The fixer

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Astounding Science-Fiction, May 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

Sandra Drake sat in her perfect apartment on Telfu, and cursed in an unladylike manner. She was plying a needle with some difficulty, and the results of her work were decidedly amateurish. But her clothing was slowly going to pieces, and there was not a good tailor in nine light-years of Sandra Drake.

The Telfan tailors didn't understand Solarian tailoring; Sandra was forced to admit that they were good--for Telfans. But for Solarians, they didn't come up to the accepted standards.

They had tried, she gave them credit for that. But the Telfan figure did not match the Solarian, especially the four-breasted female Telfan woman did not match Sandra's thin-waisted, high breasted figure. Her total lack of the Telfan skin; part feathers, part hair, but actually classifiable as neither, caused a different "hang" to the clothing. Telfans wore practically nothing because of the pelt and though Sandra's figure was one of those that should have been adorned in practically nothing, Telfu was not sufficiently warm to go running around in a sunsuit.

And making over Telfan clothing to fit her was out of the question. She stood half a head above their tallest women, and the only clothing that would have fit was clothing made in outsizes for extremely huge Telfan women. Needless to say this size of garment was shapeless.

Sandra finished her mending, tried on the garment and made a wry face. "I used to curse the lack of humans here," she told her image in the mirror, "but now I'm glad I'm the only one. I'd sure hate to have any of my old friends see me looking like this."

The image that repeated silently was not too far a cry from the Sandra Drake that had called the Haywire Queen in for a landing on Telfu some months ago. But they hadn't waited, and she now knew why. Well, she was forced to admit that her try at either trapping them here or getting off with them had failed, and therefore she had been outguessed.

That made her burn. Being outguessed by a man was something that Sandra didn't care to have happen. She could live through it; but it was the aftermath that really hurt. The Telfans came to understand her too well after that incident. They no longer looked upon her as a leading figure in her system. They knew that her knowledge of Solarian science was sketchy and incomplete. Therefore she had lost her hold upon Telfu, and was now forced to do her own mending.

On the other hand, Sandra Drake was an intelligent woman. Her contempt for the Telfan language was gone. It went on that memorable day when she discovered that everyone who understood any Terran had gone to greet the landing Haywire Queen and had left her unable to convey her desires. From that time on, Sandra plied herself and was quite capable of conversing in Telfan, and fluently.

So Sandra Drake had been living with the Telfans for several months. She had been forced to live with her wits and her mind and she found it interesting. Telfans were quite cold to her charms, which made her angry at times; on Terra she was used to admiration from anything masculine from fourteen to ninety-eight. Below fourteen they didn't know any better and over ninety-eight they didn't care, but the years between were aware of Sandra Drake. On Telfu, posturing, posing, and offering had no effect. They looked upon her as an encyclopedia; an animate phonograph, which, upon proper stimulation, could be made to sound interesting.

They had their machinery of action, too. Either Sandra assisted them--or she did not find things easy. It was adjustable, too, and the better assistance she gave, the better she found things.

Well, thought Sandra, it has been interesting--

She was startled by a knock upon her door. She admitted two Telfan men and a Telfan woman. The woman she knew.

"Yes, Thuni?" she asked the woman.

"Sandrake," announced the woman, putting the Telfan pronunciation on the Terran name, "These are Orfall and Theodi, both of whom are among the leading medico-physicists of Telfu. They desire your help."

Sandra reflected quickly. After all, this ability to be of assistance did give her a sop to her vanity. The fact that as little as she really knew of Terran science she could assist, and at times direct, gave her first feeling of real self-assurance.

"I shall, if I can," she told them.

"You, in spite of your untrained mind, have been extremely valuable," Orfall said simply. "While you do not know the details, you at least have some knowledge of the channels of Terran science, and you may, and have, explained down which channel lies truth, and along which line of endeavor lies but a blank wall. That in itself is valuable."

"Another item of interest," said Theodi, "is the fact that the books left us by the Haywire Queen are ponderous and often obscure; they assume that we have a basic knowledge which we have not. You have been able to direct us to the proper place in them to find the proper answer to many of our questions."

"I see," said Sandra. All too seldom had anyone told her she was valuable and interesting. It had been more likely a statement of her headstrong nature, her utter uselessness, and her nuisance value.

"As you know, we of Telfu are slightly ahead of you in chemistry. Yet there are things in chemistry that can not be solved without an advanced knowledge in the gravitic spectrum that Terra has exploited. Perhaps it was the lack of a channel in the gravitic that drove us into higher chemical development; but we are planet-locked until your people return to remove the block."

"Go on," said Sandra impatiently. "I gather that you are in trouble of some sort?"

"We are, indeed. A plague of ... ah, there is no word for it in Terran"--he switched to Telfan, "Andryorelitis," and back again to Terran--"which is an air-borne disease of the virus type. No inoculation has been discovered, and no immunity zone can be established. Telfu is in danger of halving the population."

"Bad, huh?"

"It is terrible. It strikes unknown. Its incubation period is several days, and then the victim gets the first symptoms. Nine days later, the victim is dead. Unfortunately, the victim is a carrier of andryorelitis during the incubation period, and therefore isolation is impossible."

"Sounds like real trouble to me," said Sandra. "Will examination reveal it?"

"Of course," answered Orfall. "But what planet can examine the population daily?"

"I see the impossibilities. Then what do you hope? We have nothing that will combat it; knowing nothing of it in Sol would preclude any possibility. What can we do?"

"To return to chemistry," said Theodi, "I will explain. Our chemico-physicists have predicted the combination of a molecule which will combat the virus selectively. It is a complex protein molecule of unstable nature--so unstable, unfortunately, that it will not permit us to compound it. We have used every catalyst in the book, and nothing works. Follow?"

"I think so," said Sandra. "What keeps it from forming?"

"As I said, it is very unstable. The atomic lattice appears to be structurally unsound. That happens in a lot of cases, you know. At any rate, we can make this molecule--and have made it successfully. But its yield is less than four ten-thousandths of one percent, and the residue precipitates out in an insoluble compound that can not be reprocessed."

"Otherwise you would keep the process going until completion?"

"Precisely. If reprocessing would work, we could leave the batch to cook until all of it went into combination. Or we could add fresh 'mix' to the processing batch and make the process continuous. But the stuff is not re-processable. We must complete each batch, and then go on a long process of fractionation to distill the proper compound out of the useless residue."

"I can see that a process of that inefficiency would be bothersome," said Sandra.

"Not bothersome, Sandrake. Impossible. Imagine going into a project giving about .000,37% yield for two hundred-fifty billion Telfans. The required dose of the antibody is forty-seven milligrams. Call it fifty, for round numbers, Sandrake, and you get a total figure of one trillion, two hundred-fifty billion milligrams, or one million two hundred fifty thousand kilograms. At four ten-thousandths of one percent yield, we'd have to process something like three hundred billion kilograms of raw material and then rectify it through that long and laborious process of fractional crystallization, partial electrolysis, and fractional distillation--with a final partial crystallization. Processing that much raw material would be a lifetime job at best. Doing it under pressure, with the planning and procurement problems intensified by the certainty of the few short weeks we have ... ah, Sandrake, it is impossible."

"What is this trouble specifically?"

"The final addition of silicon. It will not enter the compound, but forces something less active from the combination."

"Making it useless?"

"Right."

"You've tried it?"