The shelters would have to wait.

He went looking for Dr. Chiara one evening and found him just leaving
one of the makeshift shelters.

A boy lay inside it, his face flushed with Hell Fever and his eyes too
bright and too dark as he looked up into the face of his mother who sat
beside him. She was dry-eyed and silent as she looked down at him but
she was holding his hand in hers, tightly, desperately, as though she
might that way somehow keep him from leaving her.

Prentiss walked beside Chiara and when the shelter was behind them he
asked, "There's no hope?"

"None," Chiara said. "There never is with Hell Fever."

Chiara had changed. He was no longer the stocky, cheerful man he had
been on the _Constellation_, whose brown eyes had smiled at the world
through thick glasses and who had laughed and joked as he assured his
patients that all would soon be well with them. He was thin and his face
was haggard with worry. He had, in his quiet way, been fully as valiant
as any of those who had fought the prowlers. He had worked day and night
to fight a form of death he could not see and against which he had no
weapon.

"The boy is dying," Chiara said. "He knows it and his mother knows it. I
told them the medicine I gave him might help. It was a lie, to try to
make it a little easier for both of them before the end comes. The
medicine I gave him was a salt tablet--that's all I have."

And then, with the first bitterness Prentiss had ever seen him display,
Chiara said, "You call me 'Doctor.' Everyone does. I'm not--I'm only a
first-year intern. I do the best I know how to do but it isn't
enough--it will never be enough."

"What you have to learn here is something no Earth doctor knows or could
teach you," he said. "You have to have time to learn--and you need
equipment and drugs."

"If I could have antibiotics and other drugs ... I wanted to get a
supply from the dispensary but the Gerns wouldn't let me go."

"Some of the Ragnarok plants might be of value if a person could find
the right ones. I just came from a talk with Anders about that. He'll
provide you with anything possible in the way of equipment and supplies
for research--anything in the camp you need to try to save lives. He'll
be at your shelter tonight to see what you want. Do you want to try it?"

"Yes--of course." Chiara's eyes lighted with new hope. "It might take a
long time to find a cure--maybe we never would--but I'd like to have
help so I could t