Sector General Omnibus 3 - General Practice

by James White

  On the fourth day one of his adult Cromsaggar in sick bay terminated, but the number of deaths outside the ship went down to one hundred and fifteen. On the fifth day the figure had dropped to seven, and there were no fatalities reported on the sixth day.

  Except for the difference in scale and the continuing effort needed to keep the widely dispersed patients supplied with food, the situation in sick bay reflected the clinical conditions outside.

  As Thornnastor had predicted, a gradual remission in external symptoms was apparent and the food requirement of the adult patients had increased, and the fact that all of the food had been synthesized made no difference to their appetites. Much as he wanted to monitor their progress internally, they would not cooperate and refused to allow him to so much as touch them. With all of his medical staff and the majority of the ship’s crew scattered across the continent, he thought it better not to force the issue, especially as the patients were growing stronger with every day that passed. In spite of the differences in body mass, the young were eating more than the adults, and, as Thornnastor had also observed, their rate of physical growth was phenomenal.

  It was obvious that, in order to cause such a massive retardation of growth, the disease, which the Cromsaggar had acquired prenatally, must have involved the entire endocrine system. Now that the process was being reversed and they were not only growing but maturing, another, nonclinical change was occurring. The young patients who, once their initial fear had given way to curiosity and they had grown accustomed to his strange body and multiplicity of limbs, had spoken to him freely and with the unguarded enthusiasm of children were becoming increasingly reticent.

  They were speaking to him less because, Lioren observed, their recovering elders were talking to them more. And they talked only when he was not present.

  By then his Monitor Corps patients had been well enough to be discharged to continue their recuperation in their own quarters, so he did not know what the Cromsaggar talked about until one day, after replenishing the food supply and his few words of friendship and reassurance had been ignored, he deliberately left one of the sick-bay senders switched on Transmit so that he would be able to listen to them from his own quarters.

  In the manner of all eavesdroppers, he fully expected to overhear unkind things about himself and the bad dreams from the sky, which was the literal translation of the Cromsaggar name for their rescuers. But he was completely wrong. Instead, they talked and chanted and sang together so that his translator was unable to separate the individual voices. It was only when a single Cromsaggar spoke out alone, an adult addressing one or more of the young, that Lioren realized what he was hearing.

  It was part of an initiation ceremony, a preparation and formalized sex instruction given to the newly mature before entry into adult life, including the behavior expected of them thereafter.

  Lioren broke the connection hastily. The rite of passage into adulthood was a highly sensitive area in the cultures of many intelligent species, and one into which he was not qualified to delve. If he were to continue listening out of mere lascivious curiosity, he might find that he no longer respected himself.

  He was relieved, nevertheless, that with the exception of two very small children who were little more than infants, the sick bay held only male Cromsaggar.

  During the days that followed there were no organic fatalities reported, but the air and surface vehicles, which had been in continuous operation over eight days and nights, had not fared so well. The food synthesizers on Vespasian and in the outlying medical stations were running at maximum safe overload, a condition that was not recommended for more than a few hours at a time. All of the organic components were displaying signs of stress and severe fatigue but were operating at close to optimum efficiency, even though they rarely talked to each other and seemed to be asleep on their feet. It was becoming clear to everyone concerned that the operation was a success and that no member of the patient population was about to die, and that knowledge was both the fuel and the lubrication which kept them working.

  It was irritating to all of them, but not important, that the Cromsaggar showed no gratitude for what was being done for them apart from demolishing the previous day’s food supply. The brief explanation of the treatment and reassurance regarding their ultimate cure that was given at every visit to replenish stores was ignored. The patients were not actively hostile, unless one of the medics tried to check on their vital signs or obtain a blood sample, whereupon they reacted violently toward the person concerned.

  An ungrateful and unlikable race, Lioren thought, not for the first time. But it was their physiology rather than their psychology which was his problem, and the problem was being solved.

  From Sector General there was a continuing silence.

  He could imagine Thornnastor’s slow, careful progress, with its relatively few patients, toward a stage in the treatment which Lioren had already surpassed with the entire planetary population. It was no reflection on the Tralthan pathologist, who was, after all, the entity responsible for producing the cure for the plague. But if Lioren had not ignored its recommendations and risked the displeasure of his superiors, many hundreds of Cromsaggar would have died by now. And without false modesty on his part, the solution he had devised for the problem had been truly elegant.

  His calculated variation in the dosage administered, based as it had been on age, body mass, and clinical factors, had insured that the young and old alike were progressing toward a complete cure at the same time. In spite of his insubordination, he was sure that his action would merit praise rather than censure.

  Early on the following day he sent a brief message to the Monitor Corps base on Orligia, and copied to Sector General, requesting additional food synthesizers and spares for the air and ground transport units, adding that there had been no Cromsaggar fatalities for eight days and that a full report accompanied by a medical officer with firsthand experience of the situation was being sent with Tenelphi to the hospital. The request for synthesizers combined with the sudden drop in the death rate would tell Thornnastor what Lioren had done, and the scout ship’s medical officer would be able to fill in the details.

  Dracht-Yur had been working well and very hard, and ordering its return to normal duties on Tenelphi would be both a rest and a welldeserved reward for its efforts. It would also remove the Surgeon-Lieutenant from the scene and thereby make it possible for Lioren, whose injuries were healing well, to escape the little Nidian’s irksome medical quarantine.

  Before retiring that night Lioren posted the usual guard outside the sick bay, an unnecessary precaution because none of the Cromsaggar had shown any interest in what lay beyond the entrance, but necessary in Captain Williamson’s opinion in case one of the young ones decided to go exploring and injured itself on ship equipment. Tomorrow he would fly to the outlying medical shelters and, for the first time since his embarrassing mishap with the mating Cromsaggar, view the situation for himself.

  He would be seeing, Lioren told himself with mixed feelings of pleasure, pride, and self-congratulation, the final stages of the cure of Cromsag.

  Before he was due to board his flier next morning he visited sick bay to check on the condition of his patients, only to find the deck and walls splattered with Cromsaggar blood and all of the adults dead. The entrance guard, after succumbing to a violent attack of nausea, reported hearing quiet voices and chanting that had continued far into the night, followed by a period of unbroken silence which it had attributed to them being asleep. But from the condition of the bodies it was clear now that they had instead been fighting and silently kicking, biting, and tearing the lives out of each other until only two of the female infants survived.

  Lioren was still trying to recover from the shock, and make himself believe that he was not asleep and having a particularly horrendous dream, when the wall speaker beside him came to sudden, noisy life. It said that he should go at once to the communications center and that the bloody, self-infl
icted massacre in sick bay had been repeated all over Cromsag.

  Very soon it became clear that Surgeon-Captain Lioren was responsible not for curing but for killing a planetary population.

  CHAPTER 5

  When Lioren finished speaking there was complete stillness in the room. Even though all present were already aware of every harrowing detail of the Cromsag Incident and his responsibility for it, the mere repetition was enough to shock any civilized being into silence.

  “The guilt in this matter is entirely mine,” Lioren resumed, “and lest there be any doubt about this in anyone’s mind, I ask Thornnastor, the Diagnostician-in-Charge of Pathology, to give its evidence.”

  The Tralthan lumbered forward on its six elephantine feet to take the witnesses position, and, fixing one eye each on the president of the court, Lioren, O’Mara, and its printed notes, it began to speak. Within a few minutes Fleet Commander Dermod was holding up one hand for silence.

  “The witness is not obliged,” it said, “to relate its evidence in such clinical detail. No doubt its medical colleagues would find it interesting but it is not understandable by the court. Please simplify your language, Diagnostician Thornnastor, and go to the explanation of why the Cromsaggar acted as they did.”

  Thornnastor stamped its two medial feet in a gesture which suggested impatience, but whose exact significance would have been clear only to another Tralthan, and said, “Very well, sir …”

  Because of the more cautious approach to the trial program at Sector General and the consequently slower progress toward a complete cure, Thornnastor explained, the hypersignal from Vespasian was received in time to prevent a repetition of the catastrophe that had occurred on Cromsaggar. All of the Cromsaggar had been dispersed and confined to single quarters, and the Department of Other-species Psychology had intensified its efforts to overcome the fanatical noncooperation of the patients so that they would answer questions about themselves.

  It was only when the decision had been made, very reluctantly and only after lengthy consideration of possible psychological damage, to tell the patients the whole truth of what had happened on their home planet, including the fact that they were the sole surviving adult members of their race, that they began to talk about themselves. There was much anger and recrimination, understandably, but enough information was provided to make possible the formation of a theory which was supported by the archeological evidence.

  The best estimate was that the plague had made its first appearance just under one thousand years ago, when the Cromsaggar level of technological and philosophical advancement included atmospheric flight and a culture that no longer practiced war. No information was available regarding the origin and evolution of the disease other than that it was transmitted by either parent during sexual coupling and, in the beginning, its effects had been mild and embarrassing rather than life-threatening. The majority of the Cromsaggar did not travel widely, and they took their sexual bondings, once formed, very seriously and did not stray in this respect, either. A number of the more farsighted Cromsaggar formed communities that were plague-free, but the mating process depended on emotional rather than medical factors and eventually the disease broached this immaterial defense. Another three centuries were to pass before the plague spread unchecked across all of Cromsag to infect every member of the population, adult and child alike. By that time it had increased in virulence, and deaths in middle age were becoming common.

  The continuing efforts of the medical scientists were of no avail, and by the end of the following century their civilization had receded to pretechnology levels with no hope of a revival, and it was rare for anyone to live more than a decade past maturity. As a race, the Cromsaggar were facing extinction, a very early extinction because of the effect of the plague on the birth rate.

  “The complete symptomology of the disease,” Thornnastor said, “including the endocrinological involvement with its effect on the sufferers’ rate of growth and maturation, has already been studied and can be discussed at length, but I shall summarize and simplify for the benefit of the court.

  “Among the adults of both sexes,” it went on, “the visually and tactually unpleasant skin condition was one factor in the reducing birth rate, but it was a minor one. Even if the tegument of both partners was flawless and aesthetically pleasing, the greatly reduced performance of the endocrine system is such that the act of sexual coupling and conception is impossible without an abnormal level of prior emotional stimulation.”

  Thornnastor paused. It did not possess the kind of features which could change expression, but it was as if the mind-pictures it was seeing inside its great, immobile dome of a head had made further speech impossible for a moment. Then it went on. “Efforts were made to circumvent this difficulty by medical means, and by the use of substances derived from naturally occurring vegetation which heightened the senses or had hallucinatory effects. These methods proved ineffective and were discarded because of problems of irreversible addiction, death from overdose, and seriously deformed and nonviable offspring. The solution that was ultimately found was nonmedical and involved a deliberate regression in social behavior to the dark ages of their history.

  “The Cromsaggar went to war …”

  It was not a war fought for reasons of territorial expansion or trade advantage, and neither was it fought at a distance from fortified positions or by warriors acting in concert or protected by armored machines or equipment, and it was a war not waged to the death because there was no intention on either side of killing an opponent who might very well be a family member or a friend. In fact, there were no sides because it was fought hand to hand between pairs of unarmed individuals, and it was a war whose sole purpose was to cause the maximum of fear, pain, and danger, but if possible, not death to the combatants. There was no threat or danger from a beaten and seriously wounded opponent and, even though they had been trying desperately to kill each other moments before, the vanquished were left where they lay, hopefully to recover from their wounds to fight and instill fear in an opponent another day.

  Life was rare and precious to the Cromsaggar, rarer and more precious with every dwindling generation that passed; otherwise they would not have tried so hard to keep their race alive.

  For it was only by overloading the sensorium with pain and intense muscular effort and subjecting themselves to the highest possible levels of emotional stress that endocrine systems rendered dormant by the effects of the plague could be roused into something like normal activity, and remain so, aside from the wounds that had been sustained, for the time necessary for a successful coupling and procreation to take place.

  But in spite of the terrible solution that had been found, adult deaths from the plague continued to rise and the birth rate to fall. The population contracted in numbers and territory occupied, moving to one continent so as to conserve what little was left of their civilization and resources and to be within easy fighting distance of each other. There was archeological evidence to suggest that in the beginning the Cromsaggar were not warlike, but the need to fight and often kill each other so that their race as a whole could survive made them so, and by the time Tenelphi discovered them, the practice of hand-to-hand combat among all adults had been conditioned into the race for many centuries.

  “Even though the decision was taken for the best of all clinical reasons, that of saving many lives,” Thornnastor went on, “without prior knowledge of this conditioning, the effect of introducing a complete and short-duration cure for the plague could not have been foreseen. It is probable, and Chief Psychologist O’Mara agrees with me in this, that the Cromsaggar who had been treated were aware of feeling better and stronger than they had ever felt before, and subconsciously they must have realized that it was no longer necessary for them to fight and place themselves in the greatest possible danger in order to achieve sexual arousal. But for many centuries they had been taught from an early age that single combat between members of one’s own sex invariably pre
ceded coupling with one of the opposite, a level of conditioning with the strength of an evolutionary imperative. And so, the more their clinical condition improved the greater was their urge to fight and procreate. The many young, whose physical development had been retarded by the effects of the plague and who had suddenly come to maturity, felt the same compulsion to fight.

  “But the real tragedy,” the Tralthan continued, “lay in the fact that individually and as a group they were fully cured, and stronger than any Cromsaggar had been since the coming of the plague. Previously they had been weak, diseased, and able to expend only a small fraction of the physical effort of which they were now capable. Their newfound strength reduced the personal fear of pain and death, and made it difficult to calibrate the levels of damage inflicted on and by opponents who were so strong and evenly matched. The result was that they killed each other, every single adult on Cromsag, leaving only the infants and children alive.

  “Briefly and simply,” Thornnastor ended, “that is the background to the Cromsag Incident.”

  The silence that followed Thornnastor’s words lengthened and deepened until the faint, bubbling sound made by the refrigerated life-support system of an SNLU in the audience seemed loud. It was like the Tarlan Silence of Remembrance after the passing of a friend, except here it was the population of a world that had died and it seemed that no person present was going to break it.

  “With respect to the court,” Lioren said suddenly, “I ask that the trial be ended here and now, without further argument and waste of time. I stand accused of genocide through negligence. I am guilty without doubt or question and the responsibility and the guilt are entirely mine. I demand the death penalty.”