One Step From Earth

"I will not. It was not yours in the first place. It has now been returned to the people who live here."

"Where do you come from, little man, and what are you doing here? Do you dispute the right of the Gudaegin to the three continents? If you do you will never rest until you have killed us all. This city is one thing, our land is another."

"I want nothing that you have. Your lands or your fortunes. Nothing. We are here to make the sick well. We are here to show you how to contact other places, other worlds. We are here to change things, but only to make them better. Nothing that you value will be changed in any way."

Azpi-oyal weighed his sword in his hand and thought. He was not a stupid man. "We value the strength of our arms and our people. We mean to rule on the three continents. Will you take away our conquests?"

"Your past ones, no. But you will have no future ones. We cure disease and your kind of killing can be a disease. You will have to give it up. You will soon find that you do not miss it. As a first step on that road you will give me your sword." Toledano put out his tiny, almost child-size hand.

Azpi-oyal stepped back in anger, clutching the pommel. The turret on a tank squealed as it turned to follow him. He looked with hatred at the lowered muzzles of the guns — then burst out laughing. Tossing the sword into the air he caught it by the point and extended it to Toledano.

"I don't know whether to believe you or not, small conqueror. But I think I would like to live a little longer to see what you are going to do to the three continents. A man may always die."

The worst was over. Politically at least. They would now have a period of relative peace during which the tests and examinations could be made. A thousand years of isolation was a long time.

"We must get started," Toledano said, with sudden irritation, as he waved the radio operator to him. "Enough time has been wasted. Have the other units move up. We'll set up a base in this square here."

* * *

"The line is longer if anything," Jan said, looking out of the window. "Must be a hundred or more. It looks like the word has finally gotten out that we aren't doing terrible things to the citizens here, but are actually curing some of their ills."

They had occupied a large warehouse near the main gate and a medical aid station had been set up. There had been few volunteers for their glittering and exotic instruments at first, but they had enough involuntary patients among the wounded survivors of the fighting. Most of these had already been given up for dead. The crude local knowledge of medicine did not appear to go beyond bone setting, suturing of simple wounds, and amputation. The notion of antisepsis had stayed with them through the lost centuries, and they used alcohol as an antiseptic and boiled the bandages and instruments. But they had no way of treating infections — other than by amputation — so that death was the usual result of any deep, puncturing wound. The doctors had changed all that. None of their patients died. They healed abdominal wounds, repaired shattered limbs and heads, cured gangrene and other major infections, and even sewed back on a severed arm. This last seemed more miraculous than medical and soon the townspeople were flocking for treatment with almost religious enthusiasm.

"The waste, the absolute waste," Dr. Pidik said, giving the patient before him, a frightened girl, an injection of fungicide. "War first, that's where all the talent and energy goes, with medical care lagging ages behind. They have engineers, mechanics, builders. Did you see those steam ballistae? A pressure tank and miles of pipe and those piston-actuated things that dropped rocks right down the exhaust pipes of the tanks. You might think they could spare a miniscule amount of energy for some work on the healing arts."

The tall epidemiologist bent his blond head low, carefully cutting away dead tissue and swabbing out the wounds on the girl's monstrously swollen foot. It was twice its normal size, dark, knobby, decayed. There was no pain, the local anaesthetic took care of that, yet she was still terrified at what was happening.

"I've never seen anything like that at all," Jan said. "I don't believe there is even a reference in our text books."

"This is one of the diseases of neglect; you'll find it mentioned in the older texts. You'll see many things like this in the backwaters of the galaxy. It's maduromycosis. There is first a penetrating wound, common enough, that plants fungus spores deep inside the flesh. If untreated this is the result after a course of years."

"I've seen this, though," Jan said, taking the hand of the blank-eyed man who had been led before him. He rotated the man's hand in a circle, then let go of it. The rotation of the hand continued, automatically, as though a machine had been set into motion. "Echo-praxis, meaningless repetition of motions once they are started."