Sector General Omnibus 3 - General Practice

by James White

  Hellishomar was old for a Small as well as large for a Cutter, but its extensive knowledge and unrivaled experience more than made up for the damage caused by the size of the entry wounds it was forced to make; and here the deeper tissues were soft so that often he was able to squeeze through a single incision rather than hacking a bloody tunnel into perfectly healthy flesh.

  Avoiding the larger blood vessels or heat-sealing those that could not be avoided, and ignoring the severed capillaries which would close naturally, Hellishomar cut rapidly and accurately without waste of time. During deep work the compressed air tanks had to be small, otherwise the entry wound would have been larger, the damage greater, and the progress slower.

  Then suddenly it was visible, the first internal evidence of the growth, and precisely in the predicted position.

  Lying diagonally across the newly deepened incision there was a thin, yellow tube whose tough walls and oily surface had enabled it to slide away from the blade tentacle. It pulsed faintly as it drew nutrient from the gray, necrotic growth spreading over the Parent’s surface tegument to the heart-root, or roots, deep inside the body. Hellishomar changed direction to follow it down.

  Within a few moments there was another yellow tube visible on one side of the tunnel, then another and another, all converging towards a single point below him. Hellishomar cut and squeezed through them until the heart-root itself lay exposed like a veined, uneven globe that seemed to glow with its own sickly yellow light. In size it was only a little smaller than Hellishomar’s head. Quickly he excised a clear space all around and above it, severing in the process more than twenty of the rootlets and two thicker tubes which were the connections to secondaries. Then, taking up a position which would allow the heat and bloody steam to escape and disperse along the entry wound rather than stewing the Cutter in his own body fluids, Hellishomar attacked the foul thing with his burner turned up to full intensity.

  Hellishomar did not stop until the heart-root was converted to ash, and then he gathered the ashes into a small pile and flamed them again. He followed the connector to the secondary, burning it behind him as he went, until he found another heart-root and removed that. When the external Cutters had completed their work, the fine root connections to the surface growths, severed at both ends and starved of nutrient, would wither and shrink so that they could be withdrawn from the Parent’s body with the minimum of discomfort.

  In spite of the wipers that were laboring to keep the eye-covers clear, there was an increasing and irregular impairment of Hellishomar’s vision. His movements were becoming slower, the strokes of his cutting blades less precise, and the quality of his surgery diabolical. He diagnosed the condition as a combination of heat exhaustion and asphyxiation and turned at once to begin cutting a path to the nearest breathing passage.

  A sudden increase of resistance to the cutters indicated that he had encountered the tough outer membrane of a breathing passage. Carefully Hellishomar forced through an incision large enough to allow entrance to his head and upper body only so as to minimize bleeding from the wound, then stopped and uncovered his gills.

  Water not yet warmed by the Parent’s body heat washed past Hellishomar’s overheated body, replacing the stale tanked air in his lungs and clearing both vision and mind. His pleasure was short-lived because a few moments later the flood of clear, gill-filtered water diminished to a trickle as the Parent changed to air-breathing mode. Quickly withdrawing the rest of his body from the wound, Hellishomar uncoiled his cutter-tipped tentacles to full extension, making the shallow, angled incisions in the breathing passage wall which would enable it to maintain position above the wound when the storm of inhaled air blew past.

  The Parent’s nerve network made it aware of everything that occurred in its vast body and the exact position of the events as they took place, and it also knew that wounds healed more readily in air than in water. As he expertly drew together the edges of the exit wound with sutures, Hellishomar wished that just once one of the great creatures would touch its mind, perhaps to thank him for the surgical intervention that would extend its life, or to criticize the Small selfishness which made it want thanks, or merely to acknowledge the fact of its existence.

  Parents knew everything, but spoke of their knowledge to none but another Parent.

  The wind of inhalation died and there was a moment of dead calm as the Parent prepared to exhale. Hellishomar made a final check on the wound sutures, released its grip on the wall, and dropped onto the soft floor of the breathing passage. There it rolled itself tightly into a ball of its own tentacles, and waited.

  Suddenly its body was lifted and hurled along the breathing passage by a hurricane which coughed it onto the surface of the outside world …

  “There Hellishomar had rested and replaced its consumables,” Lioren went on, “because this Parent was old and large and there was still much work to do.”

  He paused so as to give O’Mara a chance to respond. When he had requested permission to make an immediate verbal report on his return from the Groalterri ward, the Chief Psychologist had expressed surprise in a tone which Lioren now recognized as sarcastic, but thereafter it had listened without interruption or physical movement.

  “Continue,” O’Mara said.

  “I have been told,” Lioren went on, “that the history of the Groalterri is composed entirely of memories handed down over the millennia. I have been assured of their accuracy, but archaeological evidence to support them is not available. The culture has, therefore, no presapient history, and in this respect my report must be deductive rather than factual.”

  “Then by all means,” O’Mara said, “deduce.”

  No early historical records had been kept on the mineral-starved swamp and ocean world of the Groalterri, because the life span of its people was longer and their memories clearer and more trustworthy than any marks placed upon animal skins or layers of woven vegetation that would fade and rot long before the lives of the writers would be ended. Groalter was a large world that orbited its small, hot sun once every two and one-quarter Standard Years, and one of its gigantic intelligent life-forms would have had to be unhealthy or unfortunate indeed not to have witnessed five hundred such rotations.

  It was only with the recent advent—recent as the Groalterri measured the passage of time—of Small technology that permanent written records had been kept. These were concerned principally with the discoveries and observations made by the scientific bases that had been established, with great difficulty and loss of Small life, in the heavy-gravity conditions of the polar regions. Groalter’s rapid rotation gave low levels of gravity only in a broad band above and below the equator, where the tidal effects of its large satellite kept the vast, inhabited oceans and swamps constantly in motion, and this continuing tidal action had long since eroded away its few equatorial landmasses.

  In time—a long time even as the Groalterri measured it—their great, uninhabited moon would spin closer until it and the mother planet collided in mutual destruction.

  The Small made such advances in technology as were possible in their impermanent environment. And every day of their young lives they tried to control the animal nature within them so that they might arrive more quickly at the mental maturity of the Parents, who spent their long lives thinking great thoughts while they controlled and conserved the resources of the only world that, because of their great size, they could ever know.

  “There are two distinct cultures on Groalter,” Lioren continued. “There are the Small, of which our overlarge patient is a member, and the Parents, of whom even their own children know little.”

  Within their first Groalter year the Small were forced to leave the Parents, to be cared for and educated by slightly more senior children. This seeming act of cruelty was necessary to the mental health and continued survival of the Parents because, during their years of immaturity, the Small were considered to be little more than savage animals whose quality of mentation and behavior made them ut
terly repellent to the adults.

  In spite of being unable to bear their violent and unsettling presence, the Parents loved them dearly and watched over their welfare at a distance.

  But the mind of a Small of the Groalterri, when compared with the level of intelligence and social behavior possessed by the average member species of the Federation, was neither savage nor stupid. For many thousands of Earth-standard years, during their long wait between birth and achieving adulthood, they had been solely responsible for the development of Groalterri physical science and technology. During that period they had no communication with their elders, and their physical contacts were incredibly violent and restricted to surgical interventions aimed at prolonging the Parents’ lives.

  “This behavior,” Lioren continued, “is beyond my experience. Apparently the Small hold the Parents in high regard, and they respect and obey and try to help them as much as they are able, but the Parents do not respond in any way other than by passively and at times reluctantly submitting to their surgery.

  “The Small use a spoken and written language, and the Parents are said to have great but unspecified mental powers which include wideband telepathy. They use them to exchange thoughts among themselves, and for the control and conservation of every nonintelligent living creature in Groalter’s ocean. For some reason they will not use telepathy to talk to their own young or, for that matter, to the Monitor Corps contact specialists presently in orbit above their planet.

  “Such behavior is totally without precedent,” Lioren ended helplessly, “and beyond my understanding.”

  O’Mara showed its teeth. “It is beyond your present understanding. Nevertheless, your report is of great interest to me and of greater value to the contact specialists. Their ignorance of the Groalterri is no longer total, and the Corps will be grateful and pleased with their onetime Surgeon-Captain. I, however, am impressed but not pleased because the report of the lowest-ranking member of my department, Trainee Lioren, is far from complete. You are still trying to hide important information from me.”

  Clearly the the Chief Psychologist was better at reading Tarlan facial and tonal expressions than Lioren was at reading those of an Earth-human. It was Lioren’s turn to remain silent.

  “Let me remind you,” O’Mara said in a louder voice, “that Hellishomar is a patient and this hospital, which includes Seldal and you and myself, is charged with the responsibility for solving its medical problem. Clearly Seldal suspected that there might be a psychological component to this clinical problem and, having observed the results of your talks with Mannen and knowing that it could not approach me officially because this department’s responsibility lies only with the mental health of the staff, it asked you to talk to the patient. This may not be a psychiatric hospital, but Hellishomar is a special case. It is the first Groalterri ever to have spoken with us, or more accurately, with you. I want to help it as much as you do, and I have greater experience than you in tinkering with other-species mentalities. My interest in the case is entirely professional, as is my curiosity regarding any personal information it may have disclosed to you, information which will be used therapeutically and not discussed with anyone else. Do you understand my position?”

  “Yes,” Lioren said.

  “Very well,” O’Mara said when it was obvious that Lioren would say nothing more. “If you are too stupid and insubordinate to accede to a superior’s request, perhaps you are intelligent enough to take suggestions. Ask the patient how it came by its injuries, if you haven’t already done so and are hiding the answer from me. And ask whether it was Hellishomar or someone else who broke the Groalterri silence to request medical assistance. The contact specialists are puzzled by the circumstances of the distress call and wish clarification.”

  “I did try to ask those questions,” Lioren said. “The patient became agitated and gave no answers other than to say that it personally had not requested assistance.”

  “What did it say?” O’Mara said quickly. “What were its exact words?”

  Lioren remained silent.

  The Chief Psychologist made a short, untranslatable sound and sat back in its chair. “The Seldal investigation you were given is not in itself important, but the constraints placed on you most certainly were. I knew that you would have to work through Seldal’s patients to gather information, and that one of them was Mannen. I hoped that putting the two of you together, the patient suffering from preterminal emotional distress and refusing all contact with friends and colleagues, and a Tarlan whose problems made Mannen’s look minor indeed, would cause him to open up to the stage where I might be able to help him. Without further intervention by me, you achieved results that were much better than I could have hoped for, and I am truly grateful. My gratitude and the minor nature of the affair allowed me to ignore your tiresome insubordination, but this is a different matter.

  “It was Seldal’s idea, not mine, that you should talk to the Groalterri,” O’Mara continued, “and I did not learn of it until after the event. Until now I knew nothing of what passed between you, and now I want to know everything. This involves a first-contact situation with a species that is both highly intelligent and until now completely uncommunicative. But you have been able to talk to one of them, and for some reason have achieved more in a few days than the Monitor Corps in as many years. I am impressed and so will be the Corps. But surely you must see that withholding information, any information regardless of its nature, that might help widen contact is stupid and criminal.

  “This is not the time for playing ethical games, dammit,” O’Mara ended in a quieter voice. “It is much too important for that. Do you agree?”

  “With respect—” Lioren began, when a sudden movement of O’Mara’s hand silenced him.

  “That means no,” the Chief Psychologist said angrily. “Forget the verbal niceties. Why don’t you agree?”

  “Because,” Lioren said promptly, “I was not given permission to pass on this kind of information, and I feel that it is important that I continue to do as the patient requests. Hellishomar is becoming more willing to give information about Groalter, at least, for general distribution. If I had not respected its confidence from the beginning, it is likely that we would have been given no information of any kind. Much more data on the Groalterri will be forthcoming, but only if you and the Corps are patient and I remain silent unless specifically directed otherwise by the patient. If I break confidence with Hellishomar, the flow of information will cease.”

  While he had been speaking, O’Mara’s facial pigmentation had grown a dark shade of pink again. In an effort to avert what promised to be a major emotional outburst, Lioren went on. “I apologize for my insubordinate behavior, but the continuing insubordination is being forced on me by the patient rather than any lack of respect. It is grossly unfair to you, sir, because you wish only to help the patient. Even though it is not deserved, I would welcome any help or advice that you would be willing to give.”

  O’Mara’s fixed, unblinking stare was making Lioren uneasy. He had the feeling that the other’s eyes were looking directly into his mind and reading every thought in it, which was ridiculous because Earth-human DBDGs were not a telepathic species. Its face had lightened in color but there was no other reaction.

  “Earlier,” Lioren said, “when I said that the Groalterri behavior was beyond my understanding, you said that it was beyond my present understanding. Were you implying that the situation has a precedent?”

  O’Mara’s face had returned to its normal coloration. It showed its teeth briefly. “It has many precedents, almost as many as there are member species in the Federation, but you were too close to the situation to see them. I ask you to consider the sequence of events that occurs when an embryo is growing between the time of conception and birth, although for obvious reasons I shall discuss these events as they affect my own species.”

  The Chief Psychologist clasped its hands loosely together on the desktop and adopted the calm, clini
cal manner of a lecturer. “Growth changes in the embryo within the womb follow closely the evolutionary development of the species as a whole, although on a more compressed time scale. The unborn begins as a blind, limbless, and primitive waterdweller floating in an amniotic ocean, and ends as a small, physically helpless, and stupid replica of an adult person, but with a mind which will in a relatively short time equal or surpass that of its parents. On Earth the evolutionary path that led to the four-limbed land animal becoming the thinking creature Man was long, and with many unsuccessful side turnings which resulted in creatures that had Man’s shape but not his intelligence.”

  “I understand,” Lioren said. “It was the same on Tarla. But what is the significance in this case?”

  “On Earth as on Tarla,” O’Mara went on, ignoring the question, “there was an interim stage in the development of a fully intelligent, self-aware form of life. On Earth we called the early, less intelligent men Neanderthal and the form that violently replaced it Cro-Magnon. There were small physical variations between the two, but the important difference was unseen. Cro-Magnon man, although still little more than a savage animal, possessed what was called the New Mind, the type of mind which enables civilizations to grow and flourish and cover not one world but many. But should they have tried to teach their forebears beyond their ability to learn or left them alone? On Earth in the past there were many unhappy experiences between so-called civilized men and aboriginals.”

  At first Lioren did not understand the reason for O’Mara speaking in such oversimplified generalities, but suddenly he saw where the other was leading him.

  “If we return to the analogy of prenatal and prehistoric evolution,” the Chief Psychologist continued, “and assuming that the gestation period of the Groalterri is proportional to their life span, isn’t it possible that they also experienced this preliminary stage of lesser intelligence? But let us also assume that their young experience it, not before but after they are born. This would mean that during the time from birth to prepuberty the Small belong temporarily to a different species from that of their elders, a species considered by the Parents to be cruel and savage and, relatively speaking, of low intelligence and diminished sensitivity. But these young savages are the well-beloved off-spring of these Parents.”