"Thank you, Faye Smallwood," she said. "You’ve been very kind."

"Is there anything nice I can bring you?" I asked. "Are you hungry?" Most Ooloms brought to the Circus hadn’t eaten for days, no more than a few liver-nuts or clankbeetles. A woebegone percentage were also dehydrated… not that Zillif had that problem, considering how soaked we both were with rain.

"I would like food eventually," she answered, "but not right away."

Her voice hinted she wanted something different. I looked around, but didn’t see my father in the hospital yet; usually the light woke him at dawn, but a gray day like this was dark enough he might sleep longer. My bad luck — I was itching to abandon our new patient to him. "Is there someone you’d like me to check on?" I asked. "I can link into hospital registries all over the world. If you want news about friends or family…"

"I have a link of my own," Zillif replied. "All I’ve done for days is check on people I know."

"Oh." Most patients in the Circus had lost too much finger deft to push buttons on their wrist-implants… which we Homo saps claimed was a blessing. Otherwise, our charges might learn that 21 percent of the Ooloms on Demoth had already died, with another 47 percent lying in hospitals and gradually feeling their bodies go stale. No one knew how many other casualties still lurked in the deep forests, moping as their sickness worsened or struck dead before reaching human help. The Outward Fleet had recently dispatched the entire Explorer Academy to our planet, four classes of cadets now searching for survivors in what we called the Thin Interior: any place higher than two hundred meters above sea level, where Demoth’s atmosphere became too thready for unprotected humans, but where Ooloms could live quite handily… provided they weren’t lying in slack-muscled heaps at the base of some giant tree.

And all over the world, in hospitals or the wild, we knew of no disease victim who’d recovered. Not a precious one. There was no hint you were infected till the first symptoms settled in; and from there, Pteromic Paralysis was a one-way trip down a cackling black hole.

If Zillif could still work her data-link, she must know how grisly the situation was; but when she spoke again, her voice had no trace of the trembles. "Faye Smallwood," she said, "I’d like to know… your father is participating in the Pascal protocol, is he not?"

I stiffened. "Yes." I looked around the Big Top again, wishing Dads would hurry his tail out of bed. "You’ve heard about the protocol?" I asked.

"On my link." She lowered her voice. "And I understand it. All of it."

Of course she did. A member of the Vigil could pry open government databanks for details kept out of the public information areas… including a no-fancytalk explanation of how we were "treating" the plague.

We’d adopted the Pascal protocol. Named after Blaise Pascal, the first human mathematician to analyze roulette, card games and the craps table. That’s what the Pascal protocol was all about: rolling the dice.

When an illness was a hundred percent lethal… when the course of disease was so vicious-fast that victims died within weeks… when conventional treatments showed no ghost of effect… when advanced members of the League of Peoples didn’t leap forward to offer a cure… then the Technocracy could authorize physicians to take a fling with the Pascal protocol: Try anything, treat the side effects, and for God’s sake, keep accurate records.

All over Demoth, doctors were squeezing local plants for extracts — hoping some fern or flower had come up with chemical resistance to the Pteromic microbe. Other doctors were crush-powdering insect carapaces, or drawing blood from great sea eels. Some had even placed their bets on chance molecule construction: computers using a random number generator to assemble chains of arbitrary amino acids into heaven knows what. Then the result was injected blindly-blithely-brazenly into patients.

Do you see how desperate we were? No control groups, no controls. No double-blinds, no animal tests, no computer models. Certainly no informed consent — that might jinx the placebo effect, and Christ knows, we needed whatever edge we could get. Especially when a doctor could take it into his head to scrape fuzzy brown goo off some tree bark, then mainline it straight into a patient’s artery.

I told you. No one stayed sane.

Some doctors refused to participate in the protocol: they ranted about centuries of medical tradition, and recited Hippocrates in the original Greek. But with Pteromic Paralysis, there was no cure, no remission, no ending save death… and a greedy-glutton death that might gobble every Oolom within weeks. Even my stodgy conservative father admitted it was time to go for a long shot.

But Dads was only a fiddly-dick GP in fiddly-dick Sallysweet River. He had no training in medical research and no equipment for crapshoot organic chemistry. When the Pascal protocol was first proclaimed, he went into a twelve-hour sulk, growling at anyone who’d listen, "What do they think I can do? Why should I even bother?" (Dads was given to monumental sulks. When he became a hero, biographers papered over such pout-parties with the phrase, "At times he could be difficult"… which sounds more noble for all concerned than saying Henry Smallwood was a petulant nelly.)

In the end, Dads grudgingly decided his search for a cure would use something he had near at hand: human food. "At least it won’t kill them," he muttered… which wasn’t half so certain as he pretended. Ooloms were engineered to eat foodstuffs native to Demoth, as well as crops and animal products their people brought from the Divian homeworld; no one expected they could hold down terrestrial food too.

Take a common Earth grape, for example: chocked juicy with dozens of biological compounds. Some of those compounds are nigh-on universal — you find simple sugars in every starry reach of the galaxy, and Ooloms could easily digest them. On the other hand, your average grape contains a whole lab shelf of more specialized enzymes, proteins, vitamins, and other tools of grapehood… grand for humans, because we’ve spent three billion years evolving to eat whatever grapes dish out, but to Oolom metabolisms, each chemical was an alien substance with untold poisonous potential.

Natural result: Ooloms didn’t eat terrestrial foods. They’d be crazy to take the teeniest nibble. No doubt, in the twenty-five years Homo saps had lived on Demoth, some daredevil Oolom must have given it a try; but there’d never been a systematic study. Why would there be? When Ooloms could eat blessed near every leaf and grass on the planet, where’s the sense in stuffing them with human coq au vin to see if it kills them?

That’s how things stood till the plague came… at which point, the scales tipped to the other side of Why not? When Ooloms were all going to die anyway, where was the harm in a little coq au vin, on the off chance some unexpected terrestrial chemical actually did some good?

So that’s what passed for medical treatment under the Big Top: solemnly giving our patients a single grain of wheat or a bead from a raspberry as if it were potent medicine. Ha-ha. Knee-slapping hilarity. Hard to keep a straight face.

The joke turned sour the first time an Oolom came close to dying — a fine old gentleman who jerked into half-slack convulsions after eating a sliver of carrot no bigger than a fingernail paring. The man survived, thanks to emergency whumping and pumping from my father… and it did Dads good to have a success, actually saving a victim from death. (Then the old fellow died three days later, when his diaphragm slacked out. Would have been ironic if it hadn’t been inevitable. Dads fiercely wanted to put him on the heart-lung to sustain a semblance of breathing; but we only owned one such machine, and the Ooloms had already voted not to keep a single patient alive at the expense of 120 others. Fine thing, that: death by democracy.)