The Wellness Plague

III.

The storm swept over Far Edge during the night. Lying in his bed, it seemed to Rey that the whole building swayed under the hammer blows of the wind. The next morning he was awakened by the sound of all the VTOLs in Far Edge chopping the sky in a search pattern. O’Donnel Buergher-Murchison and four friends had flown out to a mountain called the Claw for a day of hunting bloodbirds and rock climbing. Their VTOL had not returned before the storm’s onset. There were no distress calls.

O’Donnel’s mother maintained a ghastly cheerfulness which Rey found more distressing than hysterics. She was sure the boy and his companions had suffered only a minor mishap, and that they would be found in a matter of hours. As the hours became a day, two days, and then a week, Rey felt the tension building to a breaking point.

Marty agreed. “None of the families are in what you’d call good shape, but Juanita is probably under the most strain. First her husband dies, then they lose all their freehold lands and manage to retain their home only by turning it into a boarding house. Nothing against Katarina, but all her mother’s hopes were on that boy. I don’t know how she’d be able to live with his loss.”

Given the contrary winds, there was little the other colonies could do to help with the search. Not that they seemed over-inclined to be of aid. There was almost a querulousness to the messages from the Terraces, a sense that the unauthorized flight beyond the cordon was of more concern than the possible loss of lives.

First-aid classes were suspended so that more of the colonists could aid in the search. Rey discovered to his surprise that he had free time. He used some of it to go over the notes he had made on allergies.

Even in the supposedly air-cleaned homes of the freeholders, his head throbbed and his eyes watered. Often, the families he visited would discover to their surprise that the filters had not been working for a year or more. It did not matter to them. They showed no allergic response to their environment.

Or at least most of them did not. Babies did. All babies, until about the age of three. It made no sense. Usually a child would benefit from his mother’s immune response transferred through breast milk. Here, you could almost imagine that the mother was somehow suppressing a natural immunity.

If something like that was the case, where did the immunity come from? It did not seem to have anything to do with the genetic make-up of the colonists. They had come in nearly equal mix from most of the then-established colonies, usually, though not always, from the lower end of the economic scale. The immunity had developed gradually. In retrospect, you noticed that fewer and fewer antihistamines were used. Now, only visitors, newcomers like himself, and the newborns needed medication.

It was an acquired immunity. Babies might require three years; adults seemed to acquire it in a matter of months. So how was it acquired? What was different about Far Edge? First answer: it was lower in elevation and consequently wanner than any other colony. Problem: none of the literature on allergies suggested any possible correlation with air pressure or temperature. If anything, there should be an inverse correlation. There should be more dust and pollen at the lower levels. If the flora of the world jungle produced pollen. It was astonishing how little was known about the natural lifeforms on this planet.

What about diet? Research, and his own experience, disclosed that Edgers ate pretty much the same stuff as other colonists. They had a greater amount of exotics, like oranges and grapefruit, because they were locally grown. And, as he had noticed since his arrival, they tended to eat a lot. He had put that down to the difference between their active, outdoor lives and the sedentary, enclosed life with which he had been familiar in the Terraces. If his figures could be believed, however, adults on Far Edge consumed up to 50 percent more than settlers on similar frontier colonies.

Feed a cold, starve a fever, Ben Franklin had said, hundreds of years ago and light-years away. Only allergies were not colds.

Regan Lee had flown the Sunbird, specially modified with new search gear, back to Far Edge to join in the search. Rey was still thinking about the allergy problem when his communicator chimed with a priority message: Regan had spotted wreckage near the base of a ridgeline. It was almost certainly the VTOL flown by O’Donnel and his friends.