Sector General Omnibus 1 - Beginning Operations

by James White

  He saw PVSJs in balloon-like chlorine envelopes being pinned against the floor, flattened like specimens pressed under glass, then bounced into the air again. And Tralthan patients in their massive, unwieldy harness—Tralthans were prone to injury internally despite their great strength— being dragged along. There were DBDGs, DBLFs and CLSRs, also unidentifiable somethings in spherical, wheeled containers that radiated cold almost visibly. Strung out in a line, being pushed, dragged or manfully inching along on their own, the beings crept past, bowing and straightening up again like wheat in a strong wind as the gravity grids pulled at them.

  Conway could almost imagine he felt those fluctuations where he stood, but knew that the crashing ship must have destroyed the grid circuits in its path. He dragged his eyes away from that grim procession and headed downward again.

  “Conway!” Mannon’s voice barked at him a few minutes later. “That survivor down there is responsible for as many casualties now as the crashed ship! A ward of convalescent LSVOs are dead due to a three-second surge from one-eighth to four gravities. What’s happening now?”

  The tunnel of wreckage was steadily narrowing, Conway reported, the hull and lighter machinery of the ship having been peeled away by the time it had reached their present level. All that could remain ahead was the massive stuff like hyperdrive generators and so on. He thought he must be very near the end of the line now, and the being who was the unknowing cause of the devastation around them.

  “Good,” said Mannon, “but hurry it up!”

  “But can’t the Engineers get through? Surely—”

  “They can’t,” broke in Dr. Lister’s voice. “In the area surrounding the gravity grid controls there are fluctuations of up to ten Gs. It’s impossible. And joining up with your route from inside the hospital is out, too. It would mean evacuating corridors in the neighboring area, and the corridors are all filled with patients …” The voice dropped in volume as Dr. Lister apparently turned away from the mike, and Conway overhead him saying, “Surely an intelligent being could not be so panic-stricken that it … it … Oh, when I get my hands on it—”

  “It may not be intelligent,” put in another voice. “Maybe it’s a cub, from the FGLI maternity unit …”

  “If it is I’ll tan its little—”

  A sharp click ended the conversation at that point as the transmitter was switched off. Conway, suddenly realizing what a very important man he had become, tried to hurry it up as best he could.

  IX

  They dropped another level into a ward in which four MSVKs—fragile, tri-pedal storklike beings—drifted lifeless among loose items of ward equipment. Movements of the bodies and objects in the room seemed a little unnatural, as if they had been recently disturbed. It was the first sign of the enigmatic survivor they were seeking. Then they were in a great, metal-walled compartment surrounded by a maze of plumbing and unshielded machinery. On the floor in a bulge it had created for itself, the ship’s massive hyper-drive generator lay with some shreds of control room equipment strewn around it. Underneath was the remains of a life-form that was now unclassifiable. Beside the generator another hole had been torn in the severely weakened floor by some other piece of the ship’s heavy equipment.

  Conway hurried over to it, looked down, then called excitedly, “There it is!”

  They were looking into a vast room which could only be the grid control center. Rank upon rank of squat, metal cabinets covered the floor, walls and ceiling—this compartment was always kept airless and at zero gravity—with barely room for even Earth-human Engineers to move between them. But Engineers were seldom needed here because the devices in this all-important compartment were self-repairing. At the moment this ability was being put to a severe test.

  A being which Conway classified tentatively as AACL sprawled across three of the delicate control cabinets. Nine other cabinets, all winking with red distress signals, were within range of its six, python-like tentacles which poked through seals in the cloudy plastic of its suit. The tentacles were at least twenty feet long and tipped with a horny substance which must have been steel-hard considering the damage the being had caused.

  Conway had been prepared to feel pity for this hapless survivor, he had expected to find an entity injured, panic-stricken and crazed with pain. Instead there was a being who appeared unhurt and who was viciously smashing up gravity-grid controls as fast as the built-in self-repairing robots tried to fix them.

  Conway swore and began hunting for the frequency of the other’s suit radio. Suddenly there was a harsh, high-pitched cheeping sound in his ear-phones. “Got you!” Conway said grimly.

  The cheeping sounds ceased abruptly as the other heard his voice and so did all movement of those highly destructive tentacles. Conway noted the wavelength, then switched back to the band used by the PVSJ and himself.

  “It seems to me,” said the chlorine-breather when he had told it what he had heard, “that the being is deeply afraid, and the noises it made were of fear—otherwise your Translator would have made you receive them as words in your own language. The fact that these noises and its destructive activity stopped when it heard your voice is promising, but I think that we should approach slowly and reassure it constantly that we are bringing help. Its activity down there gives me the impression that it has been hitting out at anything which moves, so a certain amount of caution is indicated, I think.”

  “Yes, Padre,” said Conway with great feeling.

  “We do not know in what direction the being’s visual organs are directed,” the PVSJ went on, “so I suggest we approach from opposite sides.”

  Conway nodded. They set their radios to the new band and climbed carefully down onto the ceiling of the compartment below. With just enough power in their gravity neutralizers to keep them pressing gently against the metal surface they moved away from each other onto opposite walls, down them, then onto the floor. With the being between them now, they moved slowly toward it.

  The robot repair devices were busy making good the damage wrecked by those six anacondas it used for limbs but the being continued to lie quiescent. Neither did it speak. Conway kept thinking of the havoc this entity had caused with its senseless threshing about. The things he felt like saying to it were anything but reassuring, so he let the PSVJ padre do the talking.

  “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 toward 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 pulverized 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 realized 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 spacesuited 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 the 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 floorward, 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 center of gravity, walls, ceilings and floor with its deadly occupant whirling around 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 hawser-like 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 OK 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 Gs. 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 gray and sweaty with shock and he did not seem to be breathing. The drying chemicals in his helmet kept the face-plate 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 disorganized 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?

  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, immobilize it, then re-seal 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-gray 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 over-idealistic 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.”