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When Jos arrived at the isolation chamber, he saw that Zan was already inside the airflow

"walls" and sterile zap field that kept pathogens from entering or es-caping. Next to the bed, just outside the field, stood a hooded figure, one of The Silent.

Jos had never put much credence in the mute sibling-hood’s supposed efficacy in aiding patients’ recovery rates, but at this point he was not one to turn down any-thing that might help. And, whether it was some kind of placebo effect, spontaneous healing or remission, or something completely outside Jos’s medical experience, the fact was that a Silent’s presence at or near a patient’s side seemed to speed recuperation. So he nodded at the figure, whose face was hidden in the cowl, as he passed. The Silent nodded back.

Jos stepped into the field, which crackled slightly. Zan started, as if somebody had poked a finger into his back. He looked around, saw Jos, and relaxed. "Oh, it’s you."

"Nice to see you, too." Jos noticed that Zan was holding an empty skinpopper.

"Sorry. Just a little on edge."

"I can’t imagine why. These days everybody’s adren-als are stuck on full throttle." Jos looked down at the unconscious form in the bed. "How’s our latest poster boy for the horrors of war doing?"

The patient, one N’do Maetrecis, a major in the army, looked somewhat better than the last time Jos had seen him. His skin had been pale and anhidrotic, but now it was taking on a normal, healthy glow. The flatscreen chart hung on the bed’s foot, and Jos picked it up and scanned the stats. Blood pressure normal, heart rate normal, white cell blood count...

Hello? Look at this. The elevated white count that in-dicated the infection was way down.

And the differen-tials-the spread and proportion of specialized white cells, segs, polys, eos, and so forth-were all within normal limits.

The patient had turned around.

"Well, well," Jos said. "Looks like somebody has the healing hands of a Jedi. Or the fingers, at least."

The skin around Zan’s horns mottled a bit-the Zabrakian equivalent of a human’s blush. He dropped the empty skinpopper into the pocket of his one-piece.

Jos frowned. "You develop a sudden sentimental at-tachment to instruments? Going to have it anodized and put it on the mantel?"

"Excuse me?"

"Since when do empty poppers not go into the trash?" Jos waved at the waste hopper next to the bed.

"Oh. Sorry-guess my brain’s gone on leave." Zan pulled the skinpopper out and tossed it into the bin.

As it arced past him, Jos got a good look at the pneu-matic injector. The clear plastoid cover was just that - clear. Blank. No identification denoting what kind of medication it had held. No batch number, either. Nothing.

That simply wasn’t done.

The patient, who was now awake, mumbled that he was indeed feeling much better. Jos made polite doctor noises, automatically checked the man’s vitals, then raised an eyebrow at Zan. "Doctor Yant, if I might speak with you in private?"

Outside the building, Jos steered Zan into a patch of shade and relative coolness. "All right. What’s going on here?"

"Going on? What are you talking about?" Zan didn’t meet Jos’s eyes.

"I’m talking about a patient who comes out of a life-threatening secondary infection so fast he leaves ion burns on his chart. I’m also talking about treatment with unmarked skinpoppers."

Zan hesitated for a moment, then sighed in resigna-tion.

In that short pause, Jos suddenly knew what had tran-spired. "You didn’t, " he said.

Zan said, "I did."

"Zan, have you got an ingrown horn or something? You know what the risks are. If they catch you, you’ll be court-martialed!"

"If you see a fellow sentient drowning and there’s a rope lying right next to your foot, are you going to worry about being accused of stealing the rope?"

"If there’s a good chance they’ll hang me with it, yeah. This is not the same thing."

"It isn’t? We’re on a planet with the biggest supply of a flat-out miracle drug in the galaxy-you can walk to a huge field of it in five minutes. We tried everything else on this guy, Jos-macromolecular regeneration,