Sector General Omnibus 1 - Beginning Operations

by James White

  Conway briefly described the EPLH’s condition and background as he saw it, then ended, “ … I know you can’t get much from an unconscious patient, but it would help me if you could—”

  “There appears to be a misunderstanding here, Doctor,” Prilicla broke in, using the form of words which was the nearest it ever came to telling someone they were wrong. “The patient is conscious …”

  “Get back!”

  Warned as much by Conway’s emotional radiation at the thought of what the patient’s boney club could do to Prilicla’s eggshell body as his words, the little GLNO skittered backward out of range. The Lieutenant edged closer, his eyes on the still motionless tentacle which ended in that monstrous bludgeon. For several seconds nobody moved or spoke, while outwardly the patient remained unconscious. Finally Conway looked at Prilicla. He did not have to speak.

  Prilicla said, “I detect emotional radiation of a type which emanates only from a mind which is consciously aware of itself. The mental processes themselves seem slow and, considering the physical size of the patient, weak. In detail, it is radiating feelings of danger, helplessness and confusion. There is also an indication of some overall sense of purpose.”

  Conway sighed.

  “So it’s playing ’possum,” said the Lieutenant grimly, talking mostly to himself.

  The fact that the patient was feigning unconsciousness worried Conway less than it did the Corpsman. In spite of the mass of diagnostic equipment available to him he subscribed firmly to the belief that a doctor’s best guide to any malfunction was a communicative and cooperative patient. But how did one open a conversation with a being who was a near deity … ?

  “We … we are going to help you,” he said awkwardly. “Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  The patient remained motionless as before.

  Prilicla said, “There is no indication that it heard you, Doctor.”

  “But if it’s conscious …” Conway began, and ended the sentence with a helpless shrug.

  He began assembling his instruments again and with Prilicla’s help examined the EPLH again, paying special attention to the organs of sight and hearing. But there was no physical or emotional reaction while the examination was in progress, despite the flashing lights and a considerable amount of ungentle probing. Conway could see no evidence of physical malfunction in any of the sensory organs, yet the patient remained completely unaware of all outside stimulus. Physically it was unconscious, insensible to everything going on around it, except that Prilicla insisted that it wasn’t.

  What a crazy, mixed-up demi-god, thought Conway. Trust O’Mara to send him the weirdies. Aloud he said, “The only explanation I can see for this peculiar state of affairs is that the mind you are receiving has severed or blocked off contact with all its sensory equipment. The patient’s condition is not the cause of this, therefore the trouble must have a psychological basis. I’d say the beastie is urgently in need of psychiatric assistance.

  “However,” he ended, “the head-shrinkers can operate more effectively on a patient who is physically well, so I think we should concentrate on clearing up this skin condition first …”

  A specific had been developed at the hospital against epithelioma of the type affecting the patient, and Pathology had already stated that it was suited to the EPLH’s metabolism and would produce no harmful side-effects. It took only a few minutes for Conway to measure out a test dosage and inject subcutaneously. Prilicla moved up beside him quickly to see the effect. This, they both knew, was one of the rare, rapid-action miracles of medicine—its effect would be apparent in a matter of seconds rather than hours or days.

  Ten minutes later nothing at all had happened.

  “A tough guy,” said Conway, and injected the maximum safe dose.

  Almost at once the skin in the area darkened and lost its dry, cracked look. The dark area widened perceptibly as they watched, and one of the tentacles twitched slightly.

  “What’s its mind doing?” said Conway.

  “Much the same as before,” Prilicla replied, “but with mounting anxiety apparent since the last injection. I detect feelings of a mind trying to make a decision … of making a decision …”

  Prilicla began to tremble violently, a clear sign that the emotional radiation of the patient had intensified. Conway had his mouth open to put a question when a sharp, tearing sound dragged his attention back to the patient. The EPLH was heaving and throwing itself against its restraining harness. Two of the anchoring straps had parted and it had worked a tentacle free. The one with the club …

  Conway ducked frantically, and avoided having his head knocked off by a fraction of an inch—he felt that ultimate in blunt instruments actually touch his hair. But the Lieutenant was not so lucky. At almost the end of its swing the boney mace thudded into his shoulder, throwing him across the tiny ward so hard that he almost bounced off the wall. Prilicla, with whom cowardice was a prime survival characteristic, was already clinging with its sucker-tipped legs to the ceiling, which was the only safe spot in the room.

  From his position flat on the floor Conway heard other straps go and saw two more tentacles begin feeling about. He knew that in a few minutes the patient would be completely free of the harness and able to move about the room at will. He scrambled quickly to his knees, crouched, then dived for the berserk EPLH. As he hung on tightly with his arms around its body just below the roots of the tentacles Conway was nearly deafened by a series of barking roars coming from the speaking orifice beside his ear. The noise translated as “Help me! Help me!” Simultaneously he saw the tentacle with the great, boney bludgeon at its tip swing downward. There was a crash and a three inch hollow appeared on the floor at the point where he had been lying a few seconds previously.

  Tackling the patient the way he had done might have seemed foolhardy, but Conway had been trying to keep his head in more ways than one. Clinging tightly to the EPLH’s body below the level of those madly swinging tentacles, Conway knew, was the next safest place in the room.

  Then he saw the Lieutenant …

  The Lieutenant had his back to the wall, half lying and half sitting up. One arm hung loosely at his side and in the other hand he held his gun, steadying it between his knees, and one eye was closed in a diabolical wink while the other sighted along the barrel. Conway shouted desperately for him to wait, but the noise from the patient drowned him out. At every instant Conway expected the flash and shock of exploding bullets. He felt paralyzed with fear, he couldn’t even let go.

  Then suddenly it was all over. The patient slumped onto its side, twitched and became motionless. Holstering his unfired weapon the Lieutenant struggled to his feet. Conway extricated himself and Prilicla came down off the ceiling.

  Awkwardly, Conway said, “Uh, I suppose you couldn’t shoot with me hanging on there?”

  The Lieutenant shook his head. “I’m a good shot, Doctor, I could have hit it and missed you all right. But it kept shouting ‘Help me’ all the time. That sort of thing cramps a man’s style …”

  CHAPTER 3

  It was some twenty minutes later, after Prilicla had sent the Lieutenant away to have a cracked humerus set and Conway and the GLNO were fitting the patient with a much stronger harness, that they noticed the absence of the darker patch of skin. The patient’s condition was now exactly the same as it had been before undergoing treatment. Apparently the hefty shot which Conway had administered had had only a temporary effect, and that was decidedly peculiar. It was in fact downright impossible.

  From the moment Prilicla’s empathetic faculty had been brought to bear on the case Conway had been sure that the root of the trouble was psychological. He also knew that a severely warped mind could do tremendous damage to the body which housed it. But this damage was on a purely physical level and its method of repair—the treatment developed and proved time and time again by Pathology—was a hard, physical fact also. And no mind, regardless of its power or degree of malfunction, should be able t
o ignore, to completely negate, a physical fact. The Universe had, after all, certain fixed laws.

  So far as Conway could see there were only two possible explanations. Either the rules were being ignored because the Being who had made them had also the right to ignore them or somehow, someone—or some combination of circumstances or mis-read data—was pulling a fast one. Conway infinitely preferred the second theory because the first one was altogether too shattering to consider seriously. He desperately wanted to go on thinking of his patient with a small P …

  Nevertheless, when he left the ward Conway paid a visit to the office of Captain Bryson, the Monitor Corps Chaplain, and consulted that officer at some length in a semi-professional capacity—Conway believed in carrying plenty of insurance. His next call was on Colonel Skempton, the officer in charge of Supply, Maintenance and Communications at the Hospital. There he requested complete copies of the patient’s log—not just the sections relevant to the murder—together with any other background data available to be sent to his room. Then he went to the AUGL theater to demonstrate operative techniques on submarine life-forms, and before dinner he was able to work in two hours in the Pathology department during which he discovered quite a lot about his patient’s immortality.

  When he returned to his room there was a pile of typescript on his desk that was nearly two inches thick. Conway groaned, thinking of his six-hour recreation period and how he was going to spend it. The thought obtruded of how he would have liked to spend it, bringing with it a vivid picture of the very efficient and impossibly beautiful Nurse Murchison whom he had been dating regularly of late. But Murchison was currently with the FGLI Maternity Section and their free periods would not coincide for another two weeks.

  In the present circumstances perhaps it was just as well, Conway thought, as he settled down for a good long read.

  The Corpsmen who had examined the patient’s ship had been unable to convert the EPLH’s time units into the Earth-human scale with any accuracy, but they had been able to state quite definitely that many of the taped logs were several centuries old and a few of them dated back to two thousand years or more. Conway began with the oldest and sifted carefully through them until he came to the most recent. He discovered almost at once that they were not so much a series of taped diaries—the references to personal items were relatively rare—as a catalog of memoranda, most of which was highly technical and very heavy going. The data relevant to the murder, which he studied last, was much more dramatic.

  … My physician is making me sick, the final entry read, it is killing me. I must do something. It is a bad physician for allowing me to become ill. Somehow I must get rid of it …

  Conway replaced the last sheet on its pile, sighed, and prepared to adopt a position more conducive to creative thinking; i.e. with his chair tipped far back, feet on desk and practically sitting on the back of his neck.

  What a mess, he thought.

  The separate pieces of the puzzle—or most of them, anyway—were available to him now and required only to be fitted together. There was the patient’s condition, not serious so far as the Hospital was concerned but definitely lethal if not treated. Then there was the data supplied by the two Ians regarding this God-like, power-hungry but essentially beneficent race and the companions—who were never of the same species—who always traveled or lived with them. These companions were subject to replacement because they grew old and died while the EPLHs did not. There were also the Path reports, both the first written one he had received before lunch and the later verbal one furnished during his two hours with Thornnastor, the FGLI Diagnostician-in-Charge of Pathology. It was Thornnastor’s considered opinion that the EPLH patient was not a true immortal, and the Considered Opinion of a Diagnostician was as near to being a rock-hard certainty as made no difference. But while immortality had been ruled out for various physiological reasons, the tests had shown evidence of longevity or rejuvenation treatments of the unselective type.

  Finally there had been the emotion readings furnished by Prilicla before and during their attempted treatment of the patient’s skin condition. Prilicla had reported a steady radiation pattern of confusion, anxiety and helplessness. But when the EPLH had received its second injection it had gone berserk, and the blast of emotion exploding from its mind had, in Prilicla’s own words, nearly fried the little empath’s brains in their own ichor. Prilicla had been unable to get a detailed reading on such a violent eruption of emotion, mainly because it had been tuned to the earlier and more gentle level on which the patient had been radiating, but it agreed that there was evidence of instability of the schizoid type.

  Conway wriggled deeper into his chair, closed his eyes and let the pieces of the puzzle slide gently into place.

  It had begun on the planet where the EPLHs had been the dominant life-form. In the course of time they had achieved civilization which included interstellar flight and an advanced medical science. Their life span, lengthy to begin with, was artificially extended so that a relatively short-lived species like the Ians could be forgiven for believing them to be immortal. But a high price had had to be paid for their longevity: reproduction of their kind, the normal urge toward immortality of race in a species of mortal individuals, would have been the first thing to go; then their civilization would have dissolved—been forced apart, rather—into a mass of star-traveling, rugged individualists; and finally there would have been the psychological rot which set in when the risk of purely physical deterioration had gone.

  Poor demi-gods, thought Conway.

  They avoided each other’s company for the simple reason that they’d already had too much of it—century after century of each other’s mannerisms, habits of speech, opinions and the sheer, utter boredom of looking at each other. They had set themselves vast, sociological problems—taking charge of backward or errant planetary cultures and dragging them up by their bootstraps, and similar large-scale philanthropies—because they had tremendous minds, they had plenty of time, they had constantly to fight against boredom and because basically they must have been nice people. And because part of the price of such longevity was an ever-growing fear of death, they had to have their own personal physicians—no doubt the most efficient practitioners of medicine known to them—constantly in attendance.

  Only one piece of the puzzle refused to fit and that was the odd way in which the EPLH had negated his attempts to treat it, but Conway had no doubt that that was a physiological detail which would soon become clear as well. The important thing was that he now knew how to proceed.

  Not every condition responded to medication, despite Thornnastor’s claims to the contrary, and he would have seen that surgery was indicated in the EPLH’s case if the whole business had not been so be-fogged with considerations of who and what the patient was and what it was supposed to have done. The fact that the patient was a near-deity, a murderer and generally the type of being not to be trifled with were details which should not have concerned him.

  Conway sighed and swung his feet to the floor. He was beginning to feel so comfortable that he decided he had better go to bed before he fell asleep.

  Immediately after breakfast next day Conway began setting up things for the EPLH’s operation. He ordered the necessary instruments and equipment sent to the observation ward, gave detailed instructions regarding its sterilization—the patient was supposed to have killed one doctor already for allowing it to become sick, and a dim view would be taken if another one was the cause of it catching something else because of faulty aseptic procedures—and requested the assistance of a Tralthan surgeon to help with the fine work. Then half an hour before he was due to start Conway called on O’Mara.

  The Chief Psychologist listened to his report and intended course of action without comment until he had finished, then he said, “Conway, do you realize what could happen to this hospital if that thing got loose? And not just physically loose, I mean. It is seriously disturbed mentally, you say, if not downright psychotic. At
the moment it is unconscious, but from what you tell me its grasp of the psychological sciences is such that it could have us eating out of its manipulatory appendage just by talking at us.

  “I’m concerned as to what may happen when it wakes up.”

  It was the first time Conway had heard O‘Mara confess to being worried about anything. Several years back when a runaway spaceship had crashed into the hospital, spreading havoc and confusion through sixteen levels, it was said that Major O’Mara had expressed a feeling of concern on that occasion also …

  “I’m trying not to think about that,” said Conway apologetically. “It just confuses the issue.”

  O’Mara took a deep breath and let it out slowly through his nose, a mannerism of his which could convey more than twenty scathing sentences. He said coldly, “Somebody should think about these things, Doctor. I trust you will have no objection to me observing the coming operation … ?”

  To what was nothing less than a politely worded order there could be no reply other than an equally polite, “Glad to have you, sir.”

  When they arrived in the observation ward the patient’s “bed” had been raised to a comfortable operating height and the EPLH itself was strapped securely into position. The Tralthan had taken its place beside the recording and anesthetizing gear and had one eye on the patient, one on its equipment and the other two directed toward Prilicla with whom it was discussing a particularly juicy piece of scandal which had come to light the previous day. As the two beings concerned were PVSJ chlorine-breathers the affair could have only an academic interest for them, but apparently their academic interest was intense. At the sight of O’Mara, however, the scandal-mongering ceased forthwith. Conway gave the signal to begin.