New Writings in SF 22 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Kenneth Bulmer

  ‘That would make a nice break in the mapping routine,’ he added hopefully, ‘and I’ve never been to that place. I’m told that not all the nurses there have six legs.’

  The Captain was silent for a moment, then he nodded.

  ‘I have,’ he said. ‘Some of them have more.’

  * * * *

  Framed in the rescue tender’s aft vision screen the tremendous structure that was Sector Twelve General Hospital hung in space like a gigantic cylindrical Christmas tree. Its thousands of viewports were constantly ablaze with light in the dazzling variety of colour and intensity necessary for the visual equipment of its patients and staff, while inside its three hundred and eighty-four levels was reproduced the environments of all the intelligent life-forms known to the Galactic Federation—a biological spectrum ranging from the ultra-frigid methane-breathers through the more normal oxygen- and chlorine-breathing types up to the exotic beings who existed by the direct conversion of hard radiation.

  In addition to the patients, whose numbers and physiological classifications were a constant variable, there was a medical and maintenance staff comprising sixty-odd differing life-forms with sixty different sets of mannerisms, body odours and ways of looking at life.

  The staff of Sector General prided themselves that no case was too big, too small or too hopeless, and their reputation and facilities were second to none. They were an extremely able, dedicated, but not always serious bunch, and Senior Physician Conway could not rid himself of the idea that on this occasion someone was playing a complicated joke on him.

  ‘Now that I see it,’ he said drily, ‘I still can’t believe it.’

  Pathologist Murchison, who occupied the position beside him, stared at the image of Torrance and its tow without comment. On the controlroom ceiling, where it clung with six fragile, sucker-tipped legs, Doctor Prilicla trembled slightly and said, ‘It could prove to be an interesting and exciting professional challenge, friend Conway.’

  The musical trills and clicks of the Cinrusskin’s speech were received by Conway’s translator pack, relayed to the translation computer at the centre of the hospital and transmitted back to his ear-piece as flat, emotionless English. As expected, the reply was pleasant, polite and extremely non-controversial.

  Prilicla was insectile, exo-skeletal, six-legged and with a pair of iridescent and not quite atrophied wings and possessing a highly-developed empathic faculty. Only on Cinruss with its one-eighth gravity and dense atmosphere could a race of insects have grown to such dimensions and in time developed intelligence and an advanced civilisation. But in Sector General Prilicla was in deadly danger for most of its working day. It had to wear gravity nullifiers everywhere outside its own quarters because the gravity pull which most of its colleagues considered normal would instantly have crushed it flat, and when Prilicla held a conversation with anyone it kept well out of reach of any thoughtless movement of an arm or tentacle which could easily cave in its fragile body or snap off a leg.

  Not that anyone would have wanted to hurt Prilicla—it was too well-liked for that. The Cinrusskin’s empathic faculty forced it to be kind and considerate to everyone in order to make the emotional radiation of the people around it as pleasant for itself as possible.

  Except when its professional duty exposed it to pain and violent emotion in a patient, and that situation might arise within the next few minutes.

  Turning suddenly to Prilicla, Conway said, ‘Wear your lightweight suit but stay well clear of the being until we tell you that there is no danger of movement, involuntary or otherwise, from it. We shall wear heavy duty suits, mostly because they have more hooks on which to hang our diagnostic equipment, and I shall ask Torrance’s medic to do the same.’

  Half an hour later Lieutenant Brenner, Murchison and Conway were hanging beside the form of the enormous bird while Prilicla, wearing a transparent plastic bubble through which projected its bony mandibles, drifted beside the lock of their tender.

  ‘No detectable emotional radiation, friend Conway,’ reported the empath.

  ‘I’m not surprised,’ said Murchison.

  ‘It could be dead,’ said the Lieutenant defensively. ‘But when we found it the body temperature was measurably above the norm for an object warmed only by a two light-years distant sun.’

  ‘There was no criticism intended. Doctor,’ said Murchison soothingly. ‘I was simply agreeing with our empathic friend. But did you, before or during the trip here, carry out any examinations, observations or tests on this patient, or reach any tentative conclusions as a result of such tests? And don’t be shy. Lieutenant—we may be the acknowledged experts in xenological medicine and physiology here, but we got that way by listening and looking, not by gratuitous displays of our expertise. You were curious, naturally, and...?’

  ‘Yes, m’am,’ said Brenner, his voice registering surprise that there was an Earth-human female inside the bulky suit. ‘I assumed that, lacking information on its planet of origin, you might want to know if there were any safe atmospheric compositions in which it could be examined—I was assuming that, being a bird, it needed an atmosphere to fly in and that it had been dumped in space because of its diseased condition...’

  Listening, Conway could not help admiring the smooth way in which Murchison was getting the Corps medic to tell them about the things he had done wrong. As an e-t pathologist she was used to non-specialists interfering and complicating her job, and it was necessary that she discover as much as possible about the being’s original condition before the changes or additional damage caused by inexpert examination—no matter how well-intentioned—had been introduced. She was finding out all that she needed to know quietly and without giving offence, as if she was Prilicla in human form.

  But as Brenner continued talking it became increasingly clear that he had made few, if any, mistakes, and a fair proportion of Conway’s professional admiration was being diverted towards the Lieutenant.

  ‘... After I sent the preliminary report and we were on our way,’ Brenner was saying, ‘I discovered two small, rough areas on the black stuff covering the creature—a small, circular patch at the base of the neck, right here, and an oval patch, a little larger, which you can see on the underside. In both these areas the black stuff is cracked but with the cracks filled, or partly filled, by more of the stuff, and a few of the barnacles in these areas have been damaged as well. This is where I took my specimens.’

  ‘Marking the places you took them from, I see,’ said Murchison. ‘Go on, Doctor.’

  ‘Yes, m’am,’ said the Lieutenant, and went on. ‘The black material seems to be a near-perfect insulator—it is highly resistant to heat, including that of a cutting torch at medium power. At very high temperatures the area under test formed a black ash which flaked away but showed no sign of softening or cracking. The chips of shell from the damaged barnacles were not quite so heat-resistant unless they happened to be covered by the black material.

  ‘The black stuff was also resistant to chemical attack,’ Brenner continued, ‘but not the pieces of shell. When the chips were exposed to various basic atmosphere types, the results seemed to indicate that they had not originated on one of the exotic environments—methane- or ammonia- or even chlorine-based atmosphere envelopes. Composition of the fragments seems to be basic hydrocarbon material, and they did not react to short-term exposures to an oxygen-rich mixture-’

  ‘Give me the details of the tests you made,’ said Murchison, suddenly becoming very businesslike and, although the Lieutenant did not know it, very complimentary. Conway signalled Prilicla to come closer, leaving the professional arid amateur pathologists to get on with it.

  ‘I don’t think the patient is capable of movement,’ he told the Cinrusskin. ‘I don’t even know if it’s alive. Is it?’

  Prilicla’s limbs trembled as it steeled itself to make a negative reply and, by so doing, become just the slightest bit disagreeable. It said, “That is a deceptively simple question, friend Conway. Al
l that I can say is that it doesn’t appear to be quite dead.’

  ‘But you can detect the emotional emanations from a sleeping or deeply unconscious mind,’ said Conway incredulously. ‘Is there no emotional radiation at all?’

  ‘There are traces, friend Conway,’ said the Cinrusskin, still trembling, ‘but they are too faint to be identifiable. There is no .self-awareness and the traces which are apparent do not, so far as I am able to tell, originate from the being’s cranial area—they seem to emanate from the body as a whole. I have never encountered this effect before, so I lack sufficient information or experience even to speculate.’

  ‘But you will,’ said Conway, smiling.

  ‘Of course,’ said Prilicla. ‘It is possible that if the being was both deeply unconscious and at the same time was having the nerve endings in its skin constantly stimulated by severe pain, this might explain the effect which I can detect on and for some distance below the skin.’

  ‘But that means that you are detecting the peripheral nerve network and not the brain,’ said Conway. ‘That is unusual.’

  ‘Highly unusual, friend Conway,’ said the little empath. ‘The brain in question would have to have had important nerve trunks severed or have suffered major structural damage.’

  In short, Conway thought grimly, we may have been handed someone’s cast-off patient.

  * * * *

  Two

  Murchison and Brenner, using the pathologist’s sterile drills, were taking deep samples as well as collecting and labelling chippings of shell and the black material which covered the patient—more accurately, Murchison took the samples while the Lieutenant sealed the tiny openings she made. Conway returned to the tender with Prilicla to arrange accommodation for the patient based on their sketchy knowledge—an evacuated chamber large enough to hold the thing, with provision for restraining it and for surrounding it with an oxygen-based atmosphere—and was followed shortly afterwards by the others.

  It was then that Brenner saw for the first time the contents of the pathologist’s spacesuit, and Prilicla began a slow tremble.

  Unless covered by a heavy duty suit fitted with an opaque sun filter, Murchison displayed a combination of physiological features which made it impossible for any male Earth-human member of the staff to regard her with anything approaching clinical detachment. The Lieutenant finally managed to drag his eyes away from her and to notice Prilicla.

  ‘Is something wrong, Doctor?’ he asked, looking concerned.

  ‘To the contrary, friend Brenner,’ said the empath, still trembling slowly. ‘This type of involuntary physical activity is my species’ reaction to the, close proximity of an intense but pleasurable source of emotional radiation of the kind usually associated with the biological urge to mate...’

  The Cinrusskin broke off and stopped trembling because the Surgeon-Lieutenant’s suddenly red face was clashing discordantly against his green uniform, and Prilicla was feeling his embarrassment.

  Murchison smiled sympathetically and said, ‘Perhaps I am the cause, Lieutenant Brenner—I have intense feelings of pleasure over the way in which your earlier tests and deductions have saved me nearly four hours work in a very irksome spacesuit. Isn’t that so, Prilicla?’

  ‘Most certainly,’ said the empath, to whom lying was second nature so long as it made someone, especially itself, happy. ‘Empathy is not nearly as accurate as telepathy, you know, and mistakes of this kind frequently occur.’

  Conway cleared his throat and said, ‘I’ve arranged to see O’Mara just as soon as we have the patient accommodated which, initially, will be in an evacuated dock and storage chamber on Level 103. We will use the tender’s tractor beam to transfer the patient to the hospital, so if you are needed on board Torrance, Lieutenant...?’

  Brenner shook his head. ‘The Captain would like to spend some time here, if possible, and so would I if I wouldn’t be in the way. It’s my first time to visit this place. Are there, ah, many other Earth-humans on the medical staff?’

  If you mean like Murchison, Conway thought smugly, the answer is no. Aloud, he said, ‘We would welcome your help, of course. But you do not know what you are letting yourself in for, Lieutenant, and you keep asking about the Earth-humans on the staff. Are you xenophobic, even slightly? Uncomfortable near extra-terrestrials?’

  ‘Certainly not,’ said Brenner firmly, then added, ‘Of course, I wouldn’t want to marry one.’

  Prilicla began the slow shakes again. The musical trills and clicks of its Cinrusskin speech formed a pleasant background to its translated voice as it said, ‘From the sudden flood of pleasant emotional radiation, for which I can see no apparent reason in the current situation and recent dialogue, I assume that someone has made what Earth-humans call a joke.’

  At Level 103 Prilicla left to check on its wards while the others supervised the transfer of the great, stiff-winged bird into the storage chamber. Looking at the swept-back, partially folded wings and stiffly extended neck, Conway was reminded of one of the old-time space shuttles. His mind began to slip off on an interesting, but ridiculous, tangent and he had to remind himself that birds did not fly, in space.

  With the patient immobilised under one full G of artificial gravity it still took another three hours before Murchison had everything she wanted in the way of specimens and x-rays. In part the delay was caused by them having to work in pressure suits because, as Murchison put it, there would be little risk in observing the patient for a few more hours in airless until they had worked out its atmosphere requirements with exactness—otherwise they might simply end by observing its processes of decomposition.

  But their information on the patient was growing with every minute that passed, and the results of their tests— transmitted direct from Pathology by the portable communicator beside them—were both interesting and utterly baffling. Conway lost all track of time until the communicator chimed for attention and the face of Major O’Mara glowered out at them.

  ‘Conway, you arranged to see me here seven and one half minutes ago,’ said the Chief Psychologist. ‘No doubt you were just leaving.’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ said Conway, ‘the preliminary investigation is taking longer than I estimated, and I want to have something concrete to report before seeing you.’

  There was a faint rustling sound as O’Mara breathed heavily through his nose. The Chief Psychologist’s face was about as readable as a piece of weathered basalt, which in some respects it resembled, but the eyes which studied Conway opened into a mind so keenly analytical that it gave the Major what amounted to a telepathic faculty.

  As Chief Psychologist of a multi-environment hospital he was responsible for the mental well-being of a staff of several thousand entities belonging to more than sixty different species. Even though his Monitor Corps rank of Major did not place him high in the chain of command, there was no clear limit to his authority. To O’Mara the medical staff were patients, too, and part of his job was to assign the right kind of doctor—whether Earth-human or e-t—to a given patient.

  Given even the highest qualities of tolerance and mutual respect, potentially dangerous situations could still arise through ignorance or misunderstanding, or, a being could develop xenophobia to a degree which threatened to affect its professional competence, 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 a Cinrusskin patient the proper degree of clinical detachment necessary for its treatment. And if someone like Prilicla were to treat such an Earth-human patient...

  A large part of O’Mara’s job was to detect and eradicate such trouble among the medical staff while other members of his department saw to it that the problem did not arise where the patients were concerned. According to O’Mara himself, however, the true reason for the high degree of mental stability among the variegated and often touchy medical staff was that they were all too frightened of him to risk going mad.

  Caustically, he said, �
��Doctor Conway, I freely admit that this patient is unusual even by your standards, but you must have discovered a few simple facts about it and its condition. Is it alive? Is it diseased or injured? Does it possess intelligence ? Are you wasting your time on an outsize, space-frozen turkey?’

  Conway ignored the rhetoric and tried to answer the questions. He said. ‘The patient is alive, just barely, and the indications are that it is both diseased—the exact nature of the disease is not yet known—and suffering from gross physical injury, specifically a punctured wound made by a large, high-velocity projectile or a tightly focussed heat beam which passed through the base of the neck and the upper chestal area. The wound entrance and exit is sealed by the black covering or growth—we still don’t know which —encasing the body. Regarding the possibility of intelligence, the cranial capacity is large enough not to rule this out, but again, the head is not disproportionately large for the mass of the being, which is too deeply unconscious to radiate detectable emotion. The manipulatory appendages, whose degree of specialisation or otherwise can give a strong indication of the presence or absence of intelligence, have been removed.