Sector General Omnibus 1 - Beginning Operations

by James White

  The fine, ever-present mist of bubbles made it difficult to see clearly, but for a moment he caught a glimpse of something which was not part of the machinery—something that was brown and convoluted and with a suggestion of fronds or short tentacles sprouting from it, something organic. The being was hemmed in on all sides by revolving machinery, and it also seemed to be rotating, but there was so little of its body visible that he could not be sure.

  “I see it,” said Conway. “Not enough for accurate classification, though. It doesn’t seem to be wearing a pressure suit so this must be its equivalent of shirt-sleeve conditions. But we can’t get at the brute without tearing its ship apart and killing it in the process.” He swore, then went on furiously, “This is ridiculous, insane! I’m supposed to come out here, immobilize the patient, transfer it to a ward and give treatment. But this blasted thing can’t be immobilized without …”

  “Suppose there is something wrong with its life-support system,” the Lieutenant broke in. “Something which requires gravity, or artificial gravity in the form of centrifugal force, to restore proper function. If we could somehow repair this malfunctioning equipment …”

  “But why?” said Conway suddenly, as a vague idea that had been lurking at the back of his mind began to creep out into the light. “I mean, why should we assume that it is malfunctioning …” He paused, then said, “We’ll open the valves of a couple of oxygen tanks in here to freshen up the beastie’s air—I mean water. It’s only a first-aid measure, I’m afraid, until we’re in a position to do something more positive. Then back to the tender, I’m beginning to get some odd ideas about this astronaut and I’d like to test them.”

  They returned to the control room without taking off their suits, and were met by Prilicla who told them that the patient’s condition seemed a little better although it was still unconscious. The empath added that the reason for this might be that the being was injured and in an advanced state of malnutrition as well as having been close to death through asphyxiation. Conway began telling them about his idea and sketching the alien ship as he talked.

  “If this is the center of spin,” he said when the drawing was complete, “and the distance from that point to the pilot’s position is this, and the rate of rotation is this, can you tell me how closely does the apparent gravity in the pilot’s position approach that of Meatball itself?”

  “Just a minute,” said Harrison as he took Conway’s pen and began to scribble. A few minutes later—he had taken extra time to double check his calculations—he said, “Very close, Doctor. Identical, in fact.”

  “Which means,” said Conway thoughtfully, “that we have here a beastie which can’t, for some very good physiological reason no doubt, live without gravity, for whom weightless conditions are fatal …”

  “Excuse me, Doctor,” the quiet voice of the radioman cut in. “I have Major O’Mara for you on Screen Two …”

  Conway felt the idea which was beginning to take shape at the back of his mind being blown into tatters. Spin, he thought furiously, trying to draw it back; centrifugal force, wheels within wheels! But the square, craggy features of the Chief Psychologist were filling the screen and it was impossible to think of anything else.

  O’Mara spoke pleasantly—a very bad sign. He said, “Your recent activity has been impressive, Doctor—especially when it took the form of man-made meteorite activity in the shape of dropped tools and structural material. But I’m concerned about your patient. We all are—even, and especially, the Captain of Descartes who has recently returned to Meatball.

  “The Captain has run into trouble,” the psychologist continued, “in the shape of three missiles with nuclear warheads which were directed at his ship. One of them went off course and dirtied up a large area of Meatball ocean, and the other two came so close that he had to use full emergency thrust to avoid them. He says that establishing communications and friendly contact with the inhabitants in these circumstances is impossible, that they obviously think he has kidnaped their astronaut for some ghastly purpose of his own, and that the return of the being in a happy and healthy condition is the only means there is of retrieving the situation … Doctor Conway, your mouth is open. Either say something or close it!”

  “Sorry, sir,” said Conway absently. “I was thinking. There is something I would like to try, and perhaps you could help me with it—by getting Colonel Skempton’s support, I mean. We’re wasting time out here, I realize that now, and I want to bring the spacecraft inside the hospital. Still spinning, of course—at first, anyway. Cargo Lock Thirty is big enough to take it and is close enough to the water-filled corridor leading to the ward we are preparing for this patient. But I’m afraid the Colonel will be a bit sticky about allowing the spacecraft into the hospital.”

  The Colonel was very sticky indeed, despite Conway’s arguments and the support given by O’Mara. Skempton, for the third time, gave a firm and unequivocal negative.

  He said, “I realize the urgency of this matter. I fully appreciate its importance to our future hopes of trading with Meatball and I sympathize with your technical problems. But you are not, repeat not, going to bring a chemically powered spacecraft with a live retro pack inside this hospital! If it accidentally ignited we might have a hole blown in the hull which would cause a lethal pressure drop on a dozen levels, or the vehicle might go bulleting into the central computer or gravity-control sections!”

  “Excuse me,” said Conway angrily, and turned to the Lieutenant. He asked, “Can you ignite that retro pack, working from the ambulance ship, or disconnect it?”

  “I probably couldn’t disconnect it without inadvertently setting it off and burning myself to a crisp,” Harrison replied slowly, “but I know enough to be able to set up a relay which … Yes, we could ignite it from this control room.”

  “Go to it, Lieutenant,” said Conway, and returned to the image of Skempton. “I take it, sir, that you have no objection to taking the vessel aboard after its retro pack has been fired? Or to furnishing the special equipment I will need in the cargo lock and ward?”

  “The maintenance officer on that level has orders to cooperate,” said Skempton. “Good luck, Doctor. Off.”

  While Harrison set up his relay, Prilicla kept an emotional eye on the patient while Mannon and himself worked out the being’s approximate size and weight based on the brief look Conway had had of the astronaut and on the dimensions of its ship. This information would be needed quickly if the special transporter and the rotating operating theater were to be ready in time.

  “I’m still here, Doctor,” said O’Mara sharply, “and I have a question. Your idea that the being needs gravity, either normal or artificial, to live I can understand, but strapping it onto an elaborate merry go-round …”

  “Not a merry-go-round, sir,” said Conway. “It will be mounted vertically, like a ferris wheel.”

  O’Mara breathed heavily through his nose. “I suppose you are quite sure that you know what you’re doing, Doctor?”

  “Well …” began Conway.

  “Ask a stupid question,” said the psychologist, and broke the connection.

  It took longer than the Lieutenant had estimated to set up his relay—everything took longer than estimated on this assignment!—and Prilicla reported that the patient’s condition was rapidly worsening. But at last the spacecraft’s retros flared out for the number of seconds necessary to have brought it out of its original orbit and the ambulance ship kept pace with it, spinning it with opposing tractors as soon as thrust disappeared so that the occupant would still have the gravity it needed. There were complications even so. Immediately the retros cut out, panels opened in the nose cone and the landing parachute tumbled out and within seconds the spinning ship had wound the parachute untidily around itself.

  The short period of thrust had added to the hull damage as well.

  “It’s leaking like a sieve!” Conway burst out. “Shoot another magnetic grapple to it. Keep it spinning and get us to Lo
ck Thirty quick! How is the patient?”

  “Conscious now,” said Prilicla, trembling. “Just barely conscious and radiating extreme fear …”

  Still spinning, the vehicle was maneuvered into the enormous mouth of Lock Thirty. Inside the lock chamber the artificial gravity grids under the deck were set at neutral so that the weightless conditions of space were duplicated there. Conway’s feeling of vertigo, which had been with him since he had first seen the ship, was intensified by the sight of the alien vessel whirling ponderously in the enclosed space, flinging out streamers of coldly steaming water as it spun.

  Then suddenly the lock’s outer seal clanged shut, the tractors smoothly checked the ship’s spin as, simultaneously, the artificial gravity of the deck was brought up to Meatball normal. Within a few seconds the spacecraft was resting horizontally on the deck.

  “How is it?” began Conway anxiously.

  Prilicla said, “Fear … no, extreme anxiety. The radiation is quite strong now—otherwise the being seems all right, or at least improved …” The empath gave the impression of not believing its own feelings.

  The spacecraft was lifted gently and a long, low trolley mounted on balloon wheels rolled under it. Water began pouring into the lock chamber from the seal which had opened into the adjacent water-filled section. Prilicla ran up the wall and across the ceiling until it was in position a few yards above the nose of the vessel, and Mannon, Harrison and Conway waded, then swam, in the same direction. When they reached it they clustered around the forward section, ignoring the team which was throwing straps around the hull and fastening it to the trolley prior to moving it into the nearby corridor of the water-breathers, while they cut into the thin hull plating and carefully peeled it away.

  Conway insisted on extreme care during this operation so as to avoid damaging the life-support machinery.

  Gradually the nose section became little more than a skeleton and the astronaut lay revealed, like a leathery, brown caterpillar with its tail in its mouth that was caught on one of the innermost gear wheels of a giant clock. By this time the vessel was completely submerged, oxygen was being released into the water all around it, and Prilicla was reporting the patient’s feelings as being extremely anxious and confused.

  “It’s confused …” said a familiar, irascible voice and Conway discovered O’Mara swimming beside him. Colonel Skempton was dog-paddling along on his other side, but silently. The psychologist went on, “This is an important one, Doctor, in case you’ve forgotten—hence our close personal interest. But now why don’t you pull that glorified alarm clock apart and get the patient out of there? You’ve proved your theory that it needed gravity to live, and we’re supplying that now …”

  “No, sir,” said Conway, “not just yet …”

  “Obviously the rotation of the being inside the capsule,” Colonel Skempton broke in, “compensates for the ship’s spin, thus allowing the pilot a stationary view of the outside world.”

  “I don’t know,” said Conway doggedly. “The ship’s rotation does not quite match that of the astronaut inside it. In my opinion we should wait until we can transfer it quickly to the ferris wheel, which will almost exactly duplicate module conditions. I have an idea—it may be a pretty wild one—that we aren’t out of the woods yet.”

  “But transferring the whole ship into the ward when the patient alone could be moved there in a fraction of the time …”

  “No,” said Conway.

  “He’s the Doctor,” said O’Mara, before the argument could develop further, and smoothly directed the Colonel’s attention to the system of paddle-wheels which kept the water-breathing astronaut’s “air” circulating.

  The enormous trolley, its weight supported in the water to a large extent by air-filled balloon tires, was manhandled along the corridor and into the tremendous tank which was one of the combined theater/wards of the hospital’s water-breathing patients. Suddenly there was another complication.

  “Doctor! It’s coming out!”

  One of the men swarming around the nose section must have accidentally pushed the astronaut’s ejection button, because the narrow hatch had swung open and the system of gears, sprocket wheels and chain drives was sliding into new positions. Something which looked like three five-foot diameter tires was rolling toward the opening.

  The innermost tire of the three was the astronaut while the two on each side of it had a metallic look and a series of tubes running from them into the central, organic tire—probably food storage tanks, Conway thought. His theory was borne out when the outer sections stopped just inside the hatch and the alien, still trailing one of the feeding tubes, rolled out of its ship. Still turning it began to fall slowly toward the floor eight feet below.

  Harrison, who was nearest, tried to break its fall but could only get one hand to it. The being tipped over and hit the floor flat on its side. It bounced slowly just once and came to rest, motionless.

  “It is unconscious again, dying! Quickly, friend Conway!”

  The normally polite and self-effacing empath had turned the volume of its suit radio to maximum so as to attract attention quickly. Conway acknowledged with a wave—he was already swimming toward the fallen astronaut as fast as he could—and yelled at Harrison, “Get it upright, man! Turn it!”

  “What …” began Harrison, but he nevertheless got both hands under the alien and began to lift.

  Mannon, O’Mara and Conway arrived together. With four of them working on it they quickly lifted the being into an upright position, but when Conway tried to get them to roll it, it wobbled like a huge, soggy hoop and tended to fold in on itself. Prilicla, at great danger to life and its extremely fragile limbs, landed beside them and deafened everyone with details of the astronaut’s emotional radiation—which was now virtually nonexistent.

  Conway yelled directions to the other three to lift the alien to waist height while keeping it upright and turning. Within a few seconds he had O’Mara pulling down on his side, Mannon lifting on his and the Lieutenant and himself at each flank turning and steadying the great, flaccid, ring-shaped body.

  “Cut your volume, Prilicla!” O’Mara shouted. Then in a quieter, furious voice he snarled, “I suppose one of us knows what we’re doing?”

  “I think so,” said Conway. “Can you speed it up—it was rotating much faster than this inside its ship. Prilicla?”

  “It … it is barely alive, friend Conway.”

  They did everything possible to speed the alien’s rotation while at the same time moving it toward the accommodation prepared for it. This contained the elaborate ferris wheel which Conway had ordered and a watery atmosphere which duplicated the soup of Meatball’s oceans. It was not an exact duplicate because the material suspended in the soup was a nonliving synthetic rather than the living organisms found in the original, but it had the same food value and, because it was nontoxic so far as the other water breathers who were likely to use the ward were concerned, the astronaut’s quarters were contained by a transparent plastic film rather than metal plating and a lock chamber. This also helped speed the process of getting the patient into its ward and onto the wheel.

  Finally it was in position, strapped down and turning in the direction and at the same velocity as its “couch” on the spacecraft. Mannon, Prilicla and Conway attached themselves as close to the center of the wheel and their rotating patient as possible and, as their examination proceeded, theater staff, special instruments, diagnostic equipment and the very special, thought-controlled “tool” from Meatball added themselves or were attached to the framework of the wheel and whirled up and over and around through the nearly opaque soup.

  The patient was still deeply unconscious at the end of the first hour.

  For the benefit of O’Mara and Skempton, who had relinquished their places on the wheel to members of the theater staff, Conway said, “Even at close range it is difficult to see through this stuff, but as the process of breathing is involuntary and includes ingestion, and as
the patient has been short of food and air for a long time, I’d prefer not to work in clear, food-free water at this time.”

  “My favorite medicine,” said Mannon, “is food.”

  “I keep wondering how such a life-form got started,” Conway went on. “I suppose it all began in some wide, shallow, tidal pool—so constituted that the tidal effects caused the water to wash constantly around it instead of going in and out. The patient might then have evolved from some early beastie which was continually rolled around in the shallows by the circular tides, picking up food as it went. Eventually this prehistoric creature evolved specialized internal musculature and organs which allowed it to do the rolling instead of trusting to the tides and currents, also manipulatory appendages in the form of this fringe of short tentacles sprouting from the inner circumference of its body between the series of gill mouths and eyes. Its visual equipment must operate like some form of coeleostat since the contents of its field of vision are constantly rotating.

  “Reproduction is probably by direct fission,” he went on, “and they keep rolling forevery moment of their lives, because to stop is to die.”

  “But why?” O’Mara broke in. “Why must it roll when water and food can be sucked in without it having to move?”

  “Do you know what is wrong with the patient, Doctor?” Skempton asked sharply, then added worriedly, “Can you treat it?”

  Mannon made a noise which could have been a snort of derision, a bark of laughter or perhaps merely a strangled cough.

  Conway said, “Yes and no, sir. Or, in a sense, the answer should be yes to both questions.” He glanced at O’Mara to include the psychologist and went on, “It has to roll to stay alive—there is an ingenious method of shifting its center of gravity while keeping itself upright by partially inflating the section of its body which is on top at any given moment. The continual rolling causes its blood to circulate—it uses a form of gravity feed system instead of a muscular pump. You see, this creature has no heart, none at all. When it stops rolling its circulation stops and it dies within a few minutes.