"Blish, James - A Case Of Conscience" - читать интересную книгу автора (Blish James)

"Open up," the Jesuit commanded. When Cleaver complied, it became evident
that his complaint had been the understatement of the year. The mucosa
inside his mouth was nearly covered with ugly and undoubtedly painful
ulcers, their edges as sharply defined as though they had been cut with a
cookie punch.

Ruiz%Sanchez made no comment, however, and deliberately changed his
expression to one of carefully calculated dismissal. If the physicist
needed to minimize his ailments, that was all right with Ruiz%Sanchez. An
alien planet is not a good place to strip a man of his inner defenses.

"Come into the lab," he said. "You've got some inflammation in there."

Cleaver arose, a little unsteadily, and followed the Jesuit into the
laboratory. There Ruiz%Sanchez took smears from several of the ulcers
onto microscope slides, and Gram-stained them. He filled the time
consumed by the staining process with the ritual of aiming the
microscope's substage mirror out the window at a brilliant white cloud.
When the timer's alarm went off, he rinsed and flame-dried the first
slide and slipped it under the clips.

As he had half-feared, he saw few of the mixed bacilli and spirochetes
which would have indicated a case of ordinary, Earthly, Vincent's
angina--"trench mouth," which the clinical picture certainly suggested,
and which he could have cured overnight with a spectrosigmin pastille.
Cleaver's oral flora were normal, though on the increase because of all
the exposed tissue.

"I'm going to give you a shot," Ruiz%Sanchez said gently. "And then I
think you'd better go to bed."

"The hell with that," Cleaver said. "I've got nine times as much work to
do as I can hope to clean up now, without any additional handicaps."

"Illness is never convenient," Ruiz%Sanchez agreed. "But why worry about
losing a day or so, since you're in over your head anyhow?"



"What have I got?" Cleaver asked suspiciously.

"You haven't got anything," Ruiz%Sanchez said, almost regretfully. "That
is, you aren't infected. But your 'pineapple' did you a bad turn. Most
plants of that family on Lithia bear thorns or leaves coated with
polysaccharides that are poisonous to us. The particular glucoside you
ran up against today was evidently squill, or something closely related
to it. It produces symptoms like those of trench mouth, but a lot harder
to clear up."

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