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The Moruan system was not distant from the Lancet's present location. Tiger calculated that two hours in Koenig drive would put the ship in the vicinity of the planet, with another hour required for landing procedures. He passed the word on to the others, and Dal began digging through the mass of information in the tape library on Morua VIII and its people. There was a wealth of data.
Initial attempts to find a causative agent had all three of the Lancet's crew spending sleepless nights for a week, but Jack's careful study of the pattern of the disease and the biochemical reactions that accompanied it brought out the answer: the disease was caused by a rare form of genetic change which made crippling alterations in an essential enzyme system.
From the Lancet's position, no planets at all were visible to the naked eye, but with the telescope Jack soon found two inside the star's envelope of gas and one tiny one outside. They would have to be searched for, and the one that they were hoping to reach located before centering and landing maneuvers could be begun. Already the radio was chattering with two powerful signals coming in.
This was no ordinary virus. It proved resistant to every one of the antibiotics and antiviral agents in the Lancet's stockroom. No drug seemed to affect it, and its molecular structure was different from any virus that had ever been recorded before. "If one of the drugs would only just slow it up a little, we'd be ahead," Tiger said in perplexity.
On the intercom viewscreens they saw the small suited figure cross from his ship into the Lancet's lock, and watched as the sprays of formalin washed down the outside of the suit. Moments later the creature stepped out of the decontamination chamber. He was small and humanoid, with tiny fragile bones and pale, hairless skin. He stood no more than four feet high.
A scooter shot away from its storage rack on the black ship, and a crew of black-garbed technicians piled into the Lancet's entrance lock, dressed in the special decontamination suits worn when a ship was returning from a plague spot into uninfected territory. "What is this?" Tiger demanded as the technicians started unloading decontamination gear into the lock.
Dal spent over eighteen hours straight with the patient in the Lancet's surgery, carefully repairing the creature's damaged exoskeleton and grafting new segments of bone for regeneration of the hopelessly ruined parts, with Tiger administering anaesthesia and Jack preparing the grafts from the freezer.
In the culture tubes in the Lancet's incubators, it would begin to grow nicely, and then falter and die, but when guinea pigs were inoculated in the ship's laboratory, the substance proved its virulence. The animals injected with tiny bits of the substance grew sick within hours and very quickly died. The call to the Hospital Ship was canceled as the three doctors worked in feverish excitement.
All his life Dal had traveled on the outgoing freighters with his father; star-drive conversion was no surprise to him. But for Jack and Tiger, it was their first experience in a star-drive ship. The Lancet's piloting and navigation were entirely automatic; its destination was simply coded into the drive computers, and the ship was ready to leap across light years of space in a matter of hours.
"There's no greater humbug in the world. You never hear of a reform, but it means some trick to put in new men. I hope you are not one of the 'Lancet's' men, Mr. Lydgate wanting to take the coronership out of the hands of the legal profession: your words appear to point that way." "I disapprove of Wakley," interposed Dr.
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