Sector General Omnibus 1 - Beginning Operations

by James White

  After the forty-eighth hour of the infant FROB’s company and the fifty-seventh since he had had a good sleep, such illogical and somewhat maudlin thinking did not seem strange to O’Mara at all.

  Then abruptly there came a change in what O’Mara had accepted as the order of things. The FROB after complaining, was fed and refused to shut up!

  O’Mara’s first reaction was a feeling of hurt surprise; this was against the rules. They cried, you fed them, they stopped crying—at least for a while. This was so unfair that it left him too shocked and helpless to react.

  The noise was bedlam, with variations. Long, discordant blasts of sound beat over him. Sometimes the pitch and volume varied in an insanely arbitrary manner and at others it had a grinding, staccato quality as if broken glass had got into its vocal gears. There were intervals of quiet, varying between two seconds and half a minute, during which O’Mara cringed waiting for the next blast. He struck it out for as long as he could—a matter of ten minutes or so—then he dragged his leaden body off the couch again.

  “What the blazes is wrong with you?” O’Mara roared against the din. The FROB was thoroughly covered by food compound so it couldn’t be hungry.

  Now that the infant had seen him the volume and urgency of its cries increased. The external, bellows-like flap of muscle on the infant’s back—used for sound production only, the FROBs being non—breathers—continued swelling and deflating rapidly. O’Mara jammed the palms of his hands against his ears, an action which did no good at all, and yelled, “Shut up!”

  He knew that the recently orphaned Hudlarian must still be feeling confused and frightened, that the mere process of feeding it could not possibly fulfill all of its emotional needs—he knew all this and felt a deep pity for the being. But these feelings were in some quiet, sane and civilized portion of his mind and divorced from all the pain and weariness and frightful onslaughts of sound currently torturing his body. He was really two people, and while one of him knew the reason for the noise and accepted it, the other—the purely physical O’Mara—reacted instinctively and viciously to stop it.

  “Shut up! SHUT UP!” screamed O’Mara, and started swinging with his fists and feet.

  Miraculously after about ten minutes of it, the Hudlarian stopped crying.

  O’Mara returned to the couch shaking. For those ten minutes he had been in the grip of a murderous, uncontrollable rage. He had punched and kicked savagely until the pains from his hands and injured leg forced him to stop using those members, but he had gone on kicking and screeching invective with the only other weapons left to him, his good leg and tongue. The sheer viciousness of what he had done shocked and sickened him.

  It was no good telling himself that the Hudlarian was tough and might not have felt the beating; the infant had stopped crying so he must have got through to it somehow. Admittedly Hudlarians were hard and tough, but this was a baby and babies had weak spots. Human babies, for instance, had a very soft spot on the top of their heads …

  When O’Mara’s utterly exhausted body plunged into sleep his last coherent thought was that he was the dirtiest, lowest louse that had ever been born.

  Sixteen hours later he awoke. It was a slow, natural process which brought him barely above the level of unconsciousness. He had a brief feeling of wonder at the fact that the infant was not responsible for waking him before he drifted back to sleep again. The next time he wakened was five hours later and to the sound of Waring coming through the airlock.

  “Dr. P-Pelling asked me to bring this,” he said, tossing O’Mara a small book. “And I’m not doing you a favor, understand—it’s just that he said it was for the good of the youngster. How is it doing?”

  “Sleeping,” said O’Mara.

  Waring moistened his lips. “I’m-I’m supposed to check. C-C-Caxton says so.”

  “Ca-Ca-Caxton would,” mimicked O’Mara.

  He watched the other silently as Waring’s face grew a deeper red. Waring was a thin young man, sensitive, not very strong, and the stuff of which heroes were made. On his arrival O’Mara had been overwhelmed with stories about this tractor-beam operator. There had been an accident during the fitting of a power pile and Waring had been trapped in a section which was inadequately shielded. But he had kept his head and, following instructions radioed to him from an engineer outside, had managed to avert a slow atomic explosion which nevertheless would have taken the lives of everyone in his section. He had done this while all the time fully convinced that the level of radiation in which he worked would, in a few hours time, certainly cause his death.

  But the shielding had been more effective than had been thought and Waring did not die. The accident had left its mark on him, however, they told O‘Mara. He had blackouts, he stuttered, his nervous system had been subtly affected, they said, and there were other things which O’Mara himself would see and was urged to ignore. Because Waring had saved all their lives and for that he deserved special treatment. That was why they made way for him wherever he went, let him win all fights, arguments and games of skill or chance, and generally kept him wrapped in a swathe of sentimental cottonwool.

  And that was why Waring was a spoiled, insufferable, simpering brat.

  Watching his white-lipped face and clenched fists, O‘Mara smiled. He had never let Waring win at anything if he could possibly help it, and the first time the tractor-beam man had started a fight with him had also been the last. Not that he had hurt him, he had been just tough enough to demonstrate that fighting O’Mara was not a good idea.

  “Go in and have a look,” O’Mara said eventually. “Do what Ca-Ca-Caxton says.”

  They went in, observed the gently twitching infant briefly and came out. Stammering, Waring said that he had to go and headed for the airlock. He didn’t often stutter these days, O’Mara knew; probably he was scared the subject of the accident would be brought up.

  “Just a minute,” said O’Mara. “I’m running out of food compound, will you bring—”

  “G-get it yourself!”

  O’Mara stared at him until Waring looked away, then he said quietly, “Caxton can’t have it both ways. If this infant has to be cared for so thoroughly that I’m not allowed to either feed or keep it in airless conditions, it would be negligence on my part to go away and leave it for a couple of hours to get food. Surely you see that. The Lord alone knows what harm the kid might come to if it was left alone. I’ve been made responsible for this infant’s welfare so I insist …”

  “B-b-but it won’t—”

  “It only means an hour or so of your rest period every second or third day,” said O’Mara sharply. “Cut the bellyaching. And stop sputtering at me, you’re old enough to talk properly.”

  Waring’s teeth came together with a click. He took a deep, shuddering breath then with his jaws still clenched furiously together he exhaled. The sound was like an airlock valve being cracked. He said:

  “It … will … take … all of … my next two rest periods. The FROB quarters … where the food is kept … are being fitted to the main assembly the day after tomorrow. The food compound will have to be transferred before then.”

  “See how easy it is when you try,” said O’Mara, grinning. “You were a bit jerky at first there, but I understood every word. You’re doing fine. And by the way, when you’re stacking the food tanks outside the airlock will you try not to make too much noise in case you wake the baby?”

  For the next two minutes Waring called O’Mara dirty names without repeating himself or stuttering once.

  “I said you were doing fine,” said O’Mara reprovingly. “You don’t have to show off.”

  III

  After Waring left, O’Mara thought about the dismantling of the Hudlarian’s quarters. With gravity grids set to four Gs and what few other amenities they required the FROBs had been living in one of the key sections. If it was about to be fitted to the main assembly then the completion of the hospital structure itself could only be five or six weeks off. The
final stages, he knew, would be exciting. Tractor men at their safe positions—depressions actually on the joining faces—tossing thousand-ton loads about the sky, bringing them together gently while fitters checked alignment or adjusted or prepared the slowly closing faces for joining. Many of them would disregard the warning lights until the last possible moment, and take the most hair-raising risks imaginable, just to save the time and trouble of having their sections pulled apart and rejoined again for a possible re-fitting.

  O’Mara would have liked to be in on the finish, instead of baby-sitting!

  Thought of the infant brought back the worry he had been concealing from Waring. It had never slept this long before—it must be twenty hours since it had gone to sleep or he had kicked it to sleep. FROBs were tough, of course, but wasn’t it possible that the infant was not simply asleep but unconscious through concussion …?

  O’Mara reached for the book which Pelling had sent and began to read.

  It was slow, heavy going, but at the end of two hours O‘Mara knew a little about the handling of Hudlarian babies, and the knowledge brought both relief and despair. Apparently his fit of temper and subsequent kicking had been a good thing—FROB babies needed constant petting and a quick calculation of the amount of force used by an adult of the species administering a gentle pat to its offspring showed that O’Mara’s furious attack had been a very weak pat indeed. But the book warned against the dangers of over-feeding, and O’Mara was definitely guilty on this count. Seemingly the proper thing to do was to feed it every five or six hours during its waking period and use physical methods of soothing—patting, that was—if it appeared restless or still hungry. Also it appeared that FROB infants required, at fairly frequent intervals, a bath.

  On the home planet this involved something like a major sandblasting operation, but O’Mara thought that this was probably due to the pressure and stickiness of the atmosphere. Another problem which he would have to solve was how to administer a hard enough consoling pat. He doubted very much if he could fly into a temper every time the baby needed its equivalent of a nursing.

  But at least he would have plenty of time to work out something, because one of the things he had found out about them was that they were wakeful for two full days at a stretch, and slept for five.

  During the first five-day period of sleep O‘Mara was able to devise methods of petting and bathing his charge, and even had a couple of days free to relax and gather his strength for the two days of hard labor ahead when the infant woke up. It would have been a killing routine for a man of ordinary strength, but O’Mara discovered that after the first two weeks of it he seemed to make the necessary physical and mental adjustment to it. And at the end of four weeks the pain and stiffness had gone out of his leg and he had no worries regarding the baby at all.

  Outside, the project neared completion. The vast, three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle was finished except for a few unimportant pieces around the edges. A Monitor Corps investigator had arrived and was asking questions—of everybody, apparently, except O’Mara.

  He couldn’t help wondering if Waring had been questioned yet, and if he had, what the tractor man had said. The investigator was a psychologist, unlike the mere Engineer officers already on the project, and very likely no fool. O‘Mara thought that he, himself, was no fool either; he had worked things out and by rights he should feel no anxiety over the outcome of the Monitor’s investigations. O’Mara had sized up the situation here and the people in it, and the reactions of everyone were predictable. But it all depended on what Waring told that Monitor.

  You’re turning yellow! O’Mara thought in angry self-disgust. Now that your pet theories are being put to the test you’re scared silly they won’t work. You want to crawl to Waring and lick his boots!

  And that course, O’Mara knew, would be introducing a wild variable into what should be a predictable situation, and it would almost certainly wreck everything. Yet the temptation was strong nevertheless.

  It was at the beginning of the sixth week of his enforced guardianship of the infant, while he was reading up on some of the weird and wonderful diseases to which baby FROBs were prone, his airlock telltale indicated a visitor. He got off the couch quickly and faced the opening seal, trying hard to look as if he hadn’t a worry in the world.

  But it was only Caxton.

  “I was expecting the Monitor,” said O’Mara.

  Caxton grunted. “Hasn’t seen you yet, eh? Maybe he figures it would be a waste of time. After what we’ve told him he probably thinks the case is open and shut. He’ll have cuffs with him when he comes.”

  O’Mara just looked at him. He was tempted to ask Caxton if the Corpsman had questioned Waring yet, but it was only a small temptation.

  “My reason for coming,” said Caxton harshly, “is to find out about the water. Stores department tells me you’ve been requisitioning treble the amount of water that you could conceivably use. You starting an aquarium or something?”

  Deliberately O’Mara avoided giving a direct answer. He said, “It’s time for the baby’s bath, would you like to watch?”

  He bent down, deftly removed a section of floor plating and reached inside.

  “What are you doing?” Caxton burst out. “Those are the gravity grids, you’re not allowed to touch—”

  Suddenly the floor took on a thirty degree list. Caxton staggered against a wall, swearing. O‘Mara straightened up, opened the inner seal of the airlock, then started up what was now a stiff gradient toward the bedroom. Still insisting loudly that O’Mara was neither allowed nor qualified to alter the artificial gravity settings, Caxton followed.

  Inside, O‘Mara said, “This is the spare food sprayer with the nozzle modified to project a high pressure jet of water.” He pointed the instrument and began to demonstrate, playing the jet against a small area of the infant’s hide. The subject of the demonstration was engaged in pushing what was left of one of O’Mara’s chairs into even more unrecognizable shapes, and ignored them.

  “You can see,” O’Mara went on, “the area of skin where the food compound has hardened. This has to be washed at intervals because it clogs the being’s absorption mechanism in those areas, causing the food intake to drop. This makes a young Hudlarian very unhappy and, ah, noisy …”

  O‘Mara trailed off into silence. He saw that Caxton wasn’t looking at the infant but was watching the water which rebounded from its hide streaming along the now steeply slanted bedroom door, across the living room and into the open airlock. Which was just as well, because O’Mara’s sprayer had uncovered a patch of the youngster’s hide which had a texture and color he had never seen before. Probably there was nothing to worry about, but it was better not to have Caxton see it and ask questions.

  “What’s that up there?” said Caxton, pointing toward the bedroom ceiling.

  In order to give the infant the petting it deserved O’Mara had had to knock together a system of levers, pulleys and counterweights and suspend the whole ungainly mass from the ceiling. He was rather proud of the gadget; it enabled him to administer a good, solid pat—a blow which would have instantly killed a human being—anywhere on that half-ton carcass. But he doubted if Caxton would appreciate the gadget. Probably the section chief would swear that he was torturing the baby and forbid its use.

  O’Mara started out of the bedroom. Over his shoulder he said, “Just lifting tackle.”

  He dried up the wet patches of floor with a cloth which he threw into the now partly waterfilled airlock. His sandals and coveralls were wet so he threw them in, also, then he closed the inner seal and opened the outer. While the water was boiling off into the vacuum outside he readjusted the gravity grids so that the floor was flat and the walls vertical again, then he retrieved his sandals, coveralls and cloth which were now bone dry.

  “You seem to have everything well organized,” said Caxton grudgingly as he fastened his helmet. “At least you’re looking after the youngster better than you did its parents. See
it stays that way.

  “The Monitor will be along to see you at hour nine tomorrow,” he added, and left.

  O‘Mara returned quickly to the bedroom for a closer look at the colored patch. It was a pale bluish gray and in that area the smooth, almost steel-hard surface of the skin had taken on a sort of crackle finish. O’Mara rubbed the patch gently and the FROB wriggled and gave a blast of sound that was vaguely interrogatory.

  “You and me both,” said O’Mara absently. He couldn’t remember reading about anything like this, but then he had not read all the book yet. The sooner he did so the better.

  The chief method of communicating between beings of different species was by means of a Translator, which electronically sorted and classified all sense-bearing sounds and reproduced them in the native language of its user. Another method, used when large amounts of accurate data of a more subjective nature had to be passed on, was the Educator tape system. This transferred bodily all the sensory impressions, knowledge and personality of one being into the mind of another. Coming a long way third both in popularity and accuracy was the written language which was somewhat extravagantly called Universal.

  Universal was of use only to beings who possessed brains linked to optical receptors capable of abstracting knowledge from patterns of markings on a flat surface—in short, the printed page. While there were many species with this ability, the response to color in each species was very rarely matched. What appeared to be a bluish-gray patch to O’Mara might look like anything from yellow-gray to dirty purple to another being, and the trouble was that the other being might have been the author of the book.

  One of the appendices gave a rough color-equivalent chart, but it was a tedious, time-consuming job checking back on it, and his knowledge of Universal was not perfect anyway.