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Coreplot: Traveling Doctor
Jun. 24th, 2006 11:02 pmThe building they've arranged to use for the clinic today is several miles out of town, at the end of a wide dirt road. It's courtesy to call it a building, really -- one room, dirt floor dusted with wisps of hay, walls made of weathered wooden boards, roof falling in at one end -- but it serves their temporary needs. A clean sterile sheet turns the central block into a makeshift examining table, sufficient for the level of work he's got today: a handful of patients, starting with the teenage daughter of the building's owner. Simon re-sets her broken arm, and gives her a decent cast and a small supply of non-addicting painkillers; she gives him a sweet, grateful smile and the purse with the agreed-upon payment.
On a planet this well settled, the only reason anyone would pay for a traveling doctor ... would be an unwillingness to go to a hospital. Hospitals tend to have Alliance presence, and security feeds, and requirements like legal identification. From what he sees of the few other patients -- a rawboned woman with a badly infected knife wound across one shoulder; a pair of heavily tattooed young men, one with a wheezing rattle in his lungs and a low-grade fever -- Simon suspects they may have reason to want to avoid that level of attention.
Which is just as well; so does he.
The work's done by this time, and the patients have gone. Sunlight sifts golden through the missing part of the roof, and Simon is packing up the last of his equipment.
On a planet this well settled, the only reason anyone would pay for a traveling doctor ... would be an unwillingness to go to a hospital. Hospitals tend to have Alliance presence, and security feeds, and requirements like legal identification. From what he sees of the few other patients -- a rawboned woman with a badly infected knife wound across one shoulder; a pair of heavily tattooed young men, one with a wheezing rattle in his lungs and a low-grade fever -- Simon suspects they may have reason to want to avoid that level of attention.
Which is just as well; so does he.
The work's done by this time, and the patients have gone. Sunlight sifts golden through the missing part of the roof, and Simon is packing up the last of his equipment.
