Sector General Omnibus 1 - Beginning Operations

by James White

  “One thing we can’t do,” Conway replied grimly, “is delay the op. Your reports make that very clear.”

  She had not been wasting time since coming to Drambo and, as a result of her analysis of thousands of specimens taken by test bores, diggers and exploring medics from all areas and levels of its far-flung body, she was able to give an accurate if not completely detailed picture of the creature’s current physiological state.

  They already knew that the metabolism of the strata creature was extremely slow and that its muscular reactions were closer to those of a vegetable than an animal. Voluntary and involuntary muscles controlling mobility, ingestion and digestion, circulation of its working fluid and the breaking down of waste products were all governed or initiated by the secretions of the specialized plants. But it was the plants comprising the patient’s nervous system with their extensive root networks which had suffered worst in the roller fallout, because they had allowed the surface radioactivity to penetrate deep inside the strata creature. This had killed many plant species and had also caused the deaths of thousands of internal animal organisms whose purpose it was to control the growth of various forms of specialized vegetation.

  There were two distinct types of internal organisms and they took their jobs very seriously. The large-headed farmer fish were responsible for cultivating and protecting benign growth and destroying all others—for such a large creature, the patient’s metabolic balance was remarkably delicate. The second type, which were the being’s equivalent of leucocytes, assisted the farmer fish in plant control and directly if one of the fish became injured or unwell. They were also cursed with the tidy habit of eating or otherwise absorbing dead members of their own or the fish species, so that a very small quantity of radioactive material introduced by the roots of surface plants could be responsible for killing a very large number of leucocytes, one after another.

  And so the dead areas which had spread far beyond the regions directly affected by roller fallout were caused by the uncontrolled proliferation of malignant plant life. The process, like decomposition, was irreversible. The urgent surgical removal of the affected areas was the only solution.

  But the report had been encouraging in some respects. Minor surgery had already been performed in a number of areas to check on the probable ecological effects of large masses of decomposing animovegetable material on the sea or adjacent living strata creature, and to devise methods of radioactive decontamination on a large scale. It had been found that the patient would heal, but slowly; that if the incision was widened to a trench one hundred feet across, then the uncontrolled growth in the excised section would not spread to infect the living area, although regular patrols of the incision to make absolutely sure of this were recommended. The decomposition problem was no problem at all—the explosive growth rate continued until the plant life concerned used up the available material and died. On land the residue would subside into a very rich loam and make an ideal site for a self-supporting base if medical observers were needed in the years to come. In the case of material sliding off shelving coastlines into the sea, it simply broke up and drifted to the seabed to form an edible carpet for the rollers.

  Certain areas could not be treated surgically, of course, for the same reason that Shylock had to forego his pound of flesh. These were relatively small trouble spots far inland, whose condition was analogous to a severe skin cancer, but limited surgery and incredibly massive doses of medication were beginning to show results.

  “But I still don’t understand its hostility toward us,” Murchison said nervously as the ship went into a three-dimensional skid and lost a lot of height. “After all, it can’t possibly know enough about us to hate us like that.”

  The ship was passing over a dead area where the eye plants were discolored and lifeless and did not react to their shadow. Conway wondered if the vast creature could feel pain or if there was simply a loss of sensation when parts of it died. In every other life-form he had ever encountered, and he had met some really weird ones at Sector General, survival was pleasure and death brought pain—that was how evolution kept a race from just lying down and dying when the going got tough. So the strata creature almost certainly had felt pain, intense pain over hundreds of square miles, when the rollers had detonated their nuclear weapons. It had felt more than enough pain to drive it mad with hatred.

  Conway cringed inwardly at the thought of such vast and unimaginable pain. Several things were becoming very clear to him.

  “You’re right,” he said. “They don’t know anything at all about us, but they hate our shadows. This one in particular hates them because the aircraft carrying the sea-rollers’ atomic bombs produced a shadow not unlike ours just before large tracts of the patient’s body were fried and irradiated.”

  “We land in four minutes,” said Harrison suddenly. “On the coast, I’m afraid, because this bucket has too many holes in it to float. Descartes has us in sight and will send a copter.”

  The pilot’s face made Conway fight the urge to laugh. It looked like that of a half made-up clown. Furious concentration had drawn Harrison’s brows into a ridiculous scowl while his lower lip, which he had been chewing steadily since takeoff, was a wide, blood-red bow of good humor.

  Conway said, “The tools can’t operate in this area and, except for a little background radiation caused by fallout, there is no danger. You can land safely.”

  “Your trust in my professional ability,” said the pilot, “is touching.”

  From their condition of unlevel flight they curved into a barely controlled, tail-first dive. The surface crept, then rushed up at them. Harrison checked the rush with full emergency thrust. There were metallic tearing noises and the rest of the lights on his board turned red.

  “Harrison, pieces of you are dropping off …” began Descartes’ radioman, then they touched down.

  For days afterward the observers argued about it, trying to decide whether it had been a landing or a crash. The shock-absorber legs buckled, the stern section took some more of the shock as it tried to telescope amidships and the acceleration couches took the rest—even when the ship toppled, crashed onto its side and a broad, flickering wedge of daylight appeared in the plating a few feet away. The rescue copter was almost on top of them.

  “Everybody out,” said Harrison. “The pile shielding has been damaged.”

  Looking at the dead and discolored surface around them, Conway thought again of his patient. Angrily, he said, “A little more radiation hereabout won’t make much difference.”

  “To your patient, no,” said the lieutenant urgently. “But perhaps selfishly I was thinking of my future offspring. After you.”

  During the short trip to the mother ship Conway stared silently out of the port beside him and tried hard not to feel frightened and inadequate. His fear was due to reaction after what could easily have been a fatal crash plus the thought of an even more dangerous trip he would have to make in a few days’ time, and any doctor with a patient who stretched beyond the limits of visibility in all directions could not help feeling small. He was a single microbe trying to cure the body containing it, and suddenly he longed for the normal doctor-patient relationships of his hospital—even though very few of his patients or colleagues could be considered normal.

  He wondered if it might not be better to have sent a general to medical school than to give a doctor control of a whole sector subfleet.

  Only six of the Monitor Corps heavies were grounded on Drambo, their landing legs planted firmly in the shallows a few miles off one of the dead sections of coastline. The others filled the morning and evening sky like regimented stars. His medical teams were grouped in and around the grounded ships, which rose out of the thick, soupy sea like gray beehives. The Earth-humans like himself lived on board while the e-ts, none of whom breathed air, were quite happy roughing it on the sea bed.

  He had called what he hoped would be the final pre-op meeting in the cargo hold of Descartes, which was fi
lled with Drambon sea water whose content of animal and plant, life had been filtered out so that the beam of the projector would have a sporting chance of fighting its way to the screen attached to the forward bulkheads.

  Protocol demanded that the Drambons present opened the proceedings. Watching their spokesman, Surreshun, rolling like a great flacid doughnut around the clear space in the center of the deck, Conway wondered once again how such a ridiculously vulnerable species had been able to survive and evolve a highly complex, technology-based culture—though it was just possible that an intelligent dinosaur would have had similar thoughts about early man.

  Surreshun was followed by Garoth, the Hudlar Senior Physician who was in charge of the patient’s medical treatment. Garoth’s chief concern was with the devising and implementation of artificial feeding in areas where incisions would cut the throat tunnels between the coastal mouths and the inland prestomachs. Again unlike Surreshun, it did not say very much but let the projector do all the talking.

  The big screen was filled by a picture of an auxiliary mouth shaft situated about two miles inland of the planned incision line. Every few minutes a copter or small supply ship grounded beside the shaft discharged its load of freshly dead animal life from the coastal shallows and departed while corpsmen with loaders and earth-moving machinery pushed the food over the lip. Possibly the amount and quality of the food was less than that which was drawn in naturally, but when the throat was sealed during the major operation this would be the only way that large areas of the patient could be supplied with food.

  Aseptic procedures were impossible in an operation on this scale so that pumping equipment drawing sea water from the coast was drawn through large-diameter plastic piping. It poured in a steady stream—except when tools cut the pipeline—into the food shaft, supplying the strata creature with needed working fluid and at the same time wetting the walls so that leucocytes could be slipped down from time to time to combat the effects of any dangerous plant life which might have been introduced during feeding.

  They were seeing a drill, of course, performed at one of the feeding installations a few days earlier, but there were more than fifty auxiliary mouths in a similar state of readiness strung out along the proposed incision line.

  Suddenly there was a silvery blur of motion on the ground beside the pump housing and a corpsman hopped a few yards on one foot before falling to the ground. His boot with his other foot still in it lay on its side where he had been standing and the tool, no longer silvery, was already cutting its way beneath the blood-splashed surface.

  “Tool attacks are increasing in frequency and strength,” said Garoth in Translated. “They are also displaying considerable initiative. Your idea of clearing an area around the feeding installations of all eye plants so that the tools would have to operate blind, and would have to bounce around feeling for targets, worked only for a short time, Doctor. They devised a new trick, that of sliding along a few inches below the surface, blind, of course, then suddenly extruding a point or a cutting blade and stabbing or swinging with it before retreating under the surface again. If we can’t see them, mental control is impossible, and guarding every working corpsman with another carrying a metal detector has not worked very well so far—it has simply given the tool a better chance of hitting someone.

  “And just recently,” Garoth concluded, “there are indications of the tools linking up into five- , six- and in one case ten-unit combinations. The corpsman who reported this died a few seconds later before he was able to finish his report. The condition of his vehicle later supports this theory, however.”

  Conway nodded grimly and said, “Thank you, Doctor. But now I’m afraid that you’ll have to withstand air attacks as well. On the way here we taught the patient how gliders work, and it learned fast …” He went onto describe the incident, adding the latest pathological findings and their deductions and theories on the nature of their patient. As a result the meeting quickly became a debate and was degenerating into a bitter argument before he had to pull rank and get his human and e-t doctors back to a state of clinical detachment.

  The heads of the Melfan and Chalder teams made their report practically as a duet. Like Garoth they had both been concerned with the nonsurgical aspects of the patient’s treatment. To a hypothetical observer ignorant of the true scope of their problem this medical treatment could have been mistaken for a very widespread mining operation, agriculture on an even larger scale and mass kidnapping. Both were strongly convinced, and Conway agreed with them, that the wrong way to treat a skin cancer was by amputation of the affected limb.

  The amounts of radioactive material deposited by fallout in the central areas were relatively small, and their effects spread fairly slowly into the depths of the patient’s body. But even this condition would be ultimately fatal if something was not done to check it. And, since the areas affected by light fallout were too numerous and occurred in too many inoperable locations, they had skinned off the poisoned surface with earth-moving machinery and pushed it into heaps for later decontamination. The remainder of the treatment involved helping the patient to help itself.

  A picture appeared suddenly on the screen of a section of subsurface tunnel under one of the areas affected by fallout. There were dozens of life-forms in the tunnel, most of them farmer fish with stubby arms sprouting from the base of their enlarged heads while the others drifted or undulated toward the observer’s position like great, transparent slugs.

  For a living section of the strata creature it looked none too healthy. The farmer fish, whose function was the cultivation and control of internal plant life, moved slowly, bumping into each other and the leucocytes which, normally transparent, were displaying the milky coloration which occurred shortly before death. The radiation sensor readings left no doubt as to what they were dying from.

  “These specimens were rescued shortly afterward,” said the Chalder, “and transferred to sick bays in the larger ships and to Sector General. Both fish and leeches respond to the same decontamination and regeneration treatments given to our own people who have been exposed to a radiation overdose. They were then returned to carry on their good work.”

  “That being,” the Melfan joined in, “absorbing the radiation from the nearest poisoned plant or fish and getting themselves sick again.”

  O’Mara had accused Conway of treating Sector General like some kind of e-t sausage machine, although the hospital was curing everything Drambon that they possibly could, and the Monitor Corps medics had merely looked long-suffering when they weren’t looking extremely busy.

  By themselves neither the hospital nor treatment facilities on the capital ships were enough to swing the balance. To really allow the patient to fight these local infections required massive transfusions of the leucocyte life-form from other, and healthier, strata creatures.

  When he had first suggested the transfusion idea Conway had been worried in case the patient would reject what were, in effect, another creature’s antibodies. But this had not happened, and the only problems encountered were those of transportation and supply as the first single, carefully selected kidnappings became continual wholesale abduction.

  On the screen appeared a sequence showing one of the special commandos withdrawing leucocytes from a small and disgustingly healthy strata creature on the other side of the planet. The entry shaft had been in use for several weeks and the motion of the strata creature had caused it to bend in several places, but it was still usable. The corpsmen dropped from the copters and into the sloping tunnel, running and occasionally ducking to avoid the lifting gear which would later haul their catch to the surface. They wore lightweight suits and carried only nets. The leucocytes were their friends. It was very important for them to remember that.

  The leucocytes possessed a highly developed empathic faculty, which allowed them to distinguish the parent body’s friends from its foes simply by monitoring their emotional radiation. Provided the corpsmen kidnappers thought warm, friend
ly thoughts while they went about their business, they were perfectly safe. But it was hard and often frustrating work, netting and hauling and transferring the massive and inert slugs into the transport copters. Sweating and short-tempered as they frequently were, it was not easy to radiate feelings of friendship and helpfulness toward their charges. Circumstances arose in which a corpsman gave way to a flash of anger or irritation—at an item of his own equipment, perhaps—and for such lapses many of them died.

  Rarely did they die singly. At the end of the sequence Conway watched the entire crew of a transport copter taken out within a few minutes, because it had been impossible for one man to think kindly thoughts toward a being who had just killed a crew mate—by injecting a poison which triggered off muscular spasms so violent that the man broke practically every bone in his body—even if his own life did depend on it. There was no protection and no cure. Heavy-duty spacesuits tough enough to resist the needle points of the leeches’ probes would not have allowed enough mobility for the corpsmen to do their job, and the creatures killed just as quickly and thoroughly and unthinkingly as they cured.

  “To summarize,” said the Chalder as it blanked the screen, “the transfusion and artificial feeding operations are going well at present, but if casualties continue to mount at this rate the supply will fall dangerously short of the computed demand. I therefore recommend, most strongly, that surgery be commenced immediately.”

  “I agree,” added the Melfan. “Assuming that we must proceed without either the consent or cooperation of the patient, we should start immediately.”

  “How immediate?” broke in Captain Williamson, speaking for the first time. “It takes time to deploy a whole sector subfleet over the operative field. My people will need final briefings and, well, I think the Fleet Commander is a little worried about this one. Up to now his operations have been purely military.”