It turns out I was right about Curly being affected by the blockade, but not quite in the way that I'd envisioned. When Larry woke me up at the beginning of what I'd declared to be 'morning', I proceeded to wake up Moe and Curly. Moe was already up and examining a clod of soil very closely. I hadn't yet seen him actually attempt to taste it, but there was definitely some part of me that had a sick fasination with wanting to see it when it happened. Curly, on the other hand, took quite some time to rouse. He was incoherent until he got his translator, which is somewhat of an oddity as mine is usually good enough to translate for someone who doesn't have theirs.
"I need to rest." he declared. "I haven't slept yet."
This was patently false. His entire species snores, so we had ample evidence that he had, indeed, slept that night. It took a bit of time to convince him that this was the case, but eventually he grudgingly agreed to help pack up and come with us.
It was late afternoon when he fell again. At first, I thought nothing of it. The path we were following through the jungle-like area we had landed ourselves in was growing slowly more impassable, and I had on more than one occasion caught myself about to fall. I never actually did, though, and that's something I should have thought about. Instead, I helped him up, examined him for injuries, and set us all on our way again. It happened again near nightfall, and I blamed lack of light. I didn't want to call camp too early - our supplies were relatively plentiful but I didn't feel that we should take chances - so again I had us keep going. The third time he fell, we all stopped and made camp. Curly didn't get back up; Larry and myself carried him to his tent where he could continue his sleep in peace.
"He's got the Twist pretty bad." Larry said quietly, looking back at the tent we'd just deposited his friend in. Then, finally, it all made sense.
The Twisting Disease. Despite the thousands of years that hyperspace technology has been around in one form or another, there are aspects of it that are still unknown. For instance, there is a brief instant of time during which the passengers in such a transport do not exist at all. Nobody knows what happens in that time, but what we do know is that some species take being temporarily nonexistent better than others. It never affected me at all, for instance. Others - Moe, for instance, had briefly alluded to this - experienced nausea or disorientation for a short while afterwards. Some species temporarily blacked out. In most cases, the effects were indeed temporary and minor, but not in all. Some species were especially susceptible to the disorienting effects of Hyperspace. For them, it does permanent damage to the chemical balance in their brain (or, I suppose, whatever the equivalent for them). Symptoms typically include disorientation, missing periods of time in memory, inability to reason, and eventually coma. Those species susceptible did not recover from the Twisting disease; their condition often worsened until they died.
Curly had a suddenly very finite amount of time left to live.