Sector General Omnibus 1 - Beginning Operations

by James White

  “The word,” he said, “is romantic.”

  They launched themselves gently into the vast room in the direction of the restaurant. Below them the tree tops drifted past and they ran through a wisp of fog—cooling steam produced by the warm, underwater sun—which beaded their faces and arms with moisture. Conway caught her hand and held it gently, but their velocities were not exactly matching and they began to spin around their center of gravity. Conway bent his elbow slowly, drawing her toward him, and their rate of spin increased. Then he slid his other arm around her waist and pulled her closer still.

  She started to protest and then suddenly, gloriously, she was kissing him and clinging to him as fiercely as he was to her, and the empty bay, cliffs, and purple, watery sky was whirling madly around them.

  In a calm, impersonal corner of his mind Conway thought that his head would have been spinning anyway even if his body hadn’t, it was that sort of kiss. Then they spun gently into the cliff-top at the other side of the bay and broke apart, laughing.

  They used the artificial greenery to pull themselves toward the one-time restaurant. It was dim inside, and during its slow fall ceilingward a lot of water had collected under the transparent roof and on the undersides of the table canopies. Like some fragile, alien fruit it hung in clusters which stirred gently at their passage or burst into hundreds of tiny silvery globes when they blundered against a table. With the low ceiling and dim light it was difficult to keep from knocking into things and soon the globes were all around them, seeming to crowd in, throwing back a hundred tiny, distorted reflections of Murchison and himself. It was like an alien dream world, Conway thought; and it was a wish-fulfillment dream. The dark, lovely shape of Murchison drifting beside him left no doubt about that.

  They sat down at one of the tables, but carefully so as not to dislodge the water in the canopy above them. Conway took her hand in his, the others being needed to hold them onto their chairs, and said, “I want to talk to you.”

  She smiled, a little warily.

  Conway tried to talk. He tried to say the things that he had rehearsed to himself many times, but what came out was a disjointed hodge-podge. She was beautiful, he said, and he didn’t want to be friends and she was a stupid little fool for staying behind. He loved her and wanted her and he would have been happy spending months—not too many months, maybe—getting her in a corner where she couldn’t say anything but yes. But now there wasn’t time to do things properly. He thought about her all the time and even during the TRLH operation it had been thinking about her that let him hang on until the end. And all during the bombardment he had worried in case …

  “I worried about you, too,” Murchison broke in softly. “You were all over the place and every time there was a hit … And you always knew exactly what to do and … and I was afraid you would get yourself killed.”

  Her face was shadowed, her uniform clung damply. Conway felt his mouth dry.

  She said warmly, “You were wonderful that day with the TRLH. It was like working with a Diagnostician. Seven tapes, O’Mara said. I … I asked him to give me one, earlier, to help you out. But he said no because …” She hesitated, and looked away. “ … because he said girls are very choosy who they let take possession of them. Their minds, I mean …”

  “How choosy?” said Conway thickly. “Does the choice exclude … friends?”

  He leaned forward involuntarily as he spoke, letting go his hold on the chair with his other hand. He drifted heavily up from the table, jarred the canopy and touched one of the floating globes with his forehead. With the surface tension broken it collapsed wetly all over his face. Spluttering he brushed it away, knocking it into a cloud of tiny, glowing marbles. Then he saw it.

  It was the only harsh note in this dream world, a pile of unarmed missiles occupying a dark corner of the room. They were held to the floor by clamps and further secured with netting in case the clamps were jarred free by an explosion. There was plenty of slack in the netting. Still holding onto Murchison, he kicked himself over to it, searched until he found the edge of the net, and pulled it up from the floor.

  “We can’t talk properly if we keep floating into the air,” he said quietly. “Come into my parlor …”

  Maybe the netting was too much like a spider’s web, or his tone resembled too closely that of a predatory spider. He felt her hesitate. The hand he was holding was trembling.

  “I … I know how you feel,” she said quickly, not looking at him. “I like you, too. Maybe more than that. But this isn’t right. I know we don’t have any time, but sneaking down here like this and … it’s selfish. I keep thinking about all those men in the corridors, and the other casualties still to come. I know it sounds stuffy, but we’re supposed to think about other people first. That’s why—”

  “Thank you,” said Conway furiously. “Thank you for reminding me of my duty.”

  “Oh, please!” she cried, and suddenly she was clinging to him again, her head against his chest. “I don’t want to hurt you, or make you hate me. I didn’t think the war would be so horrible. I’m frightened. I don’t want you to be killed and leave me all alone. Oh, please, hold me tight and … and tell me what to do …”

  Her eyes were glittering and it was not until one of the tiny points of light floated away from them that he realized she was crying silently. He had never imagined Murchison crying, somehow. He held her tightly for a long time, then gently pushed her away from him.

  Roughly, he said, “I don’t hate you, but I don’t want you to discuss my exact feelings at the moment, either. Come on, I’ll take you home.”

  But he didn’t take her home. The alarm siren went a few minutes later and when it stopped a voice on the PA was asking Doctor Conway to come to the intercom.

  CHAPTER 23

  Once it had been Reception, with three fast-talking Nidians to handle the sometimes complex problems of getting patients out of their ambulances and into the hospital. Now it was Command Headquarters and twenty Monitor officers murmuring tensely into throat mikes, their eyes glued to screens which showed the enemy at all degrees of magnification from nil to five hundred. Two of the three main screens showed sections of the enemy fleet, the images partly obliterated by the ghostly lines and geometrical figures that was a tactical officer trying to predict what they would do next. The other screen gave a wide-angle view of the outer hull.

  A missile came down like a distant shooting star, making a tiny flash and throwing up in minute fountain of wreckage. The tearing, metallic crash which reverberated through the room was out of all proportion to the image.

  Dermod said, “They’ve withdrawn out of range of the heavy stuff mounted on the hospital and are sending in missiles. This is the softening up process designed to wear us down prior to the main attack. A counterattack by our remaining mobile force would result in its destruction, they are so heavily outnumbered that they can operate effectively only if backed by the defenses of the hospital. So we have no choice but to soak up this stage as best we can and save our strength for—”

  “What strength?” said Conway angrily. Beside him O’Mara made a disapproving noise, and across the desk the Fleet commander looked coldly at him. When Dermod spoke it was to Conway, but he didn’t answer the question.

  “We can also expect small raids by fast, maneuverable units designed to further unsettle us,” he went on. “Your casualties will come from Corpsmen engaged on hull defense, personnel from the defending ships, and perhaps enemy casualties. Which brings me to a point which I would like cleared up. You seem to be handling a lot of enemy wounded, Doctor, and you’ve told me that your facilities are already strained to the limit …”

  “How the blazes can you tell?” said Conway. Dermod’s expression became more frigid, but this time he answered the question.

  “Because I have reports of patients lying beside each other finding that the other one is talking gibberish, patients of the same physological type, that is. What steps are you taking to—�
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  “None!” said Conway, so angry suddenly that he wanted to take this cold, unfeeling martinet by the throat and shake some humanity into him.

  At the beginning he had liked Dermod. He had thought him a thoughtful and sensitive as well as a competent Fleet commander, but during the past few days he had become the embodiment of the blind, coldly implacable forces which had Conway and everyone else in the hospital trapped. Daily conferences between the military and medical authorities in the hospital had been ordered since the last attack had begun, and at all three of them Conway had found himself running across the fleet commander with increasing frequency.

  But when Conway snapped, the Fleet commander did not snap back. Dermod merely looked at him with his eyes so bleak and distant that Conway felt that the commander wasn’t seeing him at all. And it did no good at all when O’Mara advised him quietly to hold his tongue and not be so all-fired touchy—that Dermod had a war to fight and he was doing the best he could, and that the pressures he was under excused a certain lack of charm in his personality.

  “Surely,” said Dermod coldly, just as Conway had decided that he really ought to be more patient with this cold-blooded, military creature, “you are not treating enemy casualties the same as our own … ?”

  “It is difficult,” said Conway, speaking so quietly that O’Mara looked suddenly worried, “to tell the difference. Subtle variations in spacesuit design mean nothing to the nursing staff and myself. And when, as frequently happens, the suit and underlying uniform is cut away the latter may be unidentifiable due to the bleeding. Between the injection of antipain and unconsciousness the oral noises they make are not easily translatable. And if there is any way to tell the difference between a Corpsman and one of the enemy screaming, I don’t want to know about it …”

  He had started quietly, but when he ended he was close to shouting.

  “ … I won’t make any such distinction between casualties and neither will my staff! This is a hospital, damn you! Well isn’t it?”

  “Take it easy, son. It’s still a hospital,” said O’Mara gently.

  “It is also,” Dermod snapped, “a military base!”

  “What I don’t understand,” O’Mara put in quickly, trying desperately to pour on the oil, “is why the hell they don’t finish us with atomic warheads … ?”

  Another hit, more distant this time, sent its tinny echoes through the room.

  “The reason they don’t finish us off with an atomic bomb, Major,” he replied, with his eyes still locked with Conway’s, “is because they must make a conquest. The political forces involved demand it. The Empire must take and occupy this outpost of the hated enemy, the Emperor’s general must have a triumph and not a pyrrhic victory, and subjugating the enemy and capturing his territory, no matter how few or how little, can be made to look like a triumph to the citizens of the Empire.

  “Our own casualties are heavy,” Dermod went on coldly. “A space battle being what it is only ten percent of the casualties survive to be hospitalized and we are fortunate both in having medical facilities immediately available and in occupying a strong defensive position. The number of enemy casualties is much higher than ours, my estimate would be twenty to one, so that if they were to knock us out with an atomic missile now, when they could have done the same thing at the very beginning without losing a man, some very awkward questions will be asked within the Empire. If the Emperor can’t answer them he might find that the war, and all the fine, martial fervor he has built up, will backfire on him …”

  “Why don’t you communicate with them?” Conway interrupted harshly. “Tell them the truth about us, and tell them about the wounded here. You surely don’t expect to win this battle now. Why don’t we surrender … ?”

  “We cannot communicate with them, Doctor,” the commander said bitingly, “because they won’t listen to us. Or if they do listen they don’t believe what we say. They know, or think they know, what we did on Etla and what we are supposed to be doing here. Telling them that we were really helping the Etlan natives and that we have been forced to defend our hospital is no good. A series of plagues swept Etla soon after we left and this establishment no longer behaves, outwardly, that is, like a hospital. What we say to them has no importance, it is what we do that counts. And we are doing exactly what their Emperor has lead them to expect of us.

  “If they were really thinking,” he continued savagely, “they would wonder at the large number of our e-ts who are helping us. According to them our e-ts are downtrodden, subject races who are little more than slaves. The volunteers who have come out to help us do not fight like slaves, but at the present stage that is too subtle a thing to make any impression. They are thinking emotionally instead of logically …”

  “And I’m thinking emotionally, too!” Conway broke in sharply. “I’m thinking of my patients. The wards are full. They are lying in odd corners and along corridors all over the place, with inadequate protection against pressure loss …”

  “You’ve lost the ability to think about anything but your patients, Doctor!” Dermod snapped back. “It might surprise you to know that I think about them, too, but I try not to be so mauldin about it. If I did think that way I would begin to feel angry, begin to hate the enemy. Before I knew it I would want revenge …”

  Another hit rang like a loud, discordant gong through the hospital. The commander raised his voice, and kept on raising it.

  “ … You must know that the Monitor Corps is the police force for most of the inhabited Galaxy, and keeping the peace within the Federation calls for the constant application of the psychological and social sciences. In short, guiding and molding opinion both on the individual and planetary population levels. So the situation we have here, a gallant band of Corpsmen and doctors holding out against the savage, unceasing attacks of an overwhelmingly superior enemy, is one I could use. Even so it would take the Federation a long time to become angry enough to mobilize for war, far too long to do us personally any good, but think how we would be avenged, Doctor … !”

  His voice was shaking now, his face white and tight with fury. He was shouting.

  “In an interstellar war planets cannot be captured, Doctor. They can only be detonated. That stinking little Empire with its forty planets would be stamped out, destroyed, completely obliterated … !”

  O‘Mara did not speak. Conway couldn’t, nor could he take his eyes off Dermod to see how the psychologist was reacting to this outburst. He hadn’t thought it possible for the commander to blow up like this and it was suddenly frightening. Because Dermod’s sanity and self-control, like O’Mara’s, was something Conway had depended on even though he hated it.

  “But the Corps is a police force, remember?” he raged on. “We are trying to think of this as a disturbance, a riot on an interstellar scale where as usual the casualties among the rioters outnumber those of the police. Personally I think it is past the time when anything will make them see the truth and a full-scale war is inevitable, but I do not want to hate them. This is the difference, Doctor, between maintaining peace and waging war.

  “And I don’t want any sniveling, narrow-minded doctors, who have nothing to worry about except their patients, reminding me of all the horrible ways my men are dying. Trying to make me lose my perspective, making me hate people who are no different to us except that they are being fed wrong information.

  “And I don’t care if you treat enemy and Corps wounded alike,” he yelled, trying to bring his voice down but not succeeding, “but you will listen when I give orders concerning them. This is a military base and they are enemy casualties. The ones who are in a condition to move must be guarded against the possibility of them committing acts of sabotage. Now do you understand, Doctor?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Conway in a small voice.

  When he left Reception with O’Mara a few minutes later Conway still had the feeling of being charred around the edges. It was plain now that he had gravely misjudged the fleet commander
, and he should apologize for the hard things he had been thinking about Dermod. Underneath all the ice Dermod was a good man.

  Beside him O’Mara said suddenly, “I like to see these cold, controlled types blow off steam occasionally. Psychologically it is desirable, considering the pressures he is under at the present time. I’m glad you finally made him angry.”

  “What about me?” said Conway.

  “You, Doctor, are not controlled at all,” O’Mara replied sternly. “Despite your new authority, which should make you set an example of tolerance and good behavior at least, you are fast becoming a bad-tempered brat. Watch it, Doctor.”

  Conway had been looking for sympathy for the tongue-lashing Dermod had given him, and a little consideration for the pressures he himself was under, not criticism from another quarter. When O’Mara turned off toward his office a few minutes later, Conway was still too angry to speak.

  CHAPTER 24

  Next day Conway did not get the chance to apologize to the Fleet commander—the rioters launched their most vicious attack yet and both the Station Inspector and the Police Surgeon were much too busy to talk. But calling the battle a riot, Conway thought cynically, made no difference to the nature and number of the casualties which flooded suddenly in, because it began with a near-catastrophe for both sides.

  The enemy force closed in, stepping up the missile bombardment to a fantastic rate and englobing the hospital so tightly that there were times when they came within a few hundred feet of the outer hull. Dermod’s ships—Vespasian, a Tralthan capital ship and the other smaller units remaining to him—dropped back to anchor with tractors against the hospital, there being no space to maneuver without obstructing the heavy armament below them. They settled and with their lighter weapons strengthened the fixed defenses wherever possible.