* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
He shrugged. "There's not much potential in it. It doesn't do anything."

"Oh. Sevit said he thought it was no accident that a non-Eyimalian got the project. You heard that it grows all over, but the Eyimalian botanists we know have never heard of it. Arletty wants you to check out eventualities that wouldn't happen if it were used properly."

"Lots of drugs are used improperly. That's what the medical industry is for. Efirr doesn't have a very good idea where it comes from, does he?"

Paula looked up. "That's right. When you asked him at the party--"

"He lied."

"Are you sure?" she asked. "No, he sounded like he didn't know what he was talking about, that's all."

"Maybe."

"Clark, what could this stuff do if someone were really nefarious?"

"Not much. There are by-products retained. I guess if you kept dosing somebody with it for twenty years it might affect the brain."

"They'd be stupid?"

"Maybe. It would take a lot. On the other hand, the liver might go first. That's what I'm researching."

"Paula yawned. "It's impossible." She looked sadly at her half-eaten sandwich.

"Well, it's not impossible," Clark said, trying to cheer her up. "Say you wanted a whole tribe of idiots. Twenty years lag time and there they are. For whatever they're worth."

"Fools," she mused. "Paffir Haretz?"

"You think the Viyato are behind everything, don't you?"

"It's their subject planet," Paula pointed out.

"What's that?"

"Eyimalia is an Allied Planet. That means that after the wars and all, maybe eight hundred years ago--what's happened to social science education? You should know all this. After the wars, Reshebora found them and made an alliance against the Hostile Planets. With Eyimalia. So Eyimalia and Reshebora keep in touch. But it doesn't mean that all the planets out that way are Allied, or even that they've been discovered."

"Uncharted worlds. But nobody owns them," Clark said.

"Nobody owns Paffir Haretz, but some families have exclusive trade rights with it. Eyimalia gets a lot of grain from Paffir Haretz. They rook the natives out of it. They're probably using your drug on them."

"What for?"

Paula shrugged. "To make them pliable, I guess."

Clark laughed. "That's a lot of conspiring for nothing."

"But if they kidnapped Sevit..." She put her chin in her hands. "Oh, Clark, it's all random activity."

"All right, maybe it's worth finding out," Clark said. "If they've been giving this stuff to everybody on the planet for hundreds of years, the native human bacteria should be resistant. So get me a tissue sample from Paffir Haretz and I'll check."

"How am I going to do that?"

"I don't know."

He underestimated her cleverness and determination. Paula came to the lab a few days later with a bag full of odd, dirty socks she claimed to have stolen from an Eyimalian freighter's laundry. "Test that, and we can rule out on-planet use."

"What?"

"See if they're using your drug on Eyimalia."

"Paula, this won't tell us--never mind." The point was to keep her diverted. He took two dozen cultures in tubules he had been meaning to use for something else, and wasted twenty-five drops of extract proving that none of the crew's bacteria were any more resistant than a culture from her sock. Then he dropped the tubules down a vaporization chute so he wouldn't have to explain them to Arletty.

"All right, all right," she said. "I'm still trying to get you something from Paffir Haretz that hasn't been washed or sterilized on the way."

Efirr Nije, who had been listening, said, "That is no problem. I can get you some native soil from a friend in Agriculture, or if you like, a handcrafted goat's-hair rug."

"You have a Paffir rug? Aren't they expensive?" Paula asked.

"I shall bring it. I bought it only a few days ago, after selling an article. I will bring you a clipping."

No clipping ever materialized, but the rug did, and it was easy to believe soap had never touched the yellowed work of art. The knotted thread and hair that made its intricate design were still grey from the artist's hands, and the rug stank.

"This thing is expensive?" Clark asked.

"They are quite fashionable. One must wash them, of course. I had not yet gotten around to it," Efirr explained.

Clark found several bits of human skin and hair in the rug and took cultures from them. None could resist Ecclesiam extract.

"No good," he told Paula. "Nothing on that rug had ever seen it before so, if you want to believe our methodology, they aren't using the stuff on Paffir Haretz."

[~*~]

Later in the afternoon Marlow Maxwell called Paula to tell her angrily that she knew nothing of politics and he hinted, she thought, that bribery might sway whom protest only stiffened. Clark donated all his savings rather than decide how much to keep.

Efirr gave him a strange look. "This man is not your relative or even a co-worlder. Why do you give so much?" he asked.

"Ready aid," Clark replied with a shrug.

"What?"

"The doctrine of ready aid. If someone needs help, you give whatever you can. Then people should do the same for you." Eyimalian ethics are so primitive, he thought. But then, his own planet was often no better. People behave as they must, Sevit had told him. He added, "It's part of the religion at home. My father's first wife was killed defending a perfect stranger."

"From what?"

"An assailant. I don't know...I think it was the guy's brother."

"So you have seized the opportunity to do good." Efirr turned away and Clark saw tears on his cheeks.

When Paula cried he had frozen; this time he made himself act. He put his arm around the journalist's waist. Efirr dropped to his knees to return the embrace, and the two clung to one another until their agitation subsided.

By now it did not surprise Clark that he should find himself weeping in the arms of a man he did not particularly like. All of them were tense. He had touched neither napit nor alcohol since the first night of Sevit's imprisonment, but he had slept very little. Whenever someone shouted in the street, he would wake up, thinking he heard his freind's cries of anguish, run to the window and tear aside the curtain. Then he would remember that Sevit was far away and stagger back, head throbbing with the light. At other times he dreamed they had come for him and woke up covered with sweat. He took to going past the Eyimalian embassy on his way to work, though as yet he had no plan involving it.

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CONTINUE

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