by J. Naomi Ay
****
Two days later, I arrived at Spacebase 31 after sitting in a spaceplane seat for more than forty hours. My uniform stunk, I needed a shave, and I had dandruff flakes all over my shoulders. For the last twenty-hours, I had avoided the bathroom as there was some kind of malfunction in the aft cabin and the toilets wouldn't flush. Granted, I had seen just about everything in medical school and smelled it too, but I still couldn’t abide by plugged up heads.
On top of all that, I was seated right in between two of those ensigns, who not only talked non-stop for forty hours, but seemed to have no problem shouting over me.
"Do you want to sit here?" I had asked as soon as the seat belt sign turned off and we reached cruising altitude, which was something like ten thousand kilometers above the nearest planet.
"No," the brunette on my right insisted. "I specifically requested an aisle seat."
"What about you?" I asked the redhead on my left.
She shook her head and leaned on an inflatable pillow that was propped against the window. Briefly, I considered that I out ranked them and wondered if the protocols would allow me to order them to change seats.
On the other hand, even though I was a lieutenant, I was still Jerry Waldman, Schmuck. Leaning back as far as I could, I put my earplugs in, my sleep mask on and crossed my legs to hold in my bladder.
Obviously, I didn't sleep the whole time. Actually, I probably only slept about twenty minutes total. The rest of the trip, I watched old movies on my tablet and ate a lot of reheated processed food that resembled pieces of cardboard in both looks and taste.
When we finally arrived at Spacebase 31, I bolted off that plane even before the First Class travelers. Waving my medical pass in front of the flight attendants and swinging my kit, so it was either be hit or move out of the way, I mumbled something about a medical emergency and practically knocked down the airlock door by myself.
It was a medical emergency. My bladder was on the verge of bursting.
"Jerry? Can you hear me? How are you doing there?"
"Fine, Grandpa Lou. You don't need to shout. I can hear you just fine."
"What's that you say? You can't hear me?"
"Yes, I can hear you. Just speak normally."
"What's that? Speak louder?" I set down the scalpel and went to stand directly in front of the vid monitor. "Oh, there you are, boychik. Look everyone, there's my grandson, Jerry out in space. He's a doctor, you know, just like me. Murray, come over here and say hello to Jerry. He saved your life, in case you don't remember?"
A bunch of geriatric faces now appeared on the screen curiously staring at me, and the autopsy suite I happened to be in at this moment.
"I don't see any stars," Esther said. "It looks like a hospital."
"Well, he's a doctor," Phyllis replied, nosing into the front. "Where else is a space doctor going to work but in a space hospital? Alright, I've seen enough. Let's go back and play cards."
"Are you married yet, Jerry?" Esther shouted.
"Not yet," Lou replied. "Unless, he's married some green shiksa and doesn't want his poor suffering mother to know. You can tell me, Jerry." Lou winked. "I won't tell your mother."
"No, I'm not married yet." I glanced back at the Luminerian corpse on my table that was still at room temperature, but the longer I left him out, the higher the chance was he was going to warm up. He wasn't going to come back to life by any means, but he would start reeking really badly. "Listen, Grandpa, I'm in the middle of an autopsy here. I've got to get back to it."
"Oh! An autopsy." Lou nodded his head knowingly. "Did you know, your cousin Michael is doing an oncology rotation at Princeton? That boy is very smart, let me tell you." Lou waggled his finger.
"Is he married?" Esther asked.
"Not yet and he has no interest in girls that are green or purple or have three legs and four arms."
"Is that what your Jerry likes?" Esther looked at me horrified.
"I gotta go, Lou," I practically shouted. "I'll call you later."
"Sure, sure." Lou waved his arms. "Don't make it too much later. I may already be dead."
"I'll call you Sunday."
"No. Not Sunday. Your brother Kevin is going to take me riding in his fancy new speeder. That boy has more money than God and likes to spend it on his grandpa, unlike you, who has no money, and spends too much time in space chasing after girls who are blue and have three boobs. Although, come to think of it, I wouldn't mind a girl with three boobs. On the other hand, I only have two hands." Lou held up his hands as if to prove his point.
"I'll call you." I hung up before this got any worse. I walked back over to the corpse who had a grin fixed on his face as if he had heard the conversation and was laughing at me too. "You shut up," I snapped and proceeded to extract and weigh his liver.
The Spaceforce hospital on Spacebase 31 was a training facility that specialized in advanced species. I was fully competent in human physiology after med school on Earth. However, as there were more than two hundred other known advanced life forms that I might encounter out in space, additional training was required before I could be assigned permanently to a base or a starship. Even here, we didn't have enough time to develop anything beyond a basic familiarity with most of them.
Luminerians had thick lizard like skin and additional appendages both in front and back. Andorians had a blue tint to their skin due to the low atmospheric oxygen on Andorus. The women also had three breasts and two wombs although infertility was a huge problem even with all that extra equipment.
Talasians had green tinted complexions, a result of the high concentrations of copper in the Talasian soil. Cascadians were essentially human, many of them descended from early human settlers. In general, they were larger due to the slightly lower gravity on the planet. It wasn't uncommon to encounter Cascadians who were well over eight foot tall.
The species that was most similar to humans were the Rozarians, not to be confused with the Rogarians who were big headed squid like creatures related to Martians. The Rozarians were basically humanoid, an older race with only a few minor physiological differences in the brain stem and frontal lobes. Most of them were pretty short with pallid complexions, as they had been living in domed cities for more than a thousand years. In relative terms, they were slightly more advanced than us Earthlings as they had managed to thoroughly decimate their planet a whole millennium before we did. They were nice enough folks though and relatively peaceful compared to some of the other intergalactic creatures I met during my years in Spaceforce. One nuclear apocalypse in a planet's lifetime was probably enough for anyone.
The Rozarians had a brother race that escaped the nuclear destruction by moving off to a neighboring star system and populating the planet Rehnor. We didn't study them at all because they weren't part of the Alliance of Planets, and while they were known to have ships capable of extended range travel, they pretty much kept to themselves.
My days back then consisted of studying, lab assignments usually in the morgue, and working the clinic. For this, I was paid a lieutenant's salary and given a half a day off once a week. I lived in the barracks on the lowest deck of the space station, sharing quarters with eleven other guys. I had a bunk with a mattress that was as soft as cement, one thin pillow, a hypo-allergenic synthetic blanket and a cubby beneath my bed. I had to periodically remind myself, as in daily, that while this was all I did have, I no longer had my student loans.
"Hey, Jer." Kevin waved emphatically across the stars. He was sitting in a plush glass and chrome office at the top of a New York City high-rise. There was a woman perched on a chair in front of Kevin's desk. "Wave at Jerry, honey. Hey, little brother, meet my fiancé, Desdemona."
I lifted my hand, which at that moment was covered in a bloody glove. Of course, I was in the morgue. That's where I always seemed to be taking my calls from home. Desdemona smiled until she figured out why my glove was red and dripping. Her eyes grew wide as she focused on the Altarian corpse on my table.
"Kevin?" She gasped. "Is that…?"
"I guess I'll call you later," Kevin laughed uproariously and then waving again, the vid clicked off.
"Desdemona," I muttered to the corpse. She looked just like her name too. Desdemonas weren't short and slightly overweight with curly hair and thick glasses. On the other hand, neither was Kevin. Only, I had been so fortunate to inherit Grandpa Lou's genes.
I finished up my autopsy and packed the Altarian's organs back in his body. Sliding him into the cold storage unit, I was about to slam the door when I noticed the tag on his toe. His name was Dgery Wadmon. It was spelled funny but pronounced just like mine.
This Dgery had died here on the spacebase in a bar fight with a Cascadian who was three times his size. I knew this because I had done the autopsy on the Cascadian the day before. Dgery may have been smaller, but he had a bigger knife. The Cascadian's family was coming to pick him on the weekend, but so far, nobody had claimed Dgery.
Nobody knew who his family was. Poor Dgery's relatives probably didn't even care that he had died. He was just some drunken drifter who crewed freighters, hopping in and out of spaceports, and getting into fights all across the Milky Way.
Inexplicably, I got a little teary-eyed over the guy. I could be him in a few years, lying in cold storage in some distant space station, a tag on my toe reading "Jerry Waldman". There wasn't any Desdemona sitting home waiting for me.
I decided I had to do something for the guy. I felt bonded to this Dgery by our common name.
Rolling the gurney back out, I pulled the sheet down from his face. He had a nasal fracture. In fact, the whole structure was now deformed and angled laterally. In addition, all three of his eyes had subdural hemorrhages.
Combing his hair a little, so at least that would be nice, I pulled out my cell and took a picture. I'd show it around the base and see if anyone knew more about him. If they did, I'd contact his family and break the bad news myself.
****
My day off wasn't for five more days, so Dgery and his family were on the backburner while I worked clinic hours. As soon as I got free time, I printed up the pic I had made of his face and headed out to the commercial decks of the space station. I started in all the bars, but nobody recognized the guy.
"Just try to imagine him with a normal nose and eyes that aren't all purple and swollen."
"Sorry," the bartender replied and licked off the counter.
He was Amaterasian and typical of most from that planet, descended from a type of canine creature. He walked upright, had two eyes, a snout like nose and two pointy ears, as well as an exceptionally long tongue that he used to clean just about everything. Other than that, he was physiologically almost human. When he turned to lick off the bar glasses and then place them back on the shelf, I decided to avoid all Amaterasian-managed bars in the future, no matter how cheap their beer was.
"What's your problem?" He called, holding up a pilsner glass. "Don't you know dogs have anti-bacterial saliva? Just try to use a dishwasher to clean all that crap at the bottom." He stuck in his tongue, and it did swipe all the way down to those tiny specks that dishwashers always seemed to miss. "Crystal clear." He smiled and then panted a bit, his long tongue hanging past his chin as he sought to circulate more air in his body.
I tried all of the restaurants and the hotels on the upper deck, even though Dgery didn't look like he could have afforded any of those places. The last stop I made, and that was purely out of desperation, was the pawn shop on Deck 2, next to the maintenance garage. It was right before closing time and the pawn broker was shutting his metal gates when I came upon him and held up Dgery's pic.
"Have you seen this guy?"
"Seen? Do I look like I can see anything? I can barely see you, and you are right in front of my nose."
I looked closer at the old man, who oddly resembled Grandpa Lou. In addition to having cataracts in both eyes, he probably had glaucoma.
"Have you had your eyes checked recently?" I took out my Multi-Diagnostic and Scanning Device, also known as the MDaSD in space doctor circles, which served as a transilluminator, opthalmoscope, otoscope, tongue depressor and micro MRI scanner. "Look this way." I held up my finger and shone the MDaSD light into his right eye.
"Bah!" He waved his hands. "Put that toy away unless you are coming to hock it." He reached in his breast pocket and pulled out a pair of glasses so he could examine it. "I'll give you fifty bucks for it and not a penny more."
"Fifty bucks? This thing is worth five thousand."
"Fifty-five then."
"It's not even mine. It belongs to Spaceforce."
"For this you could be arrested." He pointed a gnarled finger at me. "Unless, of course, you just found this on the street and don’t know anything about what it is or where it came from, and so neither do I. Now, I will give sixty bucks, and that is my last and final offer. Will you take it and let me go home or stand here and keep arguing?"
"I'm not trying to hock this device!"
"Ah, so you choose to keep arguing. You are just like my grandson, that schmuck, who must argue everything and not give anything a rest, even when I am so tired I am going to fall over on my feet."
"Listen," I cried, following him into the store which was really just a collection of shelves with one of just about everything that could be purchased in the galaxy.
Most items were scratched or dented, obviously used, and each sported a brown price tag hanging from a string. The dust in there was about six inches thick and immediately, my sinuses became clogged.
Pulling my handkerchief from my pocket to swipe at my tearing eyes, I stopped to stare at a toaster that had a dent in the side but included settings for programming toast for up to one month. It was priced at $50.
"You want that? I'll give you the toaster and thirty bucks for the toy."
"No. I…"
"And why not? It's antique. New toasters don't make such good toast as this one."
"I'm sure they don't but…"
"So, nu? What are you standing here for, keeping an old man from his dinner?"
"I'm looking for information on this guy." I help up the pic again. "His name is Dgery Wadmon. I need to contact his family. Do you know anything about him?"
"Ah." The old guy nodded, his eyebrows rising as he apparently recognized Dgery. "He don't look so good here. He never looked so good before, but now, he is looking much worse."
"He's dead."
"That would explain it. Yes, I remember Dgery Wadmon. In fact, I believe he left something here."
"Can I see it?"
The pawnbroker shuffled over to his counter and bent down, disappearing from my view. An old combination lock clicked.
"Here it is." A hand reached up and placed a gold charm bracelet on the counter in front of me, followed by the old guy as he held his back and righted himself. "Ooph. This bending business is getting harder every day."
"This was Dgery's?" Picking up the bracelet, I examined each one of the charms. There was a heart, a key, a mini stethoscope, a flower, and a tiny figure in a yoga pose. I thought it was the lotus position.
"What? He didn't look like the type to wear a bracelet? Are you going to take it or not?"
"I can take it?" Maybe this bracelet had belonged to Dgery's wife or mother. There might be a way to track him down through this.
"Yes, of course you can take it as long as you give me eighty dollars."
"Eighty dollars!" I tossed the bracelet back on the counter. "That's spaceway robbery."
"Suit yourself." The old guy snatched it up and dropped it in his pocket. "I gave him sixty for it, and of course, I need to be recompensed for my time and my storage costs."
"Sixty? You were only willing to give me fifty for this high tech MDaSD!"
"Ok. I give you the bracelet, you give me the toy, and we call it even."
"No, no." I started to walk away. I didn't know why I was here. What did I care about Dgery Wadmon or his ridiculous charm bracelet? T
hen again, why would he have a stethoscope charm? Could he have been a doctor too? "Alright." I turned back around and pulled out my wallet.
By the time I walked out of there, I was short one hundred dollars, but now the proud owner of Dgery Wadmon's jewelry and an antique toaster.
****
Again, it took me several more weeks before I could resume my quest for Dgery Wadmon's family. We had a breakout of an Amaterasian Cytomegalovirus which may or may not have been related to the method for cleaning most bar glasses aboard this space station.
We had been pretty busy in the clinic, so by the time the smoke had cleared, and the proverbial dust had settled, my commanding officer announced that I was to be posted to a Starship.
"Seriously?" I gasped, overjoyed with this news.
We were in the Captain's office, and I was relieved to hear I was being transferred instead of a reprimanded. I had come here directly from the clinic with my chocolate protein drink in a mug as I had missed both lunch and dinner and was starting to get shaky from lack of food.
"The Discovery," he replied, glaring at my protein drink. I offered it to him, but he just frowned and narrowed his eyes. "It's a new ship and a new sickbay. You'll be in charge, Waldman, so don't screw up."
The Captain and I had gotten along well during my tenure here at Spacebase 31. Only a few times was I ever reprimanded and only once was I ever docked in pay.
This was mostly due to circumstances which were beyond my control, such as the broken hinge on my eyeglasses, which caused them to slip off during open heart surgery. They landed in the patient. Actually, they landed where one of his hearts had been.
At that moment, the heart was in the lead surgeon's hand and needless to say, he wasn't too happy to discover my glasses now occupying that space. Also, the teeny tiny screw, which had fallen out of the hinge, ended up somewhere in the guy's body. That totally screwed up his MRI a few days later causing a bit of a messy business.