Sector General Omnibus 1 - Beginning Operations

by James White

  Conway wished dully that he had opened his face-plate and ended it all before those Engineers had swarmed into the gravity grid control room and carried Williamson and himself off to O‘Mara. O’Mara must be mad. He, Conway, had violated the prime ethic of his profession and killed an intelligent being. Everything most definitely was not all right.

  “Listen to me,” O‘Mara said seriously. “The Communications boys managed to get a picture of the crashed ship’s control room, with the occupant in it, before it hit. The occupant was not your AACL, understand? It was an AMSO, one of the bigger life-forms who are in the habit of keeping a non-intelligent AACL-type creature as pets. Also, there are no AACLs listed in the hospital, so the beastie you killed was simply the equivalent of a fear-maddened dog in a protective suit.” O’Mara shook Conway’s shoulder until his head wobbled. “Now do you feel better?”

  Conway felt himself coming alive again. He nodded wordlessly.

  “You can go,” said O’Mara, smiling, “and catch up on your sleep. As for the reorientation talk, I’m afraid I haven’t the time to spare. Remind me about it sometime, if you still think you need it …”

  XI

  During the fourteen hours in which Conway slept, the intake of wounded dropped to a manageable trickle, and news came that the war was over. Monitor engineers and maintenance men succeeded in clearing the wreckage and repairing the damaged outer hull. With pressure restored, the internal repair work proceeded rapidly, so that when Conway awoke and went in search of Dr. Mannon he found patients being moved into a section which only hours ago had been a dark, airless tangle of wreckage.

  He tracked his superior down in a side ward off the main FGLI Casualty section. Mannon was working over a badly burned DBLF whose caterpillar-like body was dwarfed by a table which was designed to take the more massive Tralthan FGLIs. Two other DBLFs, under sedation, showed as white mounds on a similarly outsize bed against the wall, and another lay twitching slightly on a stretcher-carrier near the door.

  “Where the blazes have you been?” Mannon said in a voice too tired to be angry. Before Conway could reply he went on impatiently, “Oh, don’t tell me. Everybody is grabbing everybody else’s staff, and junior interns have to do as they’re told …”

  Conway felt his face going red. Suddenly he was ashamed of that fourteen hours sleep, but was too much of a coward to correct Mannon’s wrong assumption. Instead he said, “Can I help, sir?”

  “Yes,” said Mannon, waving toward his patients. “But these are going to be tricky. Punctured and incised wounds, deep. Metallic fragments still within the body, abdominal damage and severe internal hemorrhage. You won’t be able to do much without a tape. Go get it. And come straight back, mind!”

  A few minutes later he was in O’Mara’s office absorbing the DBLF physiology tape. This time he didn’t flinch from the Major’s hands. While the headband was being removed he asked, “How is Corpsman Williamson?”

  “He’ll live,” said O’Mara dryly. “The bones were set by a Diagnostician. Williamson won’t dare die …”

  Conway rejoined Mannon as quickly as possible. He was experiencing the characteristic mental double-vision and had to resist the urge to crawl on his stomach, so he knew that the DBLF tape was taking. The caterpillar-like inhabitants of Kelgia were very close to Earth-humans both in basic metabolism and temperament, so there was less of the confusion he had encountered with the earlier Telfi tape. But it gave him an affinity for the beings he was treating which was actually painful.

  The concept of gun, bullet and target was a very simple one—just point, pull the trigger, and the target is dead or disabled. The bullet didn’t think at all, the pointer didn’t think enough, and the target … suffered.

  Conway had seen too many disabled targets recently, and lumps of metal which had plowed their way into them leaving red craters in torn flesh, bone splinters and ruptured blood vessels. In addition there was the long, painful process of recovery. Anyone who would inflict such damage on a thinking, feeling entity deserved something much more painful than the Monitor corrective psychiatry.

  A few days previously Conway would have been ashamed of such thoughts—and he was now, a little. He wondered if recent events had initiated in him a process of moral degeneration, or was it that he was merely beginning to grow up?

  Five hours later they were through. Mannon gave his nurse instructions to keep the four patients under observation, but told her to get something to eat first. She was back within minutes carrying a large pack of sandwiches and bearing the news that their dining hall had been taken over by Tralthan Male Medical. Shortly after that Dr. Mannon went to sleep in the middle of his second sandwich. Conway loaded him onto the stretcher-carrier and took him to his room. On the way out he was collared by a Tralthan Diagnostician who ordered him to a DBDG casualty section.

  This time Conway found himself working on targets of his own species and his maturing, or moral degeneration, increased. He had begun to think that the Monitor Corps was too damned soft with some people.

  Three weeks later Sector General was back to normal. All but the most seriously wounded patients had been transferred to their local planetary hospitals. The damage caused by the colliding spaceship had been repaired. Tralthan Male Medical had vacated the dining hall, and Conway no longer had to snatch his meals off assorted instrument trolleys. But if things were back to normal for the hospital as a whole, such was not the case with Conway personally.

  He was taken off ward duty completely and transferred to a mixed group of Earth-humans and e-ts—most of whom were senior to himself—taking a course of lectures in Ship Rescue. Some of the difficulties experienced in fishing survivors out of wrecked ships, especially those which contained still-functioning power sources, made Conway open his eyes. The course ended with an interesting, if back-breaking, practical which he managed to pass, and was followed by a more cerebral course in e-t comparative philosophy. Running at the same time was a series on contamination emergencies: what to do if the methane section sprung a leak and the temperature threatened to rise above minus one-forty, what to do if a chlorine-breather was exposed to oxygen, or a water-breather was strangling in air, or vice-versa. Conway had shuddered at the idea of some of his fellow students trying to give him artificial respiration—some of whom weighed half a ton!—but luckily there was no practical at the end of that course.

  Every one of the lecturers stressed the importance of rapid and accurate classification of incoming patients, who very often were in no condition to give this information themselves. In the four-letter classification system the first letter was a guide to the general metabolism, the second to the number and distribution of limbs and sense organs, and the rest to a combination of pressure and gravity requirements, which also gave an indication of the physical mass and form of protective tegument a being possessed. A, B and C first letters were water-breathers. D and F warm-blooded oxygen-breathers into which classification most of the intelligent races fell. G to K were also oxygen-breathing, but insectile, light-gravity beings. L and M were also light-gravity, but bird-like. The chlorine-breathers were contained in the O and P classifications. After that came the weirdies-—radiation-eaters, frigid-blooded or crystalline beings, entities capable of changing physical shape at will, and those possessing various forms of extra-sensory powers. Telepathic species such as the Telfi were given the prefix V. The lecturers would flash a three-second picture of an e-t foot or a section of tegument onto the screen, and if Conway could not rattle off an accurate classification from this glimpse, sarcastic words would be said.

  It was all very interesting stuff, but Conway began to worry a little when he realized that six weeks had passed without him even seeing a patient. He decided to call O’Mara and ask what for—in a respectful, roundabout way, of course.

  “Naturally you want back to the wards,” O’Mara said, when Conway finally arrived at the point. “Dr. Mannon would like you back, too. But I may have a job for you and don’t want
you tied up anywhere else. But don’t feel that you are simply marking time. You are learning some useful stuff, Doctor. At least, I hope you are. Off.”

  As Conway replaced the intercom mike he was thinking that a lot of the things he was learning had regard to Major O‘Mara himself. There wasn’t a course of lectures on the Chief Psychologist, but there might well have been, because every lecture had O’Mara creeping into it somewhere. And he was only beginning to realize how close he had come to being kicked out of the hospital for his behavior during the Telfi episode.

  O’Mara bore the rank of Major in the Monitor Corps, but Conway had learned that within the hospital it was difficult to draw a limiting line to his authority. As Chief Psychologist he was responsible for the mental health of all the widely varied individuals and species on the staff, and the avoidance of friction between them.

  Given even the highest qualities of tolerance and mutual respect in its personnel, there were still occasions when friction occurred. Potentially dangerous situations arose through ignorance or misunderstanding, or a being could develop a xenophobic neurosis which might affect its efficiency, or mental stability, or both. An Earth-human doctor, for instance, who had a subconscious fear of spiders would not be able to bring to bear on an Illensan patient the proper degree of clinical detachment necessary for its treatment. So it was O’Mara’s job to detect and eradicate such signs of trouble—or if all else failed—remove the potentially dangerous individual before such friction became open conflict. This guarding against wrong, unhealthy or intolerant thinking was a duty which he performed with such zeal that Conway had heard him likened to a latter-day Torquemada.

  E-ts on the staff whose home-planet histories did not contain an equivalent of the Inquisition likened him to other things, and often called him them to his face. But in O’Mara’s book Justifiable Invective was not indicative of wrong thinking, so there were no serious repercussions.

  O’Mara was not responsible for the psychological shortcomings of patients in the hospital, but because it was so often impossible to tell when a purely physical pain left off and a psychosomatic one began, he was consulted in these cases also.

  The fact that the Major had detached him from ward duty could mean either promotion or demotion. If Mannon wanted him back, however, then the job which O‘Mara had in mind for him must be of greater importance. So Conway was pretty certain that he was not in any trouble with O’Mara, which was a very nice way to feel. But curiosity was killing him.

  Then next morning he received orders to present himself at the office of the Chief Psychologist …

  CHAPTER 3

  TROUBLE WITH EMILY

  It must have been one of the big colonial transports of the type which had carried four generations of colonists between the stars before the hyper-drive made such gargantuan ships obsolete, Conway thought, as he stared at the great tear-drop shape framed in the direct vision port beside O’Mara’s desk. With the exception of the pilot’s greenhouse, its banks of observation galleries and viewports were blocked off by thick metal plating, and braced solidly from the outside to withstand considerable internal pressure. Even beside the tremendous bulk of Sector General it looked huge.

  “You are to act as liaison between the hospital here and the doctor and patient from that ship,” said Chief Psychologist O’Mara, watching him closely. “The doctor is quite a small life-form. The patient is a dinosaur.”

  Conway tried to keep the astonishment he felt from showing in his face. O’Mara was analyzing his reactions, he knew, and perversely he wanted to make the other’s job as difficult as possible. He said simply, “What’s wrong with it?”

  “Nothing,” said O’Mara.

  “It must be psychological, then … ?”

  O’Mara shook his head.

  “Then what is a healthy, sane and intelligent being doing in a hos—”

  “It isn’t intelligent.”

  Conway breathed slowly in and out. O’Mara was obviously playing guessing games with him again—not that Conway minded that, provided he was given a sporting chance to guess the right answers. He looked again at the great mass of the converted transport, and meditated.

  Putting hyper-drive engines into that great sow of a ship had cost money, and the extensive structural alterations to the hull a great deal more. It seemed an awful lot of trouble to go to for a …

  “I’ve got it!” said Conway grinning. “It’s a new specimen for us to take apart and investigate …”

  “Good Lord, no!” cried O’Mara, horrified. He shot a quick, almost frightened look at a small sphere of plastic which was half hidden by some books on his desk, then went on seriously, “This whole business has been arranged at the highest level—a sub-assembly of the Galactic Council, no less. As to what exactly it is all about neither I nor anyone else in Sector General knows. Possibly the doctor who accompanied the patient and who has charge of it may tell you sometime …”

  O’Mara’s tone at that point implied that he very much doubted it.

  “ … However, all that the hospital and yourself are required to do is cooperate.”

  Apparently the being who was the doctor in the case came from a race which had been only recently discovered, O’Mara went on to explain, which had tentatively been given the classification VUXG: that was, they were a life-form possessing certain psi faculties, had the ability to convert practically any substance into energy for their physical needs and could adapt to virtually any environment. They were small and well-nigh indestructible.

  The VUXG doctor was telepathic, but ethics and the privacy taboo forbade it using this faculty to communicate with a non-telepathic life-form, even if its range included the Earth-human frequency. For that reason the Translator would be used exclusively. This doctor belonged to a species long-lived both as individuals and in recorded history, and in all that vast sweep of time there had been no war.

  They were an old, wise and humble race, O’Mara concluded; intensely humble. So much so that they tended to look down on other races who were not so humble as they. Conway would have to be very tactful because this extreme, this almost overbearing humility might easily be mistaken for something else.

  Conway looked closely at O‘Mara. Was there not a faintly sardonic gleam in those keen, iron-gray eyes and a too carefully neutral expression on that square-chiseled competent face? Then with a feeling of complete bafflement he saw O’Mara wink.

  Ignoring it, Conway said, “This race, they sound stuck up to me.”

  He saw O’Mara’s lips twitch, then a new voice broke in on the proceedings with dramatic suddenness. It was a flat, toneless, Translated voice which boomed, “The sense of the preceding remark is not clear to me. We are stuck—adhering—up where?” There was a short pause, then, “While I admit that my own mental capabilities are very low, at the same time I would suggest in all humility that the fault may not altogether lie with me, but be due in part to the lamentable tendency for you younger and more impractical races to make sense-free noises when there is no necessity for a noise to be made at all.”

  It was then that Conway’s wildly searching eyes lit on the transparent plastic globe on O’Mara’s desk. Now that he was really looking at it he could see several lengths of strapping attached to it, together with the unmistakable shape of a Translator pack. Inside the container there floated a something …

  “Dr. Conway,” said O’Mara dryly, “meet Dr. Arretapec, your new boss.” Mouthing silently, he added, “You and your big mouth!”

  The thing in the plastic globe, which resembled nothing so much as a withered prune floating in a spherical gob of syrup, was the VUXG doctor! Conway felt his face burning. It was a good thing that the Translator dealt only with words and did not also transfer their emotional—in this instance sarcastic—connotations, otherwise he would have been in a most embarrassing position.

  “As the closest cooperation is required,” O‘Mara went on quickly, “and the mass of the being Arretapec is slight, you will
wear it while on duty.” O’Mara deftly suited actions to his words and strapped the container onto Conway’s shoulder. When he had finished he added, “You can go, Dr. Conway. Detailed orders, when and where necessary, will be given to you direct by Dr. Arretapec.”

  It could only happen here, Conway thought wryly as they left. Here he was with an e-t doctor riding on his shoulder like a quivering, transparent dumpling, their patient a healthy and husky dinosaur, and the purpose of the whole business was something which his colleague was reluctant to clarify. Conway had heard of blind obedience but blind cooperation was a new—and he thought, rather stupid—concept.

  On the way to Lock Seventeen, the point where the hospital was joined to the ship containing their patient, Conway tried to explain the organization of Sector Twelve General Hospital to the extra-terrestrial doctor.

  Dr. Arretapec asked some pertinent questions from time to time, so presumably he was interested.

  Even though he had been expecting it, the sheer size of the converted transport’s interior shocked Conway. With the exception of the two levels nearest the ship’s outer skin, which at the moment housed the artificial gravity generators, the Monitor Corps engineer had cut away everything to leave a great sphere of emptiness some two thousand feet in diameter. The inner surface of this sphere was a wet and muddy shambles. Great untidy heaps of uprooted vegetation were piled indescriminately about, most of it partially trampled into the mud. Conway also noticed that quite a lot of it was withered and dying.

  After the gleaming, aseptic cleanliness which he was used to Conway found that the sight was doing peculiar things to his nervous system. He began looking around for the patient.

  His gaze moved out and upward across the acres of mud and tumbled vegetation until, high above his head on the opposite side of the sphere the swamp merged into a small, deep lake. There were shadowy movements and swirlings below its surface. Suddenly a tiny head mounted on a great sinuous neck broke the surface, looked around, then submerged again with a tremendous splash.