Sector General Omnibus 1 - Beginning Operations

by James White

  Five hours later he was still no nearer diagnosing the FROB’s ailment, and the single blue-gray patch on its hide had grown to twice its original size and been joined by three more. He fed the infant, wondering anxiously whether that was the right thing to do in a case like this, then returned quickly to his studies.

  According to the handbook there were literally hundreds of mild, short-lived diseases to which young Hudlarians were subject. This youngster had escaped them solely because it had been fed on tanked food compound and had avoided the air-borne bacteria so prevalent on its home planet. Probably this disease was nothing worse than the Hudlarian equivalent of a dose of measles, O‘Mara told himself reassuringly, but it looked serious. At the next feeding the number of patches had grown to seven and they were a deeper, angrier blue, also the baby was continually slapping at itself with its appendages. Obviously the colored patches itched badly. Armed with this new datum O’Mara returned to the book.

  And suddenly he found it. The symptoms were given as rough, discolored patches on the tegument with severe itching due to unabsorbed food particles. Treatment was to cleanse the irritated patches after each feed so as to kill the itching and let nature take care of the rest. The disease was a very rare one on Hudlar these days, the symptoms appeared with dramatic suddenness and it ran its course and disappeared equally quickly. Provided ordinary care was taken of the patient, the book stated, the disease was not dangerous.

  O’Mara began converting the figures into his own time and size scale. As accurately as he could come to it the colored patches should grow to about eighteen inches across and he could expect anything up to twelve of them before they began to fade. This would occur, calculating from the time he had noticed the first spot, in approximately six hours.

  He hadn’t a thing to worry about.

  IV

  At the conclusion of the next feeding O‘Mara carefully sprayed the blue patches clean, but still the young FROB kept slapping furiously at itself and quivering ponderously. Like a kneeling elephant with six angrily waving trunks, he thought. O’Mara had another look at the book, but it still maintained that under ordinary conditions the disease was mild and short-lived, and that the only palliative treatment possible was rest and seeing that the affected areas were kept clean.

  Kids, thought O’Mara distractedly, were a blasted worrisome thing … !

  All that quivering and slapping looked wrong, common sense told him, and should be stopped. Maybe the infant was scratching through sheer force of habit, though the violence of the process made this seem doubtful, and a distraction of some kind would make it stop. Quickly O’Mara chose a fifty-pound weight and used his lifting tackle to swing it to the ceiling. He began raising and dropping it rhythmically over the spot which he had discovered gave the infant the most pleasure—an area two feet back of the hard, transparent membrane which protected its eyes. Fifty pounds dropping from a height of eight feet was a nice gentle pat to a Hudlarian.

  Under the patting the FROB grew less violent in its movements. But as soon as O‘Mara stopped it began lashing at itself worse than ever, and even running full tilt into walls and what was left of the furniture. During one frenzied charge it nearly escaped into the living room, and the only thing which stopped it was the fact that it was too big to go through the door. Up to that moment O’Mara did not realize how much weight the FROB had put on in five weeks.

  Finally sheer fatigue made him give up. He left the FROB threshing and blundering about in the bedroom and threw himself onto the couch outside to try to think.

  According to the book it was now time for the blue patches to begin to fade. But they weren’t fading—they had reached the maximum number of twelve and instead of being eighteen or less inches across they were nearly double that size. They were so large that at the next feeding the absorption area of the infant would have shrunk by a half, which meant that it would be further weakened by not getting enough food. And everyone knew that itchy spots should not be scratched if the condition was not to spread and become more serious …

  A raucous foghorn note interrupted his thoughts. O’Mara had experience enough to know by the sound that the infant was badly frightened, and by the relative decrease in volume that it was growing weak as well.

  He needed help badly, but O‘Mara doubted very much if there was anyone available who could furnish it. Telling Caxton about it would be useless—the section chief would only call in Pelling and Pelling was much less informed on the subject of Hudlarian children than was O’Mara, who had been specializing in the subject for the past five weeks. That course would only waste time and not help the kid at all, and there was a strong possibility that—despite the presence of a Monitor investigator—Caxton would see to it that something pretty violent happened to O’Mara for allowing the infant to take sick, for that was the way the section chief would look at it.

  Caxton didn’t like O‘Mara. Nobody liked O’Mara.

  If he had been well-liked on the project nobody would have thought of blaming him for the infant’s sickness, or immediately and unanimously assuming that he was the one responsible for the death of its parents. But he had made the decision to appear a pretty lousy character, and he had been too damned successful.

  Maybe he really was a despicable person and that was why the role had come so easy to him. Perhaps the constant frustration of never having the chance to really use the brain which was buried in his ugly, muscle-bound body had gradually soured him, and the part he thought he was playing was the real O’Mara.

  If only he had stayed clear of the Waring business. That was what had them really mad at him.

  But this sort of thinking was getting him nowhere. The solution of his own problems lay—in part, at least—in showing that he was responsible, patient, kind and possessed the various other attributes which his fellow men looked on with respect. To do that he must first show that he could be trusted with the care of a baby.

  He wondered suddenly if the Monitor could help. Not personally; a Corps psychologist officer could hardly be expected to know about obscure diseases of Hudlar children, but through his organization. As the Galaxy’s police, maid-of-all-work and supreme authority generally, the Monitor Corps would be able to find at short notice a being who would know the necessary answers. But again, that being would almost certainly be found on Hudlar itself, and the authorities there already knew of the orphaned infant’s position and help had probably been on the way for weeks. It would certainly arrive sooner than the Monitor could bring it. Help might arrive in time to save the infant. But again maybe it might not.

  The problem was still O’Mara’s.

  About as serious as a dose of measles.

  But measles, in a human baby, could be very serious if the patient was kept in a cold room or in some other environment which, although not deadly in itself, could become lethal to an organism whose resistance was lowered by disease or lack of food. The handbook had prescribed rest, cleansing and nothing else. Or had it? There might be a large and well hidden assumption there. The kicker was that the patient under discussion was residing on its home world at the time of the illness. Under ordinary conditions like that the disease probably was mild and short-lived.

  But O’Mara’s bedroom was not, for a Hudlarian baby with the disease, anything like normal conditions.

  With that thought came the answer, if only he wasn’t too late to apply it. Abruptly O’Mara pushed himself out of the couch and hurried to the spacesuit locker. He was climbing into the heavy duty model when the communicator beeped at him.

  “O’Mara,” Caxton’s voice brayed at him when he had acknowledged, “the Monitor wants to talk to you. It wasn’t supposed to be until tomorrow but—”

  “Thank you, Mr. Caxton,” broke in a quiet, firmer voice. There was a pause, then, “My name is Craythorne, Mr. O’Mara. I had planned to see you tomorrow as you know, but I managed to clear up some other work which left me time for a preliminary chat …”

  What, thoug
ht O’Mara fulminatingly, a damned awkward time you had to pick! He finished putting on the suit but left the gauntlets and helmet off. He began tearing into the panel which covered the air-supply controls.

  “ … To tell you the truth,” the quiet voice of the Monitor went on, “your case is incidental to my main work here. My job is to arrange accommodation and so on for the various life-forms who will shortly be arriving to staff this hospital, and to do everything possible to avoid friction developing between them when they do come. There are a lot of finicky details to attend to, but at the moment I’m free. And I’m curious about you, O’Mara. I’d like to ask some questions.”

  This is one smooth operator! thought one half of O’Mara’s mind. The other half noted that the air-supply controls were set to suit the conditions he had in mind. He left the panel hanging loose and began pulling up a floor section to get at the artificial gravity grid underneath. A little absently he said, “You’ll have to excuse me if I work while we talk. Caxton will explain—”

  “I’ve told him about the kid,” Caxton broke in, “and if you think you’re fooling him by pretending to be the harassed mother type … !”

  “I understand,” said the Monitor. “I’d also like to say that forcing you to live with an FROB infant when such a course was unnecessary comes under the heading of cruel and unusual punishment, and that about ten years should be knocked off your sentence for what you’ve taken this past five weeks—that is, of course, if you’re found guilty. And now, I always think it’s better to see who one is talking to. Can we have vision, please?”

  The suddenness with which the artificial gravity grids switched from one to two Gs caught O’Mara by surprise. His arms folded under him and his chest thumped the floor. A frightened bawl from his patient in the next room must have disguised the noise he made from his listeners because they didn’t mention it. He did the great-grand-daddy of all pressups and heaved himself to his knees.

  He fought to keep from gasping. “Sorry, my vision transmitter is on the blink.”

  The Monitor was silent just long enough to let O‘Mara know that he knew he was lying, and that he would disregard the lie for the moment. He said finally, “Well, at least you can see me,” and O’Mara’s vision plate lit up.

  It showed a youngish man with close-cropped hair whose eyes seemed twenty years older than the rest of his features. The shoulder tabs of a Major were visible on the trim, dark-green tunic and the collar bone bore a caduceus. O’Mara thought that in different circumstances he would have liked this man.

  “I’ve something to do in the next room,” O’Mara lied again. “Be with you in a minute.”

  He began the job of setting the anti-gravity belt on his suit to two Gs repulsion, which would exactly counteract the floor’s present attraction and allow him to increase the pull to four Gs without too much discomfort to himself. He would then reset the belt for three Gs, and that would give him back a normal gravity apparent of one G.

  At least that was what should have happened.

  Instead the G-belt or the floor grids or both started producing half-G fluctuations, and the room went mad. It was like being in an express elevator which was constantly being started and stopped. The frequency of the surges built up rapidly until O‘Mara was being shaken up and down so hard his teeth rattled. Before he could react to this a new and more devastating complication occurred. As well as variations in strength the floor grids were no longer acting at right angles to their surface, but yawed erratically from ten to thirty degrees from the vertical. No storm-tossed ship had ever pitched and rolled as viciously as this. O’Mara staggered, grabbed frantically for the couch, missed and was flung heavily against the wall. The next surge sent him skidding against the opposite wall before he was able to switch off the G-belt.

  The room settled down to a steady gravity-pull of two Gs again.

  “Will this take long?” asked the Monitor suddenly.

  O’Mara had almost forgotten the Major during the past hectic seconds. He did his best to make his voice sound both natural and as if it was coming from the next room as he replied, “It might. Could you call back later?”

  “I’ll wait,” said the Monitor.

  For the next few minutes O’Mara tried to forget the bruising he had received despite the protection given him by the heavy spacesuit, and concentrate on thinking his way out of this latest mess. He was beginning to see what must have happened.

  When two anti-gravity generators of the same power and frequency were used close together, a pattern of interference was set up which affected the stability of both. The grids in O‘Mara’s quarters were merely a temporary job and powered by a generator similar to the one used in his suit, though normally a difference in frequency was built in against the chance of such instability occurring. But O’Mara had been fiddling with the grid settings constantly for the past five weeks—every time the infant had a bath, to be exact—so that he must have unknowingly altered the frequency.

  He didn’t know what he had done wrong and there wasn’t enough time to try fixing it if he had known. Gingerly, O’Mara switched on his G-belt again and slowly began increasing power. It registered over three-quarters of a G before the first signs of instability appeared.

  Four Gs less three-quarters made a little over three Gs. It looked, O’Mara thought grimly, like he was going to have to do this the hard way …

  V

  O’Mara closed his helmet quickly, then strung a cable from his suit mike to the communicator so that he would be able to talk without Caxton or the Monitor realizing that he was sealed inside his suit. If he was to have time to complete the treatment they must not suspect that there was anything out of the ordinary going on here. Next came the final adjustments to the air-pressure regulator and gravity grids.

  Inside two minutes the atmosphere pressure in the two rooms had multiplied six times and the gravity apparent was four Gs—the nearest, in fact, that O’Mara could get to “ordinary conditions” for a Hudlarian. With shoulder muscles straining and cracking with the effort—for his under-powered G-belt took only three-quarters of a gravity off the four-G pull in the room—he withdrew the incredibly awkward and ponderous thing which his arm had become from the grid servicing space and rolled heavily onto his back.

  He felt as if his baby was sitting on his chest, and large, black blotches hung throbbing before his eyes. Through them he could see a section of ceiling and, at a crazy angle, the vision panel. The face in it was becoming impatient.

  “I’m back, Major,” gasped O’Mara. He fought to control his breathing so that the words would not be squeezed out too fast. “I suppose you want to hear my side of the accident?”

  “No,” said the Monitor. “I’ve heard the tape Caxton made. What I’m curious about is your background prior to coming here. I’ve checked up and there is something which doesn’t quite fit …”

  A thunderous eruption of noise blasted into the conversation. Despite the deeper note caused by the increased air pressure O’Mara recognized the signal for what it was; the FROB was angry and hungry.

  With a mighty effort O’Mara rolled onto his side, then propped himself up on his elbows. He stayed that way for a while gathering strength to roll over onto his hands and knees. But when he finally accomplished this he found that his arms and legs were swelling and felt as if they would burst from the pressure of blood piling up in them. Gasping, he eased himself down flat onto his chest. Immediately the blood rushed to the front of his body and his vision began to red out.

  He couldn’t crawl on hands and knees nor wriggle on his stomach. Most certainly, under three Gs, he could not stand up and walk. What else was there?

  O’Mara struggled onto his side again and rolled back, but this time with his elbows propping him up. The neck-rest of his suit supported his head, but the insides of the sleeves were very lightly padded and his elbows hurt. And the strain of holding up even part of his three times heavier than normal body made his heart pound. Worst of
all, he was beginning to black out again.

  Surely there must be some way to equalize, or at least distribute, the pressures in his body so that he could stay conscious and move. O’Mara tried to visualize the layout of the acceleration chairs which had been used in ships before artificial gravity came along. It had been a not-quite-prone position, he remembered suddenly, with the knees drawn up …

  Inching along on his elbows, bottom and feet, O‘Mara progressed snail-like toward the bedroom. His embarrassment of riches where muscles were concerned was certainly of use now—in these conditions any ordinary man would have been plastered helplessly against the floor. Even so it took him fifteen minutes to reach the food sprayer in the bedroom, and during practically every second of the way the baby kept up its ear-splitting racket. With the increased pressure the noise was so tremendously loud and deep that every bone in O’Mara’s body seemed to vibrate to it.

  “I’m trying to talk to you!” the Monitor yelled during a lull. “Can’t you keep that blasted kid shut up!”

  “It’s hungry,” said O’Mara. “It’ll quiet down when it’s fed …”

  The food sprayer was mounted on a trolley and O’Mara had fitted a pedal control so as to leave both hands free for aiming. Now that his patient was immobilized by four gravities he didn’t have to use his hands. Instead he was able to nudge the trolley into position with his shoulders and depress the pedal with his elbow. The high-pressure jet tended to bend floorward owing to the extra gravity but he did finally manage to cover the infant with food. But cleaning the affected areas of food compound was another matter. The water jet, which handled very awkwardly from floor level, had no accuracy at all. The best he could manage was to wash down the wide, vivid blue patch—formed from three separate patches which had grown together—which covered nearly one quarter of its total skin area.