The Big Book of Science Fiction

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

  While he was hurrying in that direction Conway realised suddenly that he was tired and hungry, but he did not get the chance to think about it for long. The annunciators were giving out a call for all junior interns to report to Casualty, and directions for adjacent wards to be evacuated where possible to other accommodation. An alien gabble interspersed these messages as other species received similar instructions.

  Obviously the Casualty Section was being extended. But why, and where were all the casualties coming from? Conway’s mind was a confused and rather tired question mark.

  V

  At Lock Six a Tralthan Diagnostician was deep in conversation with two Monitors. Conway felt a sense of outrage at the sight of the highest and the lowest being so chummy together, then reflected with a touch of bitterness that nothing about this place could surprise him anymore. There were two more Monitors beside the lock’s direct vision panel.

  “Hello, doctor,” one of them said pleasantly. He nodded towards the view-port. “They’re unloading at Locks Eight, Nine, and Eleven. We’ll be getting our quota any minute now.”

  The big transparent panel framed an awesome sight: Conway had never seen so many ships together at one time. More than thirty sleek, silver needles, ranging from ten-man pleasure yachts to the gargantuan transports of the Monitor Corps, wove a slow, complicated pattern in and around each other as they waited for permission to lock on and unload.

  “Tricky work, that,” the Monitor observed.

  Conway agreed. The repulsion fields which protected ships against collision with the various forms of cosmic detritus required plenty of space. Meteorite screens had to be set up a minimum of five miles away from the ship they protected if heavenly bodies large and small were to be successfully deflected from them—further away if it was a bigger ship. But the ships outside were a mere matter of hundreds of yards apart, and had no collision protection except the skill of their pilots. The pilots would be having a trying time at the moment.

  But Conway had little time for sightseeing before three Earth-human interns arrived. They were followed quickly by two of the red-furred DBDGs and a caterpillar-like DBLF, all wearing medical insignia. There came a heavy scrape of metal against metal; the lock telltales turned from red to green, indicating that a ship was properly connected up; and the patients began to stream through.

  Carried in stretchers by Monitors, they were of two kinds only: DBDGs of the Earth-human type and DBLF caterpillars. Conway’s job, and that of the other doctors present, was to examine them and route them through to the proper department of Casualty for treatment. He got down to work, assisted by a Monitor who possessed all the attributes of a trained nurse except the insignia. He said his name was Williamson.

  The sight of the first case gave Conway a shock—not because it was serious, but because of the nature of the injuries. The third made him stop so that his Monitor assistant looked at him questioningly.

  “What sort of accident was this?” Conway burst out. “Multiple punctures, but the edge of the wounds cauterised. Lacerated punctures, as if from fragments thrown out by an explosion. How…?”

  The Monitor said, “We kept it quiet, of course, but I thought here at least the rumour would have got to everybody.” His lips tightened and the look that identified all Monitors to Conway deepened in his eyes. “They decided to have a war,” he went on, nodding at the Earth-human and DBLF patients around them. “I’m afraid it got a little out of control before we were able to clamp down.”

  Conway thought sickly, A war…! Human beings from Earth, or an Earth-seeded planet, trying to kill members of a species that had so much in common with them. He had heard that there were such things occasionally, but had never really believed any intelligent species could go insane on such a large scale. So many casualties…

  He was not so bound up in his thoughts of loathing and disgust at this frightful business that he missed noticing a very strange fact—that the Monitor’s expression mirrored his own! If Williamson thought that way about war, too, maybe it was time he revised his thinking about the Monitor Corps in general.

  A sudden commotion a few yards to his right drew Conway’s attention. An Earth-human patient was objecting strenuously to the DBLF intern trying to examine him, and the language he was using was not nice. The DBLF was registering hurt bewilderment, though possibly the human had not sufficient knowledge of its physiognomy to know that, and trying to reassure the patient in flat, translated tones.

  It was Williamson who settled the business. He swung round on the loudly protesting patient, bent forward until their faces were only inches apart, and spoke in a low, almost conversational tone which nevertheless sent shivers along Conway’s spine.

  “Listen, friend,” he said. “You say you object to one of the stinking crawlers that tried to kill you trying to patch you up, right? Well, get this into your head, and keep it there—this particular crawler is a doctor here. Also, in this establishment there are no wars. You all belong to the same army and the uniform is a nightshirt, so lay still, shut up, and behave. Otherwise I’ll clip you one.”

  Conway returned to work underlining his mental note about revising his thinking regarding Monitors. As the torn, battered, and burnt life-forms flowed past under his hands his mind seemed strangely detached from it all. Williamson kept surprising him with expressions on his face that seemed to give the lie to some of the things he had been told about Monitors. This tireless, quiet man with the rock-steady hands—was he a killer, a sadist of low intelligence and nonexistent morals? It was hard to believe. As he watched the Monitor covertly between patients, Conway gradually came to a decision. It was a very difficult decision. If he wasn’t careful he would very likely get clipped.

  O’Mara had been impossible, so had Bryson and Mannon for various reasons, but Williamson now…

  “Ah…er, Williamson,” Conway began hesitantly, then finished with a rush, “have you ever killed anybody?”

  The Monitor straightened suddenly, his lips a thin, bloodless line. He said tonelessly, “You should know better than to ask a Monitor that question, doctor. Or should you?” He hesitated, his curiosity keeping check on the anger growing in him because of the tangle of emotion which must have been mirrored on Conway’s face, then said heavily, “What’s eating you, doc?”

  Conway wished fervently that he had never asked the question, but it was too late to back out now. Stammering at first, he began to tell of his ideals of service and of his alarm and confusion on discovering that Sector General—an establishment which he had thought embodied all his high ideals—employed a Monitor as its chief psychologist, and probably other members of the Corps in positions of responsibility. Conway knew now that the Corps was not all bad, that they had rushed units of their Medical Division here to aid them during the present emergency. But even so, Monitors…!

  “I’ll give you another shock,” Williamson said dryly, “by telling you something that is so widely known that nobody thinks to mention it. Dr. Lister, the director, also belongs to the Monitor Corps.

  “He doesn’t wear a uniform, of course,” the Monitor added quickly, “because Diagnosticians grow forgetful and are careless about small things. The Corps frowns on untidiness, even in a lieutenant general.”

  Lister, a Monitor! “But, why?” Conway burst out in spite of himself. “Everybody knows what you are. How did you gain power here in the first place…?”

  “Everybody does not know, obviously,” Williamson cut in, “because you don’t, for one.”

  VI

  The Monitor was no longer angry, Conway saw as they finished with their current patient and moved on to the next. Instead there was an expression on the other’s face oddly reminiscent of a parent about to lecture an offspring on some of the unpleasant facts of life.

  “Basically,” said Williamson as he gently peeled back a field dressing of a wounded DBLF, “your trouble is that you, and your whole social group, are a protected species.”

  Conway said,
“What?”

  “A protected species,” he repeated. “Shielded from the crudities of present-day life. From your social strata—on all the worlds of the Union, not only on Earth—come practically all the great artists, musicians, and professional men. Most of you live out your lives in ignorance of the fact that you are protected, that you are insulated from childhood against the grosser realities of our interstellar so-called civilisation, and that your ideas of pacifism and ethical behaviour are a luxury which a great many of us simply cannot afford. You are allowed this luxury in the hope that from it may come a philosophy which may one day make every being in the galaxy truly civilised, truly good.”

  “I didn’t know,” Conway stammered. “And…and you make us—me, I mean—look so useless….”

  “Of course you didn’t know,” said Williamson gently. Conway wondered why it was that such a young man could talk down to him without giving offence; he seemed to possess authority somehow. Continuing, he said, “You were probably reserved, untalkative, and all wrapped up in your high ideals. Not that there’s anything wrong with them, understand, it’s just that you have to allow for a little grey with the black and white. Our present culture,” he went on, returning to the main line of discussion, “is based on maximum freedom for the individual. An entity may do anything he likes provided it is not injurious to others. Only Monitors forgo this freedom.”

  “What about the Normals’ reservations?” Conway broke in. At last the Monitor had made a statement which he could definitely contradict. “Being policed by Monitors and confined to certain areas of country is not what I’d call freedom.”

  “If you think back carefully,” Williamson replied, “I think you will find that the Normals—that is, the group on nearly every planet which thinks that, unlike the brutish Monitors and the spineless aesthetes of your own strata, it is truly representative of its species—are not confined. Instead they have naturally drawn together into communities, and it is in these communities of self-styled Normals that the Monitors have to be most active. The Normals possess all the freedom, including the right to kill each other if that is what they desire, the Monitors being present only to see that any Normal not sharing this desire will not suffer in the process.

  “We also, when a sufficiently high pitch of mass insanity overtakes one or more of these worlds, allow a war to be fought on a planet set aside for that purpose, generally arranging things so that the war is neither long nor too bloody.” Williamson sighed. In tones of bitter self-accusation he concluded, “We underestimated them. This one was both.”

  Conway’s mind was still baulking at this radically new slant on things. Before coming to the hospital he’d had no direct contact with Monitors, why should he? And the Normals of Earth he had found to be rather romantic figures, inclined to strut and swagger a bit, that was all. Of course, most of the bad things he had heard about Monitors had come from them. Maybe the Normals had not been as truthful or objective as they could have been….

  “This is all too hard to believe,” Conway protested. “You’re suggesting that the Monitor Corps is greater in the scheme of things than either the Normals or ourselves, the professional class!” He shook his head angrily. “And anyway, this is a fine time for a philosophical discussion!”

  “You,” said the Monitor, “started it.”

  There was no answer to that.

  It must have been hours later that Conway felt a touch on his shoulder and straightened to find a DBLF nurse behind him. The being was holding a hypodermic. It said, “Pep-shot, doctor?”

  All at once Conway realised how wobbly his legs had become and how hard it was to focus his eyes. And he must have been noticeably slowing down for the nurse to approach him in the first place. He nodded and rolled up his sleeve with fingers which felt like thick, tired sausages.

  “Yipe!” he cried in sudden anguish. “What are you using, a six-inch nail?”

  “I am sorry,” said the DBLF, “but I have injected two doctors of my own species before coming to you, and as you know our tegument is thicker and more closely grained than yours is. The needle has therefore become blunted.”

  Conway’s fatigue dropped away in seconds. Except for a slight tingling in hands and feet and a greyish blotching which only others could see in his face he felt as clear-eyed, alert, and physically refreshed as if he had just come out of a shower after ten hours’ sleep. He took a quick look round before finishing his current examination and saw that here at least the number of patients awaiting attention had shrunk to a mere handful, and the number of Monitors in the room was less than half what it had been at the start. The patients were being taken care of, and the Monitors had become patients.

  He had seen it happening all around him. Monitors who had had little or no sleep on the transport coming here, forcing themselves to carry on helping the overworked medics of the hospital with repeated pep-shots and sheer, dogged courage. One by one they had literally dropped in their tracks and been taken hurriedly away, so exhausted that the involuntary muscles of heart and lungs had given up with everything else. They lay in special wards with robot devices massaging their hearts, giving artificial respiration, and feeding them through a vein in the leg. Conway had heard that only one of them had died.

  Taking advantage of the lull, Conway and Williamson moved to the direct vision panel and looked out. The waiting swarm of ships seemed only slightly smaller, though he knew that these must be new arrivals. He could not imagine where they were going to put these people—even the habitable corridors in the hospital were beginning to overflow now, and there was constant rearranging of patients of all species to make more room. But that wasn’t his problem, and the weaving pattern of ships was an oddly restful sight….

  “Emergency,” said the wall annunciator suddenly. “Single ship, one occupant, species as yet unknown requests immediate treatment. Occupant is in only partial control of its ship, is badly injured and communications are incoherent. Stand by at all admittance locks…!”

  Oh, no, Conway thought, not at a time like this! There was a cold sickness in his stomach and he had a horrible premonition of what was going to happen. Williamson’s knuckles shone white as he gripped the edge of the view-port. “Look!” he said in a flat, despairing tone, and pointed.

  An intruder was approaching the waiting swarm of ships at an insane velocity and on a wildly erratic course. A stubby, black, and featureless torpedo shape, it reached and penetrated the weaving mass of ships before Conway had time to take two breaths. In milling confusion the ships scattered, narrowly avoiding collision with both it and each other, and still it hurtled on. There was only one ship in its path now, a Monitor transport which had been given the all-clear to approach and was drifting in towards an admittance lock. The transport was big, ungainly, and not built for fast acrobatics—it had neither the time nor the ability to get out of the way. A collision was certain, and the transport was jammed with wounded….

  But no. At the last possible instant the hurtling ship swerved. They saw it miss the transport and its stubby torpedo shape foreshorten to a circle which grew in size with heart-stopping rapidity. Now it was headed straight at them! Conway wanted to shut his eyes, but there was a peculiar fascination about watching that great mass of metal rushing at him. Neither Williamson nor himself made any attempt to jump for a space suit—what was to happen was only split seconds away.

  The ship was almost on top of them when it swerved again as its injured pilot sought desperately to avoid this greater obstacle, the hospital. But too late, the ship struck.

  A smashing double shock struck up at them from the floor as the ship tore through their double skin, followed by successively milder shocks as it bludgeoned its way into the vitals of the great hospital. A cacophony of screams—both human and alien—arose briefly, also whistlings, rustlings, and guttural jabberings as beings were maimed, drowned, gassed, or decompressed. Water poured into sections containing pure chlorine. A blast of ordinary air rushed through a ga
ping hole in the compartment whose occupants had never known anything but trans-Plutonian cold and vacuum—the beings shrivelled, died, and dissolved horribly at the first touch of it. Water, air, and a score of different atmospheric mixtures intermingled forming a sludgy, brown, and highly corrosive mixture that steamed and bubbled its way out into space. But long before that had happened the airtight seals had slammed shut, effectively containing the terrible wound made by that bulleting ship.

  VII

  There was an instant of shocked paralysis, then the hospital reacted. Above their heads the annunciator went into a quiet, controlled frenzy. Engineers and Maintenance men of all species were to report for assignment immediately. The gravity neutraliser grids in the LSVO and MSVK wards were failing—all medical staff in the area were to encase the patients in protective envelopes and transfer them to DBLF theatre two, where one-twentieth-g conditions were being set up, before they were crushed by their own weight. There was an untraced leak in AUGL corridor and all DBDGs were warned of chlorine contamination in the area of their dining hall. Also, Dr. Lister was asked to report himself, please.

  In an odd corner of his mind Conway noted how everybody else was ordered to their assignments while Dr. Lister was asked. Suddenly he heard his name being called and he swung around.

  It was Dr. Mannon. He hurried up to Williamson and Conway and said, “I see you’re free at the moment. There’s a job I’d like you to do.” He paused to receive Conway’s nod, then plunged on breathlessly.

  When the crashing ship had dug a hole halfway through the hospital, Mannon explained, the volume sealed off by the safety doors was not confined simply to the tunnel of wreckage it had created. The position of the doors was responsible for this—the result being analogous to a great tree of vacuum extending into the hospital structure, with the tunnel created by the ship as its trunk and the open sections of corridors leading off it the branches. Some of these airless corridors served compartments which themselves could be sealed off, and it was possible that these might contain survivors.