Sector General Omnibus 1 - Beginning Operations

by James White

  Conway made good time to the lock, all things considered. Once he had to flatten himself against a corridor wall as a Tralthan Diagnostician lumbered absently past on its six, elephantine feet, the diminutive and nearly mindless OTSB life-form which lived in symbiosis with it clinging to its leathery back. Conway didn’t mind giving way to a Diagnostician, and the Tralthan FGLI-OTSB combination were the finest surgeons in the Galaxy. Generally, however, the people he encountered—nurses of the DBLF classification mostly, and a few of the low-gravity, bird-like LSVOs—made way for him. Which showed what a very efficient grapevine the hospital possessed, because he was still wearing his old armband.

  His swelling head was rapidly shrunk back to size by the entity waiting for him at Lock Eight. It was another of the furry, multi-pedal DBLF nurses, and it began hooting and whining immediately when he came into sight. The DBLF’s own language was unintelligible, but Conway’s Translator pack converted the sounds which it made—as it did all the other grunts, chirps and gobblings heard in the hospital—into English.

  “I have been awaiting you for over seven minutes,” it said. “They told me this was an emergency, yet I find you ambling along as if you had all the time in the world …”

  Like all Translated speech the words had been flat and strained free of all emotional content. So the DBLF could have been joking, or half joking, or even making a simple statement of fact as it saw them with no disrespect intended. Conway doubted the last very strongly, but knew that losing his temper at this stage would be futile.

  He took a deep breath and said, “I might have shortened your waiting period if I had run all the way. But I am against running for the reason that undue haste in a being in my position gives a bad impression—people tend to think I am in a panic over something and so feel unsure of my capabilities. So for the record,” he ended dryly, “I wasn’t ambling, I was walking with a confident, unhurried tread.”

  The sound which the DBLF made in reply was not Translatable.

  Conway went through the boarding tube ahead of the nurse, and seconds later they shot away from the lock. In the tender’s rear vision screen the sprawling mass of lights which was Sector General began to crawl together and shrink, and Conway started worrying.

  This was not the first time he had been called to a wreck, and he knew the drill. But suddenly it was brought home to him that he would be solely responsible for what was to happen—he couldn’t scream for help if something went wrong. Not that he had ever done that, but it had been comforting to know that he could have done so if necessary. He had an urgent desire to share some of his newly-acquired responsibility with someone—Dr. Prilicla, for instance, the gentle, spidery, emotion-sensitive who had been his assistant in the Nursery, or any of his other human and non-human colleagues.

  During the trip to the wreck the DBLF, who told him that its name was Kursedd, tried Conway’s patience sorely. The nurse was completely without tact, and although Conway knew the reason for this failing, it was still a little hard to take.

  As a race Kursedd’s species were not telepathic, but among themselves they could read each other’s thoughts with a high degree of accuracy by the observation of expression. With four extensible eyes, two hearing antenna, a coat of fur which could lie silky smooth or stick out in spikes like a newly-bathed dog, plus various other highly flexible and expressive features—all of which they had very little control over—it was understandable that this caterpillar-like race had never learned diplomacy. Invariably they said exactly what they thought, because to another member of their race those thoughts were already plain anyhow, so that saying something different would have been stupid.

  Then all at once they were sliding up to the Monitor cruiser and the wreck which hung beside it.

  Apart from the bright orange coloring it looked pretty much like any other wreck he had seen, Conway thought; ships resembled people in that respect—a violent end stripped them of all individuality. He directed Kursedd to circle a few times, and moved to the forward observation panel.

  At close range the internal structure of the wreck was revealed by the mishap which had practically sheered it in two, it was of dark and fairly normal-looking metal, so that the garish coloration of the hull must be due simply to paint. Conway filed that datum away carefully in his mind, because the shade of paint a being used could give an accurate guide to the range of its visual equipment, and the opacity or otherwise of its atmosphere. A few minutes later he decided that nothing further could be abstracted from an external examination of the ship, and signaled Kursedd to lock onto Sheldon.

  The lock antechamber of the cruiser was small and made even more cramped by the crowd of green-uniformed Corpsmen staring, discussing and cautiously poking at an odd-looking mechanism—obviously something salvaged from the wreck—which was lying on the deck. The compartment buzzed with the technical jargon of half a dozen specialities and nobody paid any attention to the doctor and nurse until Conway cleared his throat loudly twice. Then an officer with Major’s insignia, a thin-faced, graying man, detached himself from the crowd, and came toward them.

  “Summerfield, Captain,” he said crisply, giving the thing on the floor a fond backward glance as he spoke. “You, I take it, will be the high-powered medical types from the hospital?”

  Conway felt irritated. He could understand these people’s feelings, of course—a wrecked interstellar ship belonging to an unknown alien culture was a rare find indeed, a technological treasure trove on whose value no limit could be set. But Conway’s mind was oriented differently; alien artifacts came a long way second in importance to the study, investigation and eventual restoration of alien life. That was why he got right down to business.

  “Captain Summerfield,” he said sharply, “we must ascertain and reproduce this survivor’s living conditions as quickly as possible, both at the hospital and in the tender which will take it there. Could we have someone to show us over the wreck please. A fairly responsible officer, if possible, with a knowledge of—”

  “Surely,” Summerfield interrupted. He looked as if he was going to say something else, then he shrugged, turned, and barked, “Hendricks!” A Lieutenant wearing the bottom half of a spacesuit and a rather harassed expression joined them. The Captain performed brief introductions, then returned to the enigma on the floor.

  Hendricks said, “We’ll need heavy-duty suits. I can fit you Dr. Conway, but Dr. Kursedd is a DBLF …”

  “There is no problem,” Kursedd put in. “I have a suit in the tender. Give me five minutes.”

  The nurse wheeled and undulated toward the airlock, its fur rising and falling in slow waves which ran from the sparse hair at its neck to the bushier growth on the tail. Conway had been on the point of correcting Hendrick’s mistake regarding Kursedd’s status, but he suddenly realized that being called “Doctor” had elicited an intense emotional response from the DBLF—that rippling fur was certainly an expression of something! Not being a DBLF himself Conway could not tell whether the expression registered was one of pleasure or pride at being mistaken for a Doctor, or if the being was simply laughing one of its thirty-four legs off at the error. It wasn’t a vital matter, so Conway decided to say nothing.

  II

  The next occasion that Hendricks addressed “Doctor” Kursedd was when they were entering the wreck, but this time the DBLF’s expression was hidden by the casing of its spacesuit.

  “What happened here?” Conway asked as he looked around curiously. “Accident, collision or what?”

  “Our theory,” Lieutenant Hendricks replied, “is that one of the two pairs of generators which maintained the ship in hyperspace during faster-than-light velocities failed for some reason. One half of the vessel was suddenly returned to normal space, which automatically meant that it was braked to a velocity far below that of light. The result was that the ship was ripped in two. The section containing the faulty generators was left behind,” Hendricks went on, “because after the accident the remaining pair o
f generators must have remained functional for a second or so. Various safety devices must have gone into operation to seal off the damage, but the shock had practically shaken the whole ship to pieces so they weren’t very successful. But an automatic distress signal was emitted which we were fortunate enough to hear, and obviously there is still pressure somewhere inside because we heard the survivor moving about. But the thing I can’t help wondering about,” he ended soberly, “is the condition of the other half of the wreck. It didn’t, or couldn’t, send out a distress signal or we would have heard it also. Someone might have survived in that section, too.”

  “A pity if they did,” said Conway. Then, in a firmer voice, “But we’re going to save this one. How do I get close to it?”

  Hendricks checked their suits’ anti-gravity belts and air tanks, then said, “You can’t, at least not for some time. Follow me and I’ll show you why.”

  O’Mara had made reference to difficulties in reaching the alien, Conway remembered, and he had assumed it was the normal trouble of wreckage blocking the way. But from the competent look of this Lieutenant in particular and the known efficiency of the Corps in general, he was sure that their troubles would not be ordinary.

  Yet when they penetrated further into the wreck the ship’s interior seemed remarkably clear. There was the usual loose stuff floating about, but no solid blockage. It was only when Conway looked closely at his surroundings that he was able to see the full extent of the damage. There was not one fitting, wall support or section of plating which was not either loose, cracked or sprung at the seams. And at the other end of the compartment they had just entered he could see where a heavy door had been burned through, with traces of the rapid-sealing goo used in setting up a temporary airlock showing all around it.

  “That is our problem,” Hendricks said, as Conway looked questioningly at him. “The disaster very nearly shook the ship apart. If we weren’t in weightless conditions it would fall to pieces around us.”

  He broke off to go to the aid of Kursedd, who was having trouble getting through the hole in the door, then resumed, “All the air-tight doors must be closed automatically, but with the ship in this condition the fact of an air-tight door being closed does not necessarily mean that there is pressure on the other side of it. And while we think we have figured out the manual controls, we cannot be absolutely sure that opening one by this method will not cause every other door in the ship to open at the same time, with lethal results for the survivor.”

  In Conway’s phones there was the sound of a short, heavy sigh, then the Lieutenant went on;

  “We’ve been forced to set up locks outside every bulkhead we came to so that if there should be an atmosphere on the other side when we burn through, the pressure drop will be only fractional. But it’s a very time-wasting business, and no short cuts are possible which would not risk the safety of the alien.”

  “Surely more rescue teams would be the answer,” Conway said. “If there aren’t enough on your ship we can bring them from the hospital. That would cut down the time required—”

  “No, Doctor!” Hendricks said emphatically. “Why do you think we parked five hundred miles out? There is evidence of considerable power storage in this wreck and until we know exactly how and where, we have to go easy. We want to save the alien, you understand, but we don’t want to blow it and ourselves up. Didn’t they tell you about this at the hospital?”

  Conway shook his head. “Maybe they didn’t want me to worry.”

  Hendricks laughed. “Neither do I. Seriously, the chance of a blow-up is vanishingly small provided we take proper precautions. But with men swarming all over the wreck, burning and pulling it apart, it would be a near-certainty.”

  While the Lieutenant had been talking they passed through two other compartments and along a short corridor. Conway noticed that the interior of each room had a different color scheme. The survivor’s race, he thought, must have highly individual notions regarding interior decoration.

  He said, “When do you expect to get through to it?”

  This was a simple question which required a long, complicated answer, Hendricks explained ruefully. The alien had made its presence known by noise—or more accurately, by the vibrations set up in the fabric of the ship by its movements. But the condition of the wreck plus the fact that its movements were of irregular duration and weakening made it impossible to judge its position with certainty. They were cutting a way toward the center of the wreck on the assumption that that was where an undamaged, air-tight compartment was most likely to be. Also, they were missing any later movements it made, which might have given them a fix on its position, because of the noise and vibration set up by the rescue team.

  Boiled down, the answer was between three and seven hours.

  And after they made contact with it, thought Conway, he had to sample, analyze and reproduce its atmosphere, ascertain its pressure and gravity requirements, prepare it for transfer to the hospital and do whatever he could for its injuries until it could be treated properly.

  “Far too long,” said Conway, aghast. The survivor could not be expected, in its steadily weakening state, to survive indefinitely. “We’ll have to prepare accommodation without actually seeing our patient—there’s nothing else for it. Now this is what we’ll do …”

  Rapidly, Conway gave instruction for tearing up sections of floor plating so as to bare the artificial gravity grids beneath. This sort of thing was not in his line, he told Hendricks, but no doubt the Lieutenant could make a fair guess at their output. There was only one known way of neutralizing gravity used by all the space-going races of the Galaxy; if the survivor’s species had a different way of doing it then they might as well give up there and then.

  “ … The physical characteristics of any life-form,” he went on, “can be deduced from specimens of their food supply, the size and power demands of their artificial gravity grids, and air trapped in odd sections of piping. Enough data of this sort would enable us to reproduce its living conditions—”

  “Some of the loose objects floating around must be food containers,” Kursedd put in suddenly.

  “That’s the idea,” Conway agreed. “But obtaining and analyzing a sample of air must come first. That way we’ll have a rough idea of its metabolism, which should help you to tell which cans hold paint and which syrup … !”

  Seconds later the search to detect and isolate the wreck’s air-supply system was under way. The quantity of plumbing in any compartment of a spaceship was necessarily large, Conway knew, but the amount of piping which ran through even the smallest rooms in this ship left him feeling astonished by its complexity. The sight caused a vague stirring at the back of his mind, but either his association centers were not working properly or the stimulus was too weak for him to make anything out of it.

  Conway and the others were working on the assumption that if a compartment could be sealed by air-tight bulkheads, then the pipelines supplying air to that section would be interrupted by cut-off valves where they entered and left it. The finding of a section of piping containing atmosphere was therefore only a matter of time. But the maze of plumbing all around them included control and power lines, some of which must still be live. So each section of piping had to be traced back to a break or other damage which allowed them to identify it as not belonging to the air-supply system. It was a long, exhausting process of elimination, and Conway raged inwardly at this sheerly mechanical puzzle on whose quick solution depended his patient’s life. Furiously he wished that the team cutting into the wreck would contact the survivor, just so he could go back to being a fairly capable doctor instead of acting like an engineer with ten thumbs.

  Two hours slipped by and they had the possibilities narrowed down to a single heavy pipe which was obviously the outlet, and a thick bundle of metal tubing which just had to bring the air in.

  Apparently there were seven air inlets!

  “A being that needs seven different chemical …” began
Hendricks, and lapsed into a baffled silence.

  “Only one line carries the main constituent,” Conway said. “The others must contain necessary trace elements or inert components, such as the nitrogen in our own air. If those regulator valves you can see on each tube had not closed when the compartment lost pressure we could tell by the settings the proportions involved.”

  He spoke confidently, but Conway was not feeling that way. He had premonitions.

  Kursedd moved forward. From its kit the nurse produced a small cutting torch, focused the flame to a six-inch, incandescent needle, then gently brought it into contact with one of the seven inlet pipes. Conway moved closer, an open sample flask held at the ready.

  Yellowish vapor spurted suddenly and Conway pounced. His flask now held little more than a slightly soft vacuum, but there was enough of the gas caught inside for analysis purposes. Kursedd attacked another section of tubing.

  “Judging by sight alone I would say that is chlorine,” the DBLF said as it worked. “And if chlorine is the main constituent of its atmosphere then a modified PVSJ ward could take the survivor.”

  “Somehow,” said Conway, “I don’t think it will be as simple as that.”

  He had barely finished speaking when a high-pressure jet-white vapor filled the room with fog. Kursedd jerked back instinctively, pulling the flame away from the holed pipe, and the vapor changed to a clear liquid which bubbled out to hang as shrinking, furiously steaming globes all around them. They looked and acted like water, Conway thought, as he collected another sample.