Power Play - Anne McCaffrey [92]
“You mean, there are no hospital facilities whatever on this planet?” the indignant personage repeated for the umpteenth time.
“I keep telling you, if someone’s sick, they stay home,” Adak replied.
He cast a jaundiced eye at the “patient,” who would have been better off staying at home, too, instead of bringing who-knew-what rare disease to Petaybee.
Right after they’d arrived, a big orange tomcat had sauntered in, sitting down beside the sick man’s unusual chair to wash itself. Then it had hopped up on the man’s lap, sniffed, lifted its lip in a disgusted way, and hopped down again to saunter out the door. Adak figured it was going to tell Clodagh there was someone sick and smelly here. Personally, he could only hope Clodagh would hurry. He was a little out of his depth, and Clodagh was the healer, after all—though he was absolutely certain she wasn’t what this high and lofty group would expect to have tend their patient.
The remarkable chair floated, dang it, above the floor of the cube, as he had watched it float above snow and mud and everything else people had to plow through around SpaceBase these days. And the patient—a Very Important Personage named Farringer Ball, whose helpers seemed to think that even Adak O’Connor would know who he was—was hitched up by tubes to the chair.
“Or,” Adak continued, “they call their local healer if they don’t live in Kilcoole, or Clodagh Senungatuk if they do, which is what I’ve done, only it’ll take her time to get here.”
“Don’t you realize that in medical situations time is of the essence?”
“Sure, but he ain’t bleeding and he is breathing and those’re encouraging signs,” Adak said. “And he’s got all you here to make sure he doesn’t bleed and keeps breathing, so sit down, please, over there, until Clodagh gets herself here.”
The person in his beautifully tailored fine travel garment looked at the spartan seating arrangements, and the expression on his face when he turned back to Adak was dour and condescending. “Surely there is some kind of transit lounge—”
“You’re in it,” Adak said, rudely interrupting. It was not his normal manner, but he was getting fed up with doing this crazy sort of word dance around the subject as if the name, once spoken, would instantly provide what the speaker truly wanted—in this case, apparently, the most expensive suite in a private hospital, the most successful and omniscient doctors who would provide instant health for the patient. “I done tol’ ya, Intergal pulled everything out, including their infirm’ry, when they gave the planet back to itself. At that, us Petaybeans have more than we ever had before.” Adak gestured proudly around the cube. It was not only clean and warm but bigger than any four of the biggest cabins in Kilcoole.
“Now set yourself down and wait!” Adak shuffled the papers in front of him, making a good show of looking for something. Then he picked up the comm unit and turned his back on the medic man as if this was a very private call. The guy finally copped on and moved away from the counter.
“Thavian, didn’t you tell him who I am?” wheezed the old man in the chair, pounding the armrest with a hand liberally covered with liver spots.
Surreptitiously, Adak shot him a glance. Guy didn’t look too good, at that. All sunk in on himself. If he expected Petaybee to bring him back from whatever got him that way, he was asking for a miracle. That was sure. And, as far as Adak had ever heard, you couldn’t pay for miracles: they just happened in their own good time. Like the great big mountain that Petaybee had thrust up in the middle of the landing field . . . and then swallowed back up six weeks later.
Fortunately, just as Adak himself was getting twitchy, he spotted a trio of cats bouncing through the snow and the bulk of a fur-clad Clodagh lumbering behind them. Looking from her to the immaculately dressed medical folk—even the patient had on fine threads and was bundled in the amazingly colored pelts that no animal on Petaybee ever grew—Adak was sadly