by James White
“You are in bed eighteen,” it continued. “As well as being the most convenient position to the toilet facilities, it is farthest from the ward entrance and the nurses’ station. There is a generally held belief within the hospital, which has never been officially denied, that the closer a patient is to the ward entrance, where the doctor on call and the ward nurses can reach it with minimum delay, the more serious is its clinical condition and prognosis. You may like to take some comfort from that knowledge.
“And now, Patient Hewlitt,” it went on briskly, “please undress, put on the hospital garment lying across your chair, and get into bed quickly before Charge Nurse arrives. I will remain outside the screen. If you need help, call me.
The nurse and its litter moved aside and the bed screens unrolled silently from their recess in the ceiling.
For what seemed like a long time Hewlitt held the hospital garment in his hands without moving. It was smooth, white, shapeless, and, like all the others he had known, at least two sizes too small. He did not want to lie in bed dressed in this thing; he wanted to sit in the chair and maintain some feeling of independence by wearing his own impeccably styled clothing. But then he remembered the nurse’s vast strength and its closing remark that, if he needed help, he should call it. Had that been a politely worded threat to the effect that if he did not undress himself he would be undressed by force?
He would not give that tentacled monster the satisfaction, or perhaps the pleasure, of undressing one of its juicy ETs.
While he was climbing into bed, Hewlitt heard someone else approaching his bed, someone who made a soft, slithering noise rather than the sound of walking feet as it came. There was an unpleasant background sibilance to the translated words when it spoke.
“Nurse,” it said sharply, “your paint is flaking. Give me the patient’s case notes and your report, quickly, then go to your dining area without delay.”
“Yes, Charge Nurse,” the other replied. “When Treevendar’s medical officer, a Monitor Corps surgeon-lieutenant called Turragh-Mar, gave me the case notes, it said that there had been no observable symptoms or change in Patient Hewlitt’s physical condition, but suggested the presence of a psychological component. The only evidence of this was its marked xenophobic reaction displayed during the ride here. I assumed from our earlier conversation that the patient has had very limited — if any — contact with other-species beings, and was likely to be disturbed by the sight of the hospital staff using the intervening corridors; and that my instructions to allow it to see them was intended to prepare it for the closer, in-ward contacts that it would experience later. By the time we reached the ward, the patient seemed to have its xenophobia under partial control, except for one species that it still finds visually distressing…
“Thank you, Nurse,” the other voice broke in. “Now go at once for a respray before you collapse from hunger at my feet. I will take over from here.”
The screens rose and disappeared into the ceiling to reveal the ghastly thing standing at the foot of his bed. Instinctively he pressed himself against the backrest in a vain effort to put more space between them.
“How are we feeling today, Patient Hewlitt?” it said. “I am Charge Nurse Leethveeschi and, as you have already noticed, I am an Illensan.
CHAPTER 2
Inside its chlorine envelope the thick, fleshy, yellow-green leaves twitched and slid open to reveal two stubby legs covered by what looked like oily blisters as the creature moved back from the foot of the bed.
“Do not be afraid, Patient Hewlitt,” Leethveeschi said. “I have no intention of coming closer, much less of touching you, unless some future clinical emergency requires it. It may be helpful to consider the visual effect of your flabby, pink, smooth-skinned body on my aesthetic sensibilities. So please stop trying to push yourself backward through the wall and listen to me. You may close your eyes, if it helps. First, have you eaten recently? Second, do you have an urgent need to eliminate body wastes?”
“Y-yes,” Hewlitt replied. Just to be contrary he kept his eyes open, trying to stare the disgusting creature down. But there were too many dark, wet swellings showing between its oily fronds and membranes for him to know which of them were eyes. He added, “Just before I left the ship. And no, I don’t have to go to the toilet.”
“Then you have no reason to leave your bed,” said the charge nurse, “so please remain in it until Senior Physician Medalont has examined you and officially pronounced you capable of moving about the ward without nursing assistance. The next meal will be served in a little over three hours and your examination will take place before then. But there is no cause for alarm, Patient Hewlitt, because the procedure will be noninvasive and predominantly verbal.
“When you are allowed out of bed,” Leethveeschi went on, you will be given a translator programmed for the languages used by the ward patients and medical staff. It seems that you have had limited opportunities for other-species contact, and here you will be able to remedy that. Talk to the other patients as soon as you feel comfortable doing so and you are not getting in the way of the medical staff. Patients who have screens around their beds are either undergoing treatment, resting, or being isolated for other reasons, and those you must not disturb. Most of the patients will talk to you, if they are feeling sociable, and you need not worry about their outward appearance, because all of the patients here are ugly, gross, and visually repellent.
“Without exception.”
He wondered if there had been a glint of humor in a few of the dark, wet blisters that might have been looking at him as it spoke the words, but dismissed the idea as ridiculous.
“In the bed opposite is Patient Henredth, a Kelgian,” it continued. “Diagonally on your left is Patient Kletilt, from Melf, and beside you is an Ian named Makolli who is being transferred to Level Forty-Seven later today, so you may not get the chance to talk to it. I don’t know who or what we will be sent in its place. But for now, Patient Hewlitt, you should try to relax, or sleep if you can, until the doctor sees you.
Leethveeschi’s body parts slithered and writhed together in a revolting fashion, and he realized that it was turning to go. He was pleased that the disgusting thing was leaving and wondered why he stopped it. After all, his question could have waited.
“Charge Nurse,” he said firmly, “I have no wish to talk to anyone in this place unless it is absolutely necessary for my treatment. But there is one person I might be able to talk to with, well, less discomfort. That is the nurse who brought me here. I would not mind if it took part in my treatment, and I would prefer to call for it if there was something I needed. Please tell me its name?”
“No,” said Leethveeschi with equal firmness. “Since it is the only Hudlar nurse attached to my ward, you will have no trouble identifying it. Just point a manipulatory appendage at it and call ‘Nurse’ loudly.”
“Where I come from,” said Hewlitt, trying not to lose his temper, “that would be considered the height of bad manners. Are you being deliberately unhelpful? You told me your name and those of the patients around me, so why not tell me the Hudlar’s name?”
“Because,” said Leethveeschi, “I don’t know it.”
“That is ridiculous!” Hewlitt burst out, no longer able to hold his temper with this loathsome and obviously petty-minded creature. “You are in charge of the nurses on the ward and you expect me to believe that you don’t know all their names? Do you think I’m stupid? Oh, just forget it. I will ask the next time I see it and it will give me its name itself.”
“I hope not!” said the charge nurse. It did something with its body that made it turn and move back until it was disconcertingly close to his bedside again.
“Regarding your degree of stupidity, Patient Hewlitt,” it said, “I am constrained by politeness not to comment. But it is possible that you are ignorant rather than stupid, and I am allowed to reduce your level of ignorance.
“Our Hudlar nurse wears a band around one limb that shows
its rank and hospital staff number,” Leethveeschi went on. “The number is used for administrative purposes and is the only identity known to us. Since other species find Hudlars impossible to tell apart, if one of them has to be picked out of a group this is done by calling out the last few digits of its staff number. It is not called by name because the Hudlars consider their names to be their most private and personal possession. Among their species the name is used only by close members of the family, or among those who are intending to become life-mates immediately prior to conjugation.
“It seems that you may have formed a liking for our Hudlar nurse,” it added, “but in the circumstances it is better that the relationship stops short of a personal exchange of names.”
Leethveeschi returned to the nurses’ station, making disgusting, untranslatable noises that sounded like someone in the last stages of pulmonary failure but were probably the sound of Illensan laughter. He felt sure that the heat of his embarrassment was warming the whole ward. Then he flung himself back against the pillows to glare at the monitor lens in the ceiling, wondering if the sudden reddening of his face would worry an observer and some other horrible medical creature would come hurrying to investigate.
Apparently not. Several minutes passed and there were no further visitations. But his relief was mixed with irritation as he wondered if he would have to do something melodramatic like falling out of bed and breaking an arm to attract attention. His embarrassment had faded, but it was being replaced by the old, familiar feelings of helpless anger and despair.
I should not have come here.
He looked along both sides of the ward at the large, complicated beds, several of whose occupants were not, unfortunately, screened from view, and beyond to the nurses’ station, where the alien shapes were rendered a little less frightening by distance, and listened to the quiet barking and moaning and gobbling sounds of other-species’ conversations. He had always felt distrustful of strangers, and even of relatives he had not met for a long time, because they usually represented varying degrees of change and disruption to the comfortable, organized, lonely, and moderately happy life he had made for himself. But now he was among the strangers who were stranger than he could ever have imagined, and it was his own stupid fault.
Hewlitt had been advised not to go to Sector General, by a succession of Earth doctors who had studied his psych profile and decided that it would not be a comfortable place for him. They had not, however, been able to do anything about his illness beyond stating the obvious, that his symptoms were unusually varied, nonspecific, and, at times, violently nonresponsive to the indicated medication. It was suggested that his trouble might lie in an overactive mind that was having a disproportionately large influence on the body containing it.
Being a solitary person out of necessity rather than choice, Hewlitt had had to take responsibility for looking after his own wellbeing, which included guarding himself against accident, illness, and infection. But he was not, or at least not entirely, a hypochondriac. He knew that there was something seriously wrong with him and that, in these days of advanced medical science, it was his right as a Galactic Federation citizen to demand that it be put right by somebody, somewhere.
He did not like being among strangers, but neither did he like the prospect of being intermittently and inexplicably sick for the rest of his life, so he had insisted on his rights. Now he was wondering if it would not have been better for him to stay and die comfortably on Earth. Here the treatment, and certainly the doctors prescribing it, were likely to cause him more mental anguish than the disease.
All at once Hewlitt wanted to be back home.
His attention was drawn to the nurses’ station entrance, where two creatures had emerged and were moving down the ward toward him. The first one was a long, fat, silver-furred being who undulated along the floor on more legs than he was able count and who belonged to the same species as Patient Henredth in the bed opposite. It was accompanied by the Hudlar nurse-for some reason he had begun to think of it as his nurse, possibly because it was both familiar and polite-whose flanks appeared to have been repainted since he had seen it last. In the Earth hospitals quite a few of the nurses haa used cosmetics, although only on their faces.
For a moment he wondered if his nurse was considered beautiful by other Hudlars; then he sat up straight in the bed and steeled himself for his first medical examination by a giant extraterrestrial caterpillar. But they stopped at the bed beside his, the one containing Patient Kletilt, moved inside its screens, and completely ignored his existence.
He could hear three different voices talking quietly. There was the Kelgian modulated moaning sound that must have been coming from the doctor, an erratic scraping and clicking noise that he had never heard before but that had to belong to the Melfan patient, and-with lesser frequency, suggesting that it was in response to questions or instructions-the remembered sound of the Hudlar nurse’s speaking membrane. But none of their translators were set for human speech, so he did not know what they were saying.
That irritated him, because every few minutes the fabric of the screen bulged outward as if something large and round, like the Hudlar’s flanks, or small and sharp, like something else, moved behind it. In spite of the fact that it would probably have horrified him, Hewlitt wanted to know what was going on.
Whatever it was lasted for about twenty minutes; then the Kelgian doctor emerged from behind the screens and undulated toward the nurses’ station without even a side glance at him. He could hear the Hudlar nurse moving around Kletilt’s bed, apparently doing something to or for the patient; then it, too, appeared and began following the doctor. He did not point and shout “Nurse” as Leethveeschi had advised; he waved to attract its attention.
The nurse paused to make an adjustment to its translator, then said, “Is there anything wrong, Patient Hewlitt?”
You fool, he thought, it should be obvious what is wrong. But he tried to keep his tone polite as he said, “I was expecting to be examined, Nurse. What is going on? That doctor completely ignored me!”
“That doctor,” the nurse replied, “was arranging for Patient Kletilt’s transfer to a different ward, and I was repositioning the patient during the examination. It is Senior Physician Karthad, who is currently the hospital’s specialist in other-species obstetrics and gynecology and has no interest in your case. But if you will wait for just a moment longer, Patient Hewlitt, your own doctor will be here to examine you.”
CHAPTER 3
He had seen pictures of the Melfan species as well as a few lifesize specimens in the corridors during his trip to the ward, but this was the first one that had been motionless and very, very close. It still looked like an outsize crab that was wearing its skeleton on the outside. But this time he barely noticed the thin, tubular legs projecting from the slits where the bony carapace and underside joined, because he was staring at the head with its big, vertically lidded eyes, enormous mandibles, and pincers projecting forward from the place where ears should have been. The two feelers growing from the sides of its mouth were so long and thin and fragile that they looked ridiculous by comparison. The creature’s fearsome head moved closer and, inevitably, it said, “How are we feeling, Patient Hewlitt?”
Just as inevitably, Hewlitt replied, “Fine.~~
“Good,” said the other. “I am Dr. Medalont, and I would like to give you a preliminary examination and ask a few questions, if you don’t mind. Please fold back your blanket and lie face downward. There is no need to remove your garment; my scanner imaging will not be affected by it. I shall explain everything as we go along.”
The scanner was a small, flat, rectangular object that reminded Hewlitt of an old-time book. Its “spine,” Medalont told him, contained the depth-focus and enhancement controls; the matte black underside that was being moved slowly over every square inch of his body surface held the microsensors; and the top surface displayed a picture of the underlying organic structures. An enlarged scanner image was
being repeated on the bedside viewscreen, possibly for the benefit of the nurse. He twisted his neck to look at it.
“Stop wriggling, Patient Hewlitt,” said the doctor. “Now lie face upward. Thank you.”
One of its pincers gripped him gently by the wrist and straightened his arm by his side. A feeler curled down to lie vertically along the crease inside his elbow, while the other one dropped like a soft, furry feather across his nose and mouth, making him fight a sudden urge to sneeze. A few minutes later the pincer and the feelers were withdrawn and the doctor straightened up.
“If I remember my Earth-human DBDG anatomy and vital signs correctly,” said the doctor, adding a series of quiet, untranslatable clicks that might have been the Melfan equivalent of a chuckle, “I am inclined to agree with your self-diagnosis. Apart from a little general muscular tension, which is understandable in these circumstances, you are in very good physical condition.”
This was how so many of the other examinations had ended, Hewlitt thought angrily, with the doctor pronouncing him fit. A few of the early ones had laughed at him, too, or accused him of wasting their time. This Medalont seemed to be a polite one, in spite of being an extraterrestrial, and would probably satisfy itself by wondering aloud what he was doing here.
Instead, it said, “I would like to ask you a few questions, Patient Hewlitt. They are questions you will have been asked many times, and your answers are in the case history. But I am hoping that those answers, because of their constant repetition, may have become inaccurate or incomplete, and I may be able to uncover information missed by my predecessors. Except as an infant and very young child on Etla, you have never traveled beyond the atmosphere of Earth, your home world. Correct?”
“Yes,” said Hewlitt.
“Were there any other-species contacts on Etla?”
“I can remember seeing a few extraterrestrials,” he replied, “but not well enough to describe them now. I was only four at the time and they frightened me. My parents said that I would grow out of it but kept me out of the way whenever they had other-species visitors. Obviously I didn’t grow out of it.”
