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The Lancet's leader on the Mystery was awaited with interest. It said: "We cannot join in the praises that have been showered upon the coroner's summing up. It shows again the evils resulting from having coroners who are not medical men. He seems to have appreciated but inadequately the significance of the medical evidence.
Among the billions of notes on file in the Lancet's data bank, there were only two scraps of data available on the 31 Brucker system. "Is this all you could find?" Tiger said, staring at the information slips. "There's just nothing else there," Dal said. "This one is a description and classification of the star, and it doesn't sound like the one who wrote it had even been near it."
In addition to the pilot and one technician, there was a single passenger: a portly figure dressed in a black robe, horn-rimmed glasses and cowl. The scooter grappled the Lancet's side, and Black Doctor Hugo Tanner climbed wheezing into the entrance lock, followed by the technician. He stopped halfway into the lock to get his breath, and paused again as the lock swung closed behind him.
The outpost men had concocted a medical "crisis" of staggering proportions to present to the Lancet's crew; they were so clearly disappointed to find the ship's Red Doctor in full command of himself that Dal obligingly became violently ill too, and did his best to mimick Jack and Tiger's floundering efforts to pull themselves together and do something about the "problem" that suddenly descended upon them.
They saw the side jets flare as the ship maneuvered to come in alongside the Lancet. Grapplers were thrown out to bind the emissary ship to the Lancet's hull, and Jack threw the switches to open the entrance lock and decontamination chambers. They had taken pains to describe the interior atmosphere of the patrol ship and warn the spokesman to keep himself in a sealed pressure suit.
There was nothing to be done but wait and stare hopelessly at the mass of notes and records that they had collected on the people of 31 Brucker VII and the plague that afflicted them. Until now, the Lancet's crew had been too busy to stop and piece the data together, to try to see the picture as a whole.
Once again the Lancet's calls fell into a pattern. Landings on the outpost planets became routine, bright spots in a lonely and wandering existence. The calls that came in represented few real problems. The ship stopped at one contract planet to organize a mass inoculation program against a parasitic infestation resembling malaria.
Tanner and the Four-star Surgeon aboard; now Jack broke the dark silence in the Lancet's control room for the first time. "A really great show. You missed your calling, Tiger. You should have been on the stage. If you think you fooled Dr. Tanner with that story for half a second, you're crazy, but I guess you got what you wanted.
But if he had thought before that the assignment on the Lancet was going to be easy, he knew now that he was wrong. Tiger Martin may have been Doctor Arnquist's selection as a crewmate for him, but there was no question in his mind that the Blue Doctor on the Lancet's crew was Black Doctor Hugo Tanner's choice.
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