Sector General Omnibus 1 - Beginning Operations

by James White

  “Seven ships,” O’Mara replied, motioning Conway onto the couch as he lowered the Educator helmet into position. “They seem to have been small jobs, with no evidence of unusual armament or defenses. There was quite a scrap. Three got away and one of the four which didn’t launched a missile at us before it was clobbered. A small missile with a chemical warhead.

  “Which is very odd,” O’Mara went on thoughtfully, “because if it had been a nuclear warhead there would be no hospital here now. We weren’t expecting them just as soon as this and were taken by surprise a little. Do you have to take this patient?”

  “Eh? Oh, yes,” said Conway. “You know DBLF. Any incised wound is an emergency with them. By the time another doctor had a look at the patient and came up here for a tape it might be too late.”

  O’Mara grunted. His hard, square, oddly gentle hands checked the fitting of the helmet, then pressed Conway down onto the couch. He went on, “They tried to press that attack home, it was really vicious. A clear indication, I would say, of their feelings toward us. Yet they used a chemical head when they could have destroyed us completely. Peculiar. One thing, though, it has made the ditherers make up their minds. Anybody who wants to stay here now really wants to stay and the ones who are leaving are going to leave fast, which is a good thing from Dermod’s point of view …”

  Dermod was the fleet commander.

  “ … Now make your mind a blank,” he ended sourly, “or at least make it blanker than usual.”

  Conway did not have to try to make his mind a blank, a process which aided the reception of an alien physiology tape. O’Mara’s couch was wonderfully soft and comfortable. He had never appreciated it properly before, he seemed to be sinking right into it …

  A sharp tap on the shoulder made him jump. O’Mara said caustically, “Don’t go to sleep! And when you finish with your patient go to bed. Mannon can handle things in Reception and the hospital won’t go to pieces without you unless we get hit with an atomic bomb …”

  With the first evidence of double-mindedness already becoming apparent, Conway left the office. Basically the tape was a brain recording of one of the great medical minds of the species of the patient to be treated. But the doctor taking such a tape had, literally, to share his mind with a completely alien personality. That was how it felt, because all the memories and experience of the being who had donated the tape were impressed on the receiving mind, not just selected pieces of medical data. Physiology tapes could not be edited.

  But the DBLFs were not as alien as some of the beings Conway had had to share his mind with. Although physically they resembled giant, silvery caterpillars they had a lot in common with Earth-humans. Their emotional reactions to such stimuli as music, a piece of scenic grandeur, or DBLFs of the opposite sex were very nearly identical. This one even liked meat, so that Conway would not have to starve on salad if he had to keep the tape for any length of time.

  What matter if he did feel unsafe walking on just two legs, or found himself humping his back rhythmically as he walked. Or even, when he reached the abandoned DBLF section and the small theater where the patient had been brought, that a part of his mind thought of Murchison as just another one of those spindly DBDGs from Earth …

  Although Murchison had everything ready for him, Conway did not start at once. Because of the mind and personality of the great Kelgian doctor sharing his brain he really felt for the patient now. He appreciated the seriousness of its condition and knew that there were several hours of delicate, exacting work ahead of him. At the same time he knew that he was very tired, that he could barely keep his eyes open. It was an effort even to move his feet, and his fingers, when he was checking over the instruments, felt like thick, tired sausages. He knew that he couldn’t work in this condition unless he wanted to kill the patient.

  “Fix me a pep-shot, will you please?” he said, biting down on a yawn.

  For an instant Murchison looked as if she might give him an argument. Pep-shots were frowned on in the hospital—their use was sanctioned only in cases of the gravest emergency, and for very good reasons. But she prepared and injected the shot without saying anything, using a blunt needle and quite unnecessary force to jab it home. Even though half his mind wasn’t his own, Conway could see that she was mad at him.

  Then suddenly the shot took effect. Except for a slight tingling sensation in his feet and a blotchiness which only Murchison could see in his face Conway felt as clear-eyed, alert and physically refreshed as if he had just come out of a shower after ten hours sleep.

  “How’s the other one?” he asked suddenly. He had been so tired he had forgotten the Kelgian he had left with Murchison in the lock.

  “Artificial respiration brought it round,” she replied, then with more enthusiasm, “but it was still in shock. I sent it up to the Tralthan section, they still have a few senior staff there …”

  “Good,” said Conway warmly. He wanted to say more, to be more personally complimentary, but he knew that there was no time to stand and chat. He ended, “Let’s begin, shall we … ?”

  Except for the thin-walled, narrow casing which housed the brain the DBLF species had no boney structure. Their bodies were composed of an outer cylinder of musclature which, in addition to being its primary means of locomotion, served to protect the vital organs within it. To the mind of a being more generously reinforced with bones this protection was far from adequate. Another severe disadvantage in the event of injury was its complex and extremely vulnerable circulatory system; the blood-supply network which had to feed the tremendous bands of muscle encircling its body ran close under the skin. The thick fur of the pelt gave some protection here, but not against chunks of jagged-edged, flying metal.

  An injury which many other species would consider superficial could cause a DBLF to bleed to death in minutes.

  Conway worked slowly and carefully, dissolving away the coagulant so hastily applied by Murchison, repairing or partially replacing damaged major blood vessels and sealing off the minor branches which were too fine for him to do anything else. This part of the operation worried him—not because it endangered the life of the patient but because he knew that the beautiful silvery fur would never grow properly in these areas again, that if it grew at all it would be yellowed and visually repulsive to a male Kelgian. The injured nurse was a remarkably handsome young female and such a disfiguration could be a real tragedy. Conway hoped she wouldn’t be too proud to keep the area covered with surrogate fur. Admittedly it did not have the rich, deep luster of living fur and would be immediately recognizable for what it was, but neither would it be so visually distressing …

  An hour ago this would have been just another caterpillar, Conway thought dryly, an “it” about whom he felt only clinical concern. Now he had reached the stage of worrying about the patient’s marriage prospects. A physiology tape certainly made one feel for one’s e-t patients.

  When he had finished Conway called Reception, described the patient’s condition and urged that it should be evacuated as quickly as possible. Mannon told him that there was half a dozen small vessels loading at the moment, most of them with provision for taking oxy-breathers, and gave him a choice of two Locks in the vicinity. Mannon added that, with the exception of a few patients on the critically ill list, all patients of classifications A through G had either gone or were on the point of going, along with staff members of the same classifications who had been ordered to go by O’Mara for security reasons.

  Some of them had displayed extreme reluctance to leave. One in particular, a hoary old Tralthan Diagnostician who was unfortunate enough to own a personal space yacht—something which in normal conditions would not have been considered a misfortune!—had had to be formally charged with attempted treason, disturbing the peace and incitement to mutiny and arrested, that being the only way to get it aboard ship.

  As he broke the connection Conway thought that they wouldn’t have to go to such lengths to get him to leave the hospital. He shook
his head, angry and ashamed of himself, and gave Murchison instructions for transfering the patient to the ship.

  The injured Kelgian had to be enclosed in a pressure tent for the initial stage of its trip through the AUGL ward, which was now open to space. There were no water-breathers left in the big tank and no water, there being more urgent things to do than repairing and refilling a section which would very likely never be used again. The sight of the great tank, empty now, with its walls vacuum dry and the lush, underwater vegetation which had been designed to make the ward seem more homelike to its occupants hanging like pieces of brittle, discolored parchment made Conway feel horribly depressed. The depression remained with him while they negotiated the three empty chlorine levels below it and came to another air-filled section.

  Here they had to pause to allow a procession of TLTUs to pass. Conway was glad of the chance to stop for a while because, although the pep-shot had him still feeling full of artificial beans, Murchison was beginning to droop. As soon as their patient was aboard he thought he would order her off to bed.

  Seven TLTUs filed slowly past, their protective spheres anchored to stretcher-carriers driven by sweating, tense-faced orderlies. Unlike those of the methane life-forms these spheres did not collect frost. Instead they emitted a high-pitched, shuddering whine as their generators labored to maintain the internal temperature at a comfortable, for their occupants, five hundred degrees. Each one of them passed in a wave of heat which Conway could feel six yards away.

  If another warhead was to strike here and now, and one of those globes was opened … Conway didn’t think there was a worse way to die than to have the flesh boiled off his bones in a blast of super-heated steam.

  By the time they had handed the patient over to the ship’s medical officer at the Lock, Conway was having difficulty focusing his eyes and his legs had a definite rubbery feel to them. Bed was indicated, he thought, or another pep-shot. He had just decided on the former course of treatment when he was collared respectfully by a Monitor officer wearing a heavy-duty suit which was still radiating the cold of space.

  “The casualties are here, sir,” the officer said urgently. “We brought them in on a supply ship because Reception is tied up with the evacuation. We’re locked onto the DBLF section, but the place is empty and you’re the first doctor I’ve seen. Will you take care of them?”

  Conway almost asked what casualties, but stopped himself in time. There had been an attack, he remembered suddenly, the attack had been beaten off and the ensuing casualties, whether great or small, were obviously of prime concern to this officer. If he had known that Conway had been too busy to think about the battle and its casualties …

  “Where did you put them?” said Conway.

  “They’re still in the ship,” the officer replied, relaxing slightly. “We thought it better for someone to look at them before they were moved. Some of them … I mean … Uh, will you follow me, sir?”

  There were eighteen of them, the wreckage of men who had been fished out of the wreckage of a ship, whose suits were still cold to the touch. Only their helmets had been taken off, and that had been to ascertain whether or not they still lived. Conway counted three decompressions, the rest being fractures of varying degrees of complication one of which was quite definitely a depressed fracture of the skull. There were no radiation cases. So far it had been a clean war, if any war could have been described as clean …

  Conway felt himself getting angry, but fought it back. This was no time to become emotional over broken, bleeding and asphyxiated patients or the reasons for them being in that condition. Instead he straightened and turned to Murchison.

  “I’ll take another pep-shot,” he said briskly, “this will be a long session. But first I’ll have the DBLF tape erased and try to around up some help. While I’m gone you might see to getting these men out of their suits and moved to DBLF Theater Five, then you can catch up on your sleep.

  “And thank you,” he added awkwardly, not wanting to say too much because the Corpsman was still at his elbow. If he had tried to say the things he wanted to say to Murchison with eighteen urgent cases lying around their feet the officer would have been scandalized, and Conway would not have blamed him. But dammit the Corpsman hadn’t been working beside Murchison for the last three hours, with a pep-shot heightening all his senses …

  “If it would help you,” said Murchison suddenly, “I could take a pep-shot, too.”

  Gratefully, Conway said, “You’re a very silly girl, but I was hoping you would say that …”

  CHAPTER 17

  By the eighth day all the extra-terrestrial patients had been evacuated and with them had gone nearly four-fifths of the hospital’s staff. On the levels which maintained extremes of temperature, pressure or gravity the power was withdrawn causing the ultra-frigid solids to melt and gasify and the dense or superheated atmospheres to condense into a sludgy liquid mess on the floors. Then as the days passed more and more Corpsmen of the Engineering Division arrived, converting the one-time wards into barracks and tearing out large sections of the outer hull so that they could erect projector bases and launching platforms. Dermod’s idea now was that Sector General should defend itself instead of relying completely on the fleet, which had already shown that it wasn’t capable of stopping everything. By the twenty-fifth day Sector General had made the transition from being a defenseless hospital into what amounted to a heavily armed military base.

  Because of its tremendous size and vast reserves of power—several times greater than that of the mobile forces defending it—the weapons were many and truly formidable. Which was as well because on the twenty-ninth day they were tested to the utmost in the first major attack by the enemy.

  It lasted for three days.

  Conway knew that there were sound, logical reasons for the Corps fortifying the hospital as they had done, but he didn’t like it. Even after that fantastic, three-day long attack when the hospital had been hit four times—again with chemical warheads, luckily—he still felt wrong about it. Every time he thought of the tremendous structure which had been dedicated to the highest ideals of humanity and medicine being made into an engine of destruction, geared to a hellish and unnatural ecology wherein it produced its own casualties, Conway felt angry and sad and not a little sickened by the whole ghastly mess. Sometimes he was apt to give vent to his opinions …

  It was five weeks after the beginning of the evacuation and he was lunching with Mannon and Prilicla. The main dining hall was no longer crowded at mealtimes and green uniformed Corpsmen heavily outnumbered the e-ts at the tables, but there were still upward of two hundred extra-terrestrials in the place and this was what Conway was currently objecting to.

  “ … I still say it’s a waste,” he said angrily, “a waste of lives, of medical talent, everything! All the cases are, and will continue to be, Monitor casualties. Every one an Earth-human. So there are no juicy e-t cases for them to work on. The e-t staff should be sent home!

  “Present company included,” he ended, with a glare at Prilicla before he turned to face Mannon.

  Dr. Mannon made an incision in his steak and hefted a generous forkful mouthward. Since the disappearance of all his light-gravity patients he had had his LSVO and MSVK tapes erased and so had no mental restrictions placed on his diet. In the five weeks since the evacuation he had noticeably put on weight.

  “To an e-t,” he said reasonably, “we are juicy e-ts.”

  “You’re quibbling,” said Conway. “What I’m objecting to is senseless heroics.”

  Mannon raised his eyebrows. “But heroics are nearly always senseless,” he said dryly, “and highly contagious as well. In this case I’d say the Corps started it by wanting to defend this place, and because of that we felt obliged to stay also to look after the wounded. At least a few of us feel like that, or we think a few of us feel like that.

  “The sane, logical thing to do would have been to get while the going was good,” Mannon continued, not quit
e looking at Conway, “and not a word would have been said to those who got. But then these sane, logical people have colleagues or, uh, friends who they suspect might be in the true hero category, and they won’t leave because of what they imagine their friends will think of them if they run away. So they’d sooner die than have their friends think they were cowards, and they stay.”

  Conway felt his face getting warm, but he didn’t say anything.

  Mannon grinned suddenly and went on, “But this is a form of heroism, too. A case of Death before Dishonor, you might say. And before you can turn around twice everybody is a hero of one kind or the other. And no doubt the e-ts …” He gave a sly glance at Prilicla. “ … are staying for similar reasons. And also, I suspect, because they don’t want it thought that Earth-human DBDGs have a monopoly on heroism.”

  “I see,” said Conway. He knew that his face was flaming red. It was now quite obvious that Mannon knew that the only reason he had stayed in the hospital was because Murchison, O’Mara and Mannon himself might have been disappointed in him if he’d left. And at the other side of the table Prilicla, the emotion sensitive, would be reading him like a book. Conway thought that he had never felt worse in his whole life.

  “You are so right,” said Prilicla suddenly, deftly inserting its fork into the plate of spaghetti before it and using two mandibles to twist. “If it had not been for the heroic example of you DBDGs I would have been on the second ship out.”

  “The second?” asked Mannon.

  “I am not,” said Prilicla, waving spaghetti for emphasis, “completely without valor.”

  Listening to the by-play Conway thought that the honest thing would have been for him to admit his cowardice to them, but he also knew that to do so would be to cause embarrassment all round. It was plain that they both knew him for the coward he was and were telling him in their separate fashions that it didn’t matter. And looking at it objectively it really did not matter, because there would be no more ships leaving Sector General and its remaining staff were going to be heroes whether they liked it or not. But Conway still did not think it right that he should be given credit for being a brave, selfless, dedicated man of medicine when he was nothing of the sort.