“There’s a nightmare quality to this,” Kennon muttered as he slipped his arms into the sleeves of his tunic and closed the seam tabs. “I have the feeling that I’m going to wake up any minute.” He looked at his reflection in the dresser mirror, and his reflection looked worriedly back. “This whole thing has an air of plausible unreality: the advertisement, the contract, this impossible island that raises humanoids as part of the livestock.” He shrugged and his mirrored image shrugged back. “But it’s real, all right. No dream could possibly be this detailed. I wonder how I’m going to take it for the next five years? Probably not too well,” he mused silently. “Already I’m talking to myself. Without even trying, that Lani Copper can make me feel like a Sarkian.” He nodded at his image.
The Sarkian analogy was almost perfect, he decided. For on that grimly backward world females were as close to slaves as the Brotherhood would permit; raised from birth under an iron regimen designed to produce complaisant mates for the dominant males. Probably that was the reason Sark was so backward. The men, having achieved domestic tranquillity, had no desire to do anything that would disturb the status quo. And since no Sarkian woman under any conceivable circumstances would annoy her lordly master with demands to produce better mousetraps, household gadgetry, and more money, the technological development of Sark had come to a virtual standstill. It took two sexes to develop a civilization.
Kennon shrugged. Worlds developed as they did because people were as they were, and while passing judgment was still a major human pursuit, no native of one world had a right to force his customs down the unwilling throat of another. It would be better to accept his present situation and live with it rather than trying to impose his Betan conception of morality upon Lani that neither understood nor appreciated it. His business was to treat and prevent animal disease. What happened to the animals before infection or after recovery was none of his affair. That was a matter between Alexander and his conscience.
Blalok was waiting for him, sitting behind the wheel of a square boxy vehicle that squatted with an air of unpolished efficiency on the graveled drive behind his house. He smiled a quick greeting as Kennon approached. “It’s about time you showed up,” he said. “You’ll have to get into the habit of rising early on this place. We do most of our work early in the morning and late in the afternoon. During the day it’s too hot to breathe, let alone work. Well, let’s get going. There’s still time to visit the outer stations.”
Kennon climbed in and Blalok started the vehicle. “I thought we’d take a jeep today,” he said. “They aren’t very pretty, but they get around.” He turned onto the surfaced road that ran down the hill toward the hospital and the complex of red-roofed buildings clustered about it. “About those flukes,” he said. “You have any plans to get rid of them?”
“Not yet. I’ll have to look the place over. There’s more detective work than medicine involved in this.”
“Detective work?”
“Sure—we know the criminal, but to squelch him we have to learn his hangouts, study his modus operandi, and learn how to make his victims secure from his activities. Unless we do that, we can treat individuals from now to infinity and all we’ll have is more cases. We have to apply modern criminology tactics—eliminate the source of crime—stop up the soft spots. In other words, kill the flukes before they enter the Lani.”
“Old Doc never said anything about this,” Blalok said.
“Probably he never knew about it. I was looking over the herd books last night, and I saw nothing about trematodes, or anything that looked like a parasite pattern until the last few months.”