Read Online Statesman by Piers Anthony - Free Book Online Page A

on,” I said, with affected casualness.
    He hastened to oblige.
    We made it to the steelworks. Then I was able to relax, my hands shaking. It was a little thing I had done, but if it hadn't worked my life would have been forfeit.
    The personnel of the steelworks inspected the bubble, using their equipment. The leak appeared to be artificial: a tiny hole drilled to intersect a natural flaw, so that the stress of travel could cause the flaw to give way and amplify the leak. Had I not plugged it, the aggravation of the leak could have eliminated the traces of the tampering. My death would have been judged to be an accident, an act of fate.
    I proceeded with the tour of inspection, asking questions, making notes, interviewing personnel. But my mind was distracted by the event of the leak: It had been another effort to assassinate me. I don't think a person ever becomes completely inured to such efforts.
    A few days later, without warning, I suffered stomach cramps. “Poison!” I exclaimed, then wondered if I was being paranoid. It was probably only a bout of indigestion.
    But Tasha insisted on rushing me to the hospital, and I was too sick to protest. The doctor checked me, ran a quick test, and nodded. “Contaminated yeast,” he said. “Medication will nullify it.”
    “This happens often?” I asked.
    “The spores mutate, in the uncontrolled conditions of the atmosphere; our quality control is not as apt as Jupiter's,” he said. Saturn, of course, was using the supplementary yeast-farming system I had helped develop on Jupiter, in which the spores were cultivated in the atmosphere itself and harvested as convenient. This had solved Jupiter's food problem, and presumably would solve Saturn's, once the special problems of its environment were dealt with. Obviously those problems had not yet yielded!
    I took the initial dose of medication at the hospital and was given supplementary pills of another kind to take at regular intervals. It seemed that the contamination was active, and tough, as it had to be to survive the radical exterior environment, so that an extended period of medication was necessary to make certain it was expunged from the human system. Fortunately the Saturn medical establishment was competent; I should be in no further trouble.
    Except that I did have further trouble. My cramps returned worse than ever after I started on the refill prescription. I was promptly back at the hospital for treatment.
    “What's this?” the doctor demanded, appalled. “This is not the prescription!”
    He had it analyzed, and it turned out to be concentrated contamination of exactly the kind I had suffered from before.
    The pills had been exchanged for more poison. It turned out that the pharmacy was not at fault; its product had been eliminated, and the poison substituted, somewhere between the filling of the prescription and its delivery to me. Conditions were crowded: a number of people could have had access to the collected prescriptions in the interim. The culprit could not be identified.
    But we knew. The nomenklatura had struck again. Like a nebulous ghost, it had waited and watched, and found a way to make another attempt on me that would, if successful, seem like a mere flare-up of the original malady. Inadequate medication would be blamed. But thanks to the promptness of Tasha's reaction, and the competence of the doctor, that had been foiled. There was nothing inadequate about the socialized medicine of Saturn!
    Nevertheless, I had had a bad double dose of an extremely ornery contaminant, and harm had been done. It was, the doctor warned, too early to be sure of the full extent of it, but certainly I had suffered some liver and kidney damage. Since the liver could regenerate, and the kidneys had enormous overcapacity, I was probably all right, but he urged me to report back regularly for re-testing. I, however, was developing an aversion to hospitals and intended to ignore this advice. And so I did. In