"That damn Hiserean child is poison. Gail had a little cut inside her mouth from where she fell off the slide at school."
"I'll be at the hospital in ten minutes," I said, and hung up shakily. "Dinner is set for seven-thirty," I told Clay and Billy, and rushed out.
The first person I saw at the hospital was not Regina. It was Mrs. His-tara.
"How did you know?" I asked. Her integument was dull now and there were patches of scales rubbed off. Her eyes were almost not visible.
"Mrs. Crowley called me," she said. "In any case I would have been here. There is in Hi-nin also of poison. There remains for him only the Return Home. We must rejoice for him."
The smile she brought forth was more than I could bear.
"Gail's germs were poison to him?"
"Oh, no. He poisons himself. It is an ancient hormone, from the early days of our race when we had what your Mrs. Baden so wisely calls aggression. It is dormant in us since before the accounting of our history. An adult Hiserean, perhaps, could fight his emotions and cure himself. Hi-nin has no weapons—so your physicians have explained it to me, from our scientific books. How can I doubt that they are right?"
How could I doubt it, either? It would be, I thought, rather like a massive overdose of adrenalin. Psychogenic, of course, but what help was it to know that? Would there be some organ in Hi-nin a surgeon could remove? Like the adrenals in humans, perhaps?
Of course not. If they could have, they would have.