The Big Book of Science Fiction

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

  “Do not be afraid,” the other was saying for the twentieth time. “If you are injured, tell us. We are here to help you….”

  But there was neither movement nor reply from the being.

  On a sudden impulse Conway switched to Dr. Mannon’s band. He said quickly, “The survivor seems to be an AACL. Can you tell me what it’s here for, or any reason why it should refuse or be unable to talk to us?”

  “I’ll check with Reception,” said Mannon after a short pause. “But are you sure of that classification? I can’t remember seeing an AACL here, sure it isn’t a Creppelian—”

  “It isn’t a Creppelian octopoid,” Conway cut in. “There are six main appendages, and it is just lying here doing nothing….”

  Conway stopped suddenly, shocked into silence, because it was no longer true that the being under discussion was doing nothing. It had launched itself towards the ceiling, moving so fast that it seemed to land in the same instant that it had taken off. Above him now, Conway saw another control unit pulverised as the being struck and others torn from their mounts as its tentacles sought anchorage. In his phones Mannon was shouting about gravity fluctuations in a hitherto stable section of the hospital, and mounting casualty figures, but Conway was unable to reply.

  He was watching helplessly as the AACL prepared to launch itself again.

  “…We are here to help you,” the PVSJ was saying as the being landed with a soundless crash four yards from the padre. Five great tentacles anchored themselves firmly, and a sixth lashed out in a great, curving blur of motion that caught the PVSJ and smashed it against the wall. Life-giving chlorine spurted from the PVSJ’s suit, momentarily hiding in mist the shapeless, pathetic thing which rebounded slowly into the middle of the room. The AACL began making cheeping noises again.

  Conway heard himself babbling out a report to Mannon, then Mannon shouting for Lister. Finally the director’s voice came in to him. It said thickly, “You’ve got to kill it, Conway.”

  You’ve got to kill it, Conway!

  It was those words which shocked Conway back to a state of normality as nothing else could have done. How very like a Monitor, he thought bitterly, to solve a problem with a murder. And to ask a doctor, a person dedicated to the preserving of life, to do the killing. It did not matter that the being was insane with fear, it had caused a lot of trouble in the hospital, so kill it.

  Conway had been afraid; he still was. In his recent state of mind he might have been panicked into using this kill-or-be-killed law of the jungle. Not now, though. No matter what happened to him or the hospital he would not kill an intelligent fellow being, and Lister could shout himself blue in the face….

  It was with a start of surprise that Conway realised that both Lister and Mannon were shouting at him, and trying to counter his arguments. He must have been doing his thinking aloud without knowing it. Angrily he tuned them out.

  But there was still another voice gibbering at him, a slow, whispering, unutterably weary voice that frequently broke off to gasp in pain. For a wild moment Conway thought that the ghost of the dead PVSJ was continuing Lister’s arguments, then he caught sight of movement above him.

  Drifting gently through the hole in the ceiling was the space-suited figure of Williamson. How the badly injured Monitor had got there at all was beyond Conway’s understanding—his broken arms made control of his gravity pack impossible, so that he must have come all that way by kicking with his feet and trusting that a still-active gravity grid would not pull him in a second time. At the thought of how many times those multiple fractured members must have collided with obstacles on the way down, Conway cringed. And yet all the Monitor was concerned with was trying to coax Conway into killing the AACL below him.

  Close below him, with the distance lessening every second…

  Conway felt the cold sweat break out on his back. Helpless to stop himself, the injured Monitor had cleared the rent in the ceiling and was drifting slowly floorwards, directly on top of the crouching AACL! As Conway stared fascinated one of the steel-hard tentacles began to uncurl preparatory to making a death-dealing swipe.

  Instinctively Conway launched himself in the direction of the floating Monitor, there was no time for him to feel consciously brave—or stupid—about the action. He connected with a muffled crash and hung on, wrapping his legs around Williamson’s waist to leave his hands free for the gravity pack controls. They spun furiously around their common centre of gravity, walls, ceiling, and floor with its deadly occupant whirling round so fast that Conway could barely focus his eyes on the controls. It seemed years before he finally had the spin checked and he had them headed for the hole in the ceiling and safety. They had almost reached it when Conway saw the hawserlike tentacle come sweeping up at him….

  X

  Something smashed into his back with a force that knocked the breath out of him. For a heart-freezing moment he thought his air tanks had gone, his suit torn open, and that he was already sucking frenziedly at vacuum. But his gasp of pure terror brought air rushing into his lungs. Conway had never known canned air to taste so good.

  The AACL’s tentacle had only caught him a glancing blow—his back wasn’t broken—and the only damage was a wrecked suit radio.

  “Are you all right?” Conway asked anxiously when he had Williamson settled in the compartment above. He had to press his helmet against the other’s—that was the only way he could make himself heard now.

  For several minutes there was no reply, then the weary, pain-wrecked near-whisper returned.

  “My arms hurt. I’m tired,” it said haltingly. “But I’ll be okay when…they take me…inside.” Williamson paused, his voice seemed to gather strength from somewhere, and he went on, “That is if there is anybody left alive in the hospital to treat me. If you don’t stop our friend down there…”

  Sudden anger flared in Conway. “Dammit, do you never give up?” he burst out. “Get this, I’m not going to kill an intelligent being! My radio’s gone so I don’t have to listen to Lister and Mannon yammering at me, and all I’ve got to do to shut you up is pull my helmet away from yours.”

  The Monitor’s voice had weakened again. He said, “I can still hear Mannon and Lister. They say the wards in Section Eight have been hit now—that’s the other low-gravity section. Patients and doctors are pinned flat to the floor under three g’s. A few more minutes like that and they’ll never get up—MSVKs aren’t at all sturdy, you know….”

  “Shut up!” yelled Conway. Furiously, he pulled away from contact.

  When his anger had abated enough for him to see again, Conway observed that the Monitor’s lips were no longer moving. Williamson’s eyes were closed, his face grey and sweaty with shock, and he did not seem to be breathing. The drying chemicals in his helmet kept the faceplate from fogging, so that Conway could not tell for sure, but the Monitor could very easily be dead. With exhaustion held off by repeated pep-shots, then his injuries on top of that, Conway had expected him to be dead long since. For some peculiar reason Conway felt his eyes stinging.

  He had seen so much death and dismemberment over the last few hours that his sensitivity to suffering in others had been blunted to the point where he reacted to it merely as a medical machine. This feeling of loss, of bereavement, for the Monitor must be simply a resurgence of that sensitivity, and temporary. Of one thing he was sure, however, nobody was going to make this medical machine commit a murder. The Monitor Corps, Conway now knew, was responsible for a lot more good than bad, but he was not a Monitor.

  Yet O’Mara and Lister were both Monitors and doctors, one of them renowned throughout the galaxy. Are you better than they are? a little voice nagged in his mind somewhere. And you’re all alone now, it went on, with the hospital disorganised and people dying all over the place because of that being down there. What do you think your chances of survival are? The way you came is plugged with wreckage and nobody can come to your aid, so you’re going to die, too. Isn’t that so?

  —<
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  Desperately Conway tried to hang on to his resolution, to draw it tightly around him like a shell. But that insistent, that cowardly voice in his brain was putting cracks in it. It was with a sense of pure relief that he saw the Monitor’s lips moving again. He touched helmets quickly.

  “…hard for you, a doctor,” the voice came faintly, “but you’ve got to. Just suppose you were that being down below, driven mad with fear and pain maybe, and for a moment you became sane and somebody told you what you had done—what you were doing, and the deaths you had caused….” The voice wavered, sank, then returned. “Wouldn’t you want to die rather than go on killing…?”

  “But I can’t…!”

  “Wouldn’t you want to die, in its place?”

  Conway felt the defensive shell of his resolution begin to disintegrate around him. He said desperately, in a last attempt to hold firm, to stave off the awful decision, “Well, maybe, but I couldn’t kill it even if I tried—it would tear me to pieces before I got near it….”

  “I’ve got a gun,” said the Monitor.

  Conway could not remember adjusting the firing controls, or even taking the weapon from the Monitor’s holster. It was in his hand and trained on the AACL below, and Conway felt sick and cold. But he had not given in to Williamson completely. Near at hand was a sprayer of the fast-setting plastic which, when used quickly enough, could sometimes save a person whose suit had been holed. Conway planned to wound the being, immobilise it, then reseal its suit with cement. It would be a close thing and risky to himself, but he could not deliberately kill the being.

  Carefully he brought his other hand up to steady the gun and took aim. He fired.

  When he lowered it there was not much left except shredded twitching pieces of tentacles scattered all over the room. Conway wished now that he had known more about guns, known that this one shot explosive bullets, and that it had been set for continuous automatic fire….

  Williamson’s lips were moving again. Conway touched helmets out of pure reflex. He was past caring about anything anymore.

  “…It’s all right, doctor,” the Monitor was saying. “It isn’t anybody….”

  “It isn’t anybody now,” Conway agreed. He went back to examining the Monitor’s gun and wished that it wasn’t empty. If there had been one bullet left, just one, he knew how he would have used it.

  —

  “It was hard, we know that,” said Major O’Mara. The rasp was no longer in his voice and the iron-grey eyes were soft with sympathy, and something akin to pride. “A doctor doesn’t have to make a decision like that usually until he’s older, more balanced, mature, if ever. You are, or were, just an overidealistic kid—a bit on the smug and self-righteous side maybe—who didn’t even know what a Monitor really was.”

  O’Mara smiled. His two big, hard hands rested on Conway’s shoulders in an oddly fatherly gesture. He went on, “Doing what you forced yourself to do could have ruined both your career and your mental stability. But it doesn’t matter, you don’t have to feel guilty about a thing. Everything’s all right.”

  Conway wished dully that he had opened his faceplate 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 a pet. 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 towards 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 haemorrhage. 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 drily. “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 in both 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 ploughed 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 spe
cies 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 ETs—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 backbreaking, practical which he managed to pass, and was followed by a more cerebral course in ET 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 birdlike. 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 extrasensory powers. Telepathic species such as the Telfi were given the prefix V. The lecturers would flash a three-second picture of an ET 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.