The Big Book of Science Fiction

by The Big Book of Science Fiction (retail) (epub)

  A convalescent PVSJ rustled past him on spiny, membraneous appendages in the chlorine section and Conway found himself wanting desperately to talk to it, about anything. He had to force himself to go on.

  The protective suit worn by DBDGs like himself while visiting the methane ward was in reality a small mobile tank. It was fitted with heaters inside to keep its occupant alive and refrigerators outside so that the leakage of heat would not immediately shrivel the patients to whom the slightest glow of radiant heat—or even light—was lethal. Conway had no idea how the scanner he used in the examinations worked—only those gadget-mad beings with the Engineering armbands knew that—except that it wasn’t by infrared. That also was too hot for them.

  As he worked Conway turned the heaters up until the sweat rolled off him and still he felt cold. He was suddenly afraid. Suppose he had caught something? When he was outside in air again he looked at the tiny telltale that was surgically embedded on the inner surface of his forearm. His pulse, respiration, and endocrine balance were normal except for the minor irregularities caused by his worrying, and there was nothing foreign in his bloodstream. What was wrong with him?

  —

  Conway finished his rounds as quickly as possible. He felt confused again. If his mind was playing tricks on him he was going to take the necessary steps to rectify the matter. It must be something to do with the Telfi tape he had absorbed. O’Mara had said something about it, though he could not remember exactly what at the moment. But he would go to the Educator room right away, O’Mara or no O’Mara.

  Two Monitors passed him while he was on the way, both armed. Conway knew that he should feel his usual hostility towards them, also shock that they were armed inside a hospital, and he did, but he also wanted to slap their backs or even hug them: he desperately wanted to have people around, talking and exchanging ideas and impressions so that he would not feel so terribly alone. As they drew level with him Conway managed to get out a shaky “Hello.” It was the first time he had spoken to a Monitor in his life.

  One of the Monitors smiled slightly, the other nodded. Both gave him odd looks over their shoulders as they passed because his teeth were chattering so much.

  His intention of going to the Educator room had been clearly formed, but now it did not seem to be such a good idea. It was cold and dark there with all those machines and shaded lighting, and the only company might be O’Mara. Conway wanted to lose himself in a crowd, and the bigger the better. He thought of the nearby dining hall and turned towards it. Then at an intersection he saw a sign reading “Diet Kitchen, Wards 52 to 68, Species DBDG, DBLF, & FGLI.” That made him remember how terribly cold he felt….

  The Dietitians were too busy to notice him. Conway picked an oven which was fairly glowing with heat and lay down against it, letting the germ-killing ultraviolet which flooded the place bathe him and ignoring the charred smell given off by his light clothing. He felt warmer now, a little warmer, but the awful sense of being utterly and completely alone would not leave him. He was cut off, unloved and unwanted. He wished that he had never been born.

  When a Monitor—one of the two he had recently passed whose curiosity had been aroused by Conway’s strange behaviour—wearing a hastily borrowed heat suit belonging to one of the Cook-Dietitians got to him a few minutes later, the big, slow tears were running down Conway’s cheeks….

  —

  “You,” said a well-remembered voice, “are a very lucky and very stupid young man.”

  Conway opened his eyes to find that he was on the Erasure couch and that O’Mara and another Monitor were looking down at him. His back felt as though it had been cooked medium rare and his whole body stung as if with a bad dose of sunburn. O’Mara was glaring furiously at him; he spoke again.

  “Lucky not to be seriously burned and blinded, and stupid because you forgot to inform me on one very important point, namely that this was your first experience with the Educator….”

  O’Mara’s tone became faintly self-accusatory at this point, but only faintly. He went on to say that had he been thus informed he would have given Conway a hypno-treatment which would have enabled the doctor to differentiate between his own needs and those of the Telfi sharing his mind. He only realised that Conway was a first-timer when he filed the thumbprinted slip, and dammit, how was he to know who was new and who wasn’t in a place this size! And anyway, if Conway had thought more of his job and less of the fact that a Monitor was giving him the tape, this would never have happened.

  Conway, O’Mara continued bitingly, appeared to be a self-righteous bigot who made no pretence at hiding his feelings of defilement at the touch of an uncivilised brute of a Monitor. How a person intelligent enough to gain appointment to this hospital could also hold those sort of feelings was beyond O’Mara’s understanding.

  Conway felt his face burning. It had been stupid of him to forget to tell the psychologist that he was a first-timer. O’Mara could easily bring charges of personal negligence against him—a charge almost as serious as carelessness with a patient in a multi-environment hospital—and have Conway kicked out. But that possibility did not weigh too heavily with him at the moment, terrible though it was. What got him was the fact that he was being told off by a Monitor, and before another Monitor!

  The man who must have carried him here was gazing down at him, a look of half-humourous concern in his steady brown eyes. Conway found that harder to take even than O’Mara’s abusiveness. How dare a Monitor feel sorry for him!

  “…And if you’re still wondering what happened,” O’Mara was saying in withering tones, “you allowed—through inexperience, I admit—the Telfi personality contained in the tape to temporarily overcome your own. Its need for hard radiation, intense heat and light, and above all the mental fusion necessary to a group-mind entity, became your needs—transferred into their nearest human equivalents, of course. For a while you were experiencing life as a single Telfi being, and an individual Telfi—cut off from all mental contact with the others of its group—is an unhappy beastie indeed.”

  O’Mara had cooled somewhat as his explanation proceeded. His voice was almost impersonal as he went on, “You’re suffering from little more than a bad case of sunburn. Your back will be tender for a while and later it will itch. Serves you right. Now go away. I don’t want to see you again until hour nine the day after tomorrow. Keep that hour free. That’s an order—we have to have a little talk, remember?”

  —

  Outside in the corridor Conway had a feeling of complete deflation coupled with an anger that threatened to burst out of all control—an intensely frustrating combination. In all his twenty-three years of life he could not remember being subjected to such extreme mental discomfort. He had been made to feel like a small boy—a bad, maladjusted small boy. Conway had always been a very good, well-mannered boy. It hurt.

  He had not noticed that his rescuer was still beside him until the other spoke.

  “Don’t go worrying yourself about the major,” the Monitor said sympathetically. “He’s really a nice man, and when you see him again you’ll find out for yourself. At the moment he’s tired and a bit touchy. You see, there are three companies just arrived and more coming. But they won’t be much use to us in their present state—they’re in a bad way with combat fatigue, most of ’em. Major O’Mara and his staff have to give them some psychological first aid before—“

  “Combat fatigue,” said Conway in the most insulting tone of which he was capable. He was heartily sick of people he considered his intellectual and moral inferiors either ranting at him or sympathising with him. “I suppose,” he added, “that means they’ve grown tired of killing people?”

  He saw the Monitor’s young-old face stiffen and something that was both hurt and anger burn in his eyes. He stopped. He opened his mouth for an O’Mara-type blast of invective, then thought better of it. He said quietly, “For someone who has been here for two months you have, to put it mildly, a very unrealistic attitude towards
the Monitor Corps. I can’t understand that. Have you been too busy to talk to people or something?”

  “No,” replied Conway coldly, “but where I come from we do not discuss persons of your type, we prefer pleasanter topics.”

  “I hope,” said the Monitor, “that all your friends—if you have friends, that is—indulge in backslapping.” He turned and marched off.

  Conway winced in spite of himself at the thought of anything heavier than a feather hitting his scorched and tender back. But he was thinking of the other’s earlier words, too. So his attitude towards Monitors was unrealistic? Did they want him, then, to condone violence and murder and befriend those who were responsible for it? And he had also mentioned the arrival of several companies of Monitors. Why? What for? Anxiety began to eat at the edges of his hitherto solid block of self-confidence. There was something here that he was missing, something important.

  When he had first arrived at Sector General the being who had given Conway his original instructions and assignments had added a little pep talk. It had said that Dr. Conway had passed a great many tests to come here and that they welcomed him and hoped he would be happy enough in his work to stay. The period of trial was now over, and henceforth nobody would be trying to catch him out, but if for any reason—friction with his own or any other species, or the appearance of some xenological psychosis—he became so distressed that he could no longer stay, then with great reluctance he would be allowed to leave.

  He had also been advised to meet as many different entities as possible and try to gain mutual understanding, if not their friendship. Finally he had been told that if he should get into trouble through ignorance or any other reason, he should contact either of two Earth-human beings who were called O’Mara and Bryson, depending on the nature of his trouble, though a qualified being of any species would, of course, help him on request.

  Immediately afterwards he had met the surgeon-in-charge of the wards to which he had been posted, a very able Earth-human called Mannon. Dr. Mannon was not yet a Diagnostician, though he was trying hard, and was therefore still quite human for long periods during the day. He was the proud possessor of a small dog which stuck so close to him that visiting extraterrestrials were inclined to assume a symbiotic relationship. Conway liked Dr. Mannon a lot, but now he was beginning to realise that his superior was the only being of his own species towards whom he had any feeling of friendship.

  That was a bit strange, surely. It made Conway begin to wonder about himself.

  After that reassuring pep talk Conway had thought he was all set—especially when he found how easy it was to make friends with the ET members of the staff. He had not warmed to his human colleagues—with the one exception—because of their tendency to be flippant or cynical regarding the very important and worthwhile work he, and they, were doing. But the idea of friction developing was laughable.

  That was before today, though, when O’Mara had made him feel small and stupid, accused him of bigotry and intolerance, and generally cut his ego to pieces. This, quite definitely, was friction developing, and if such treatment at the hands of Monitors continued Conway knew that he would be driven to leave. He was a civilised and ethical human being—why were the Monitors in a position to tell him off? Conway just could not understand it at all. Two things he did know, however; he wanted to remain at the hospital, and to do that he needed help.

  IV

  The name “Bryson” popped into his mind suddenly, one of the names he had been given should he get into trouble. O’Mara, the other name, was out, but this Bryson now…

  Conway had never met anyone with that name, but by asking a passing Tralthan he received directions for finding him. He got only as far as the door, which bore the legend, “Captain Bryson, Monitor Corps, Chaplain,” then he turned angrily away. Another Monitor! There was just one person left who might help him: Dr. Mannon. He should have tried him first.

  But his superior, when Conway ran him down, was sealed in the LSVO theatre, where he was assisting a Tralthan Surgeon-Diagnostician in a very tricky piece of work. He went up to the observation gallery to wait until Mannon had finished.

  The LSVO came from a planet of dense atmosphere and negligible gravity. It was a winged life-form of extreme fragility, which necessitated the theatre being at almost zero gravity and the surgeons strapped to their position around the table. The little OTSB who lived in symbiosis with the elephantine Tralthan was not strapped down, but held securely above the operative field by one of its host’s secondary tentacles—the OTSB life-form, Conway knew, could not lose physical contact with its host for more than a few minutes without suffering severe mental damage. Interested despite his own troubles, he began to concentrate on what they were doing.

  A section of the patient’s digestive tract had been bared, revealing a spongy, bluish growth adhering to it. Without the LSVO physiology tape Conway could not tell whether the patient’s condition was serious or not, but the operation was certainly a technically difficult one. He could tell by the way Mannon hunched forward over it and by the tightly coiled tentacles of the Tralthan not then in use. As was normal, the little OTSB with its cluster of wire-thin, eye- and sucker-tipped tentacles was doing the fine, exploratory work—sending infinitely detailed visual information of the field to its giant host, and receiving back instructions based on that data. The Tralthan and Dr. Mannon attended to the relatively crude work of clamping, tying off, and swabbing out.

  Dr. Mannon had little to do but watch as the super-sensitive tentacles of the Tralthan’s parasite were guided in their work by the host, but Conway knew that the other was proud of the chance to do even that. The Tralthan combinations were the greatest surgeons the galaxy had ever known. All surgeons would have been Tralthans had not their bulk and operating procedure made it impossible to treat certain forms of life.

  —

  Conway was waiting when they came out of the theatre. One of the Tralthan’s tentacles nicked out and tapped Dr. Mannon sharply on the head—a gesture which was a high compliment—and immediately a small bundle of fur and teeth streaked from behind a locker towards the great being who was apparently attacking its master. Conway had seen this game played out many times and it still seemed wildly ludicrous to him. As Mannon’s dog barked furiously at the creature towering above both itself and its master, challenging it to a duel to the death, the Tralthan shrank back in mock terror and cried, “Save me from this fearsome beast!” The dog, still barking furiously, circled it, snapping at the leathery tegument protecting the Tralthan’s six blocky legs. The Tralthan retreated precipitously, the while calling loudly for aid and being very careful that its tiny attacker was not splattered under one of its elephantine feet. And so the sounds of battle receded down the corridor.

  When the noise had diminished sufficiently for him to be heard, Conway said, “Doctor, I wonder if you could help me. I need advice, or at least information. But it’s a rather delicate matter….”

  Conway saw Dr. Mannon’s eyebrows go up and a smile quirk the corners of his mouth. He said, “I’d be glad to help you, of course, but I’m afraid any advice I could give you at the moment would be pretty poor stuff.” He made a disgusted face and flapped his arms up and down. “I’ve still got an LSVO tape working on me. You know how it is—half of me thinks I’m a bird and the other half is a little confused about it. But what sort of advice do you need?” he went on, his head perking to one side in an oddly birdlike manner. “If it’s that peculiar form of madness called young love, or any other psychological disturbance, I’d suggest you see O’Mara.”

  Conway shook his head quickly; anybody but O’Mara. He said, “No. It’s more of a philosophical nature, a matter of ethics, maybe….”

  “Is that all!” Mannon burst out. He was about to say something more when his face took on a fixed, listening expression. With a sudden jerk of his thumb he indicated a nearby wall annunciator. He said quietly, “The solution to your weighty problems will have to wait—you’re wan
ted.”

  “…Dr. Conway,” the annunciator was saying briskly, “go to room eighty-seven and administer pep-shots….”

  “But eighty-seven isn’t even in our section!” Conway protested. “What’s going on here…?”

  Dr. Mannon had become suddenly grim. “I think I know,” he said, “and I advise you to keep a few of those shots for yourself because you are going to need them.” He turned abruptly and hurried off, muttering something about getting a fast erasure before they started screaming for him, too.

  —

  Room 87 was the Casualty Section’s staff recreation room, and when Conway arrived its tables, chairs, and even parts of its floor were asprawl with green-clad Monitors, some of whom had not the energy to lift their heads when he came in. One figure pushed itself out of a chair with extreme difficulty and weaved towards him. It was another Monitor with a major’s insignia on his shoulders and the Staff and Serpents on his collar. He said, “Maximum dosage. Start with me,” and began shrugging out of his tunic.

  Conway looked around the room. There must have been nearly a hundred of them, all in stages of advanced exhaustion and their faces showing that telltale grey colouration. He still did not feel well-disposed towards Monitors, but these were, after a fashion, patients, and his duty was clear.

  “As a doctor I advise strongly against this,” Conway said gravely. “It’s obvious that you’ve had pep-shots already—far too many of them. What you need is sleep—“

  “Sleep?” said a voice somewhere. “What’s that?”

  “Quiet, Teirnan,” said the major tiredly, then to Conway: “And as a doctor I understand the risks. I suggest we waste no more time.”

  Rapidly and expertly Conway set about administering the shots. Dull-eyed, bone-weary men lined up before him and five minutes later left the room with a spring in their step and their eyes too bright with artificial vitality. He had just finished when he heard his name over the annunciator again, ordering him to Lock Six to await instructions there. Lock Six, Conway knew, was one of the subsidiary entrances to the Casualty Section.