Sector General Omnibus 1 - Beginning Operations

by James White

  One of its four presser installations, Conway saw during the next swing, had been smashed in as if by a gigantic hammer and he knew without being told that this was the one which had been holding closed the ruptured Forty-three. As the ship whirled closer to the ground he wanted to close his eyes, but then he saw that the spin was being checked and that the surface vegetation was being flattened by the three remaining pressers, fanned out at maximum power to support the ship’s weight.

  Vespasian landed hard but not catastrophically. Another cruiser moved into position above Forty-three while surface transport and copters raced toward the crash-landed ship to give assistance. They arrived at the same time as a large group of tools which were doing nothing at all to help.

  Suddenly Dermod’s head filled the screen.

  “Doctor Conway,” said the Fleet Commander in a coldly furious voice, “this is not the first time that I have had a ship converted to scrap around me, but I have never learned to enjoy the experience. The accident was caused by trying to balance virtually the whole of the ship’s weight on one narrowly focused presser beam, with the result that its supporting structure buckled and damn near wrecked the ship.”

  His tone warmed a little, but only temporarily, as he went on, “If we are to hold tourniquets over every tunnel, and with tools attacking every seal it looks as if we will have to do just that, I shall either have to withdraw my ships for major structural modifications or use them for an hour or so at a time and check for incipient structural failure after each spell of duty. But this will tie up a much larger number of ships in unproductive activity, and the farther we extend the incision the more tunnels we will have to sit on and the slower the work will go. The operation is fast becoming a logistical impossibility, the casualty figures and material losses are making it indistinguishable from a full-scale battle, and if I thought that the only result would be the satisfaction of your medical curiosity, Doctor, and that of our cultural contact people, I would throw a permanent ‘Hold’ on it right now. I have the mind of a policeman, not a soldier—the Federation prefers it that way. I don’t glory in this sort of thing …”

  The digger lurched and for an instant Conway felt a sensation impossible in these surroundings, that of free fall. Then there was a crash as the vehicle struck rocky ground. It landed on its side, rolled over twice and moved forward again, but skidding and slewing to one side. The sound of tools striking the hull was deafening.

  Two vertical creases appeared on the Fleet Commander’s forehead. He said, “Having trouble, Doctor?”

  The constant banging of tools made it hard to think. Conway nodded and said, “I didn’t expect the seals to be attacked, but now I realize that the patient is simply trying to defend itself where it thinks it is under the heaviest attack. I also realize now that its sense of touch is not restricted to its top surface. You see, it is blind, deaf and dumb but it seems to be able to feel in three dimensions. The eye plants and subsurface root networks allow it to feel areas of local pressure, but vaguely, without detail. To feel the fine details it sends tools, which are extremely sensitive—sensitive enough to feel the airflow over their wings in the glider configuration and reproduce the shape themselves at will. Our patient learns very quickly and that glider I thought at it has cost a lot of lives. I wish—”

  “Doctor Conway,” the Fleet Commander broke in harshly. “You are either trying to make excuses or giving me a very basic lecture with which I am already familiar. I have time to listen to neither. We are faced with a surgical and tactical emergency. I require guidance.”

  Conway shook his head violently. He had the feeling that he had just said or thought of something important but he did not know what it was. He had to stay with his present train of thought if he expected to drag it out into the light again.

  He went on, “The patient sees, experiences everything, by touch. So far our only area of common contact are the tools. They are thought-controlled extensions of its sense of touch throughout and for a short distance above the patient’s body. Our own mental radiation and control are more concentrated and of strictly limited range. The situation has been that of two fencers trying to communicate only through the tips of their foils—”

  He stopped abruptly because he was talking to an empty screen. All three repeaters glowed with power, but there was neither sound nor vision.

  Harrison shouted, “I was afraid of this, Doctor. We strengthened the hull armor but had to cover the antenna housing with a plastic radome to allow two-way communications. The tools have found our weak spot. Now we are deaf, dumb and blind, too—and missing one leg because our port caterpillar tread won’t work.”

  The digger had come to rest on a flat shelf of rock in a large cavern which angled steeply into the subsurface. Above and behind them hung a great mass of the creature’s body material from which there was suspended thousands of rootlets which joined and rejoined until they became thick, silvery cables writhing motionlessly across the cavern floor, walls and roof before disappearing into the depths. Each cable had at least one bud sprouting from it, like a leaf of wrinkled tinfoil. The more well-developed buds quivered and were trying to take the shapes of the tools which were attacking the digger.

  “This is one of the places where it makes the tools,” she said, using a spotlight as pointer, “or should I say grows them—I still can’t decide whether this is an animal or vegetable life-form basically. The nervous system seems to be centered in this area, so it is almost certainly part of the brain as well. And it is sensitive—do you see how carefully the tools avoid those silver cables while they are attacking?”

  “We’ll do the same,” said Conway, then to Harrison, “That is, if you can move the digger on one track to that overhanging wall with the cables running along it, without crushing those two on the floor?”

  Damage in this sensitive area could have serious effects on their patient.

  The Lieutenant nodded and began rocking the digger forward and backward along the shelf until they were tight against the indicated wall. Protected by the sensitive cables above, the cavern floor below and the rocky wall on their starboard side, the tool attack was confined to their unprotected port side. They could once again hear themselves think, but Harrison pointed out firmly but apologetically that they could not climb the slope or dig their way out on one track, that they could not call for help and that they had air for only fourteen hours and then only if they sealed their suits to use their remaining tanked air.

  “Let’s do that now,” said Conway briskly, “and move outside. Station yourselves at each end of the digger, under the cables and with your backs to the cavern wall. That way you will have to think off attacks from the front only—any tool trying to cut through the rock behind you will make too much noise to take you by surprise. I also want you far enough from my position amidships so that your mental radiation will not affect the tools which I will be trying to control …”

  “I know that smug, self-satisfied look,” said Murchison to the Lieutenant as she began sealing her helmet. “Our Doctor has had a sudden rush of brains to the head. I think he intends talking to the patient.”

  “What language?” asked Harrison dryly.

  “I suppose,” said Conway, smiling to show the confidence which he did not feel, “you could call it three-dimensional Braille.”

  Quickly he explained what he hoped to do and a few minutes later they were in position outside the digger. Conway sat with his back to the port track housing a few feet from a water-filled depression in the cavern floor. There was a hole of unknown depth in the center of the depression where a cable or similar ore-extracting plant had eaten its way into the rock. To one side of him a group of seven or eight tools had merged together to encircle and squeeze the vehicle’s hull, and some of the armor was beginning to gape at the seams. Conway thought a break in the metal band and then he rolled it into the depression like a great lump of animated, silvery dough. Then he got down to work.

  Conway made no at
tempt to protect himself against attacking tools. He intended concentrating so hard on one particular shape that anything which came within mental range would, he hoped, lose its dangerous edges or points.

  Thought-shaping the creature’s outward aspect was easy. Within a few minutes there was a large, silvery pancake—a small-scale replica of the patient—lying in the center of the pool. But thinking three dimensionally of the mouths and their connecting tunnels and stomachs was not so easy. Even harder was the stage when he began thinking the tiny stomachs into expanding and contracting, sucking the gritty, algae-filled water into his scale model and expelling it again.

  It was a crude, oversimplified model. The best he could manage at one time was eight mouths and connecting stomachs, and he was very much afraid that it bore the same relation to the patient that a doll did to a living baby. But then he began to add the creeping motions he had observed in smaller, younger strata creatures, keeping the area around the central depression motionless, however, and hoping that with the pumping motions of the stomachs he was giving the impression of a living organism. The sweat poured off his forehead and into his eyes, but by then it did not matter that he could not see properly, because the sections he was shaping were out of sight anyway. Then he began to think certain areas solid, motionless, dead. He extended these dead, motionless and detail-less areas until gradually the whole model was a solid, lifeless lump.

  Then he blinked the sweat out of his eyes and started all over again, and then again, and suddenly the others were standing beside him.

  “They aren’t attacking us anymore,” said Harrison quietly, “and before they change their minds I am going to try fixing that damaged track. At least, there is no shortage of tools.”

  Murchison said, “Can I help—apart from keeping my mind blank to avoid warping your model?”

  Without looking up Conway said, “Yes, please. I’m going to take it through the same sequence once again, but halt it at the point where the dead areas extend to at the present time. When I do that I would like you to think the positions of our incisions and extend and widen them while I seal the severed throat tunnels and think the feeding and transfusion shafts. You withdraw the excised material a short distance and think it solid—dead, that is—while I try to get across the idea that the remainder is alive and twitching and likely to stay that way.”

  She caught on very quickly but Conway had no way of knowing if their patient had, or could, catch on. Behind them Harrison was at work on the damaged tread while before them their model of the patient and the effects of their present surgery became more and more detailed—right down to the miniature corrugated seals and what happened to the creature when one of them was collapsed. But still there was no indication from the patient that it understood what they were trying to tell it.

  Suddenly Conway stood up and began climbing the sloping floor. He said, “I’m sorry, I have to move out of range for a minute to catch my mental breath.”

  “Me, too,” she said a few minutes later. “I’ll join you … look!”

  Conway had been staring at the darkness of the cavern roof to rest both his mind and his eyes. He looked down quickly, thinking they were under attack again, and saw Murchison pointing at their model, their working model.

  Despite it being out of range of both their minds it had not slumped down or lost detail. Somebody was maintaining it exactly as they had been doing. All at once Conway forgot his physical and mental fatigue.

  Excitedly he said, “This must be its way of saying that it understands us. But we’ve got to widen communications, tell it more about ourselves. Go collect a few more tools and think a model of this cavern complete with nerve cables—I’ll shape the digger to scale with moving models of the three of us. They’ll be crude, of course, but to begin with we only need to get across the idea of our small size and vulnerability to tool attacks. Then we’ll move away for a short distance and shape a model of the digger in operation, then ’dozers, copters and scout-ship on the surface—nothing as big and complicated as Descartes, at least to begin with. We’ll have to keep everything very simple.”

  In a very short time the shelf around the digger was carpeted with models which were being maintained by the patient as soon as they were completed, and more and more tools were rolling heavily but very gently toward them eager to be shaped. But their visors were becoming almost opaque with perspiration and their suit air was running out. Murchison insisted that she had time for just one more shaping, a large one using upward of twenty tools, when Harrison appeared from behind the digger.

  “I have to go inside,” said the Lieutenant. “Unlike some people I have been working hard and burning up my ir …”

  “Kick him for me. You’re closer.”

  “ … But the digger will work at about quarter speed,” Harrison continued. “And if it doesn’t we may still be able to call for help. I used a tool to shape a new antenna—I knew the exact dimensions—so we may even get two-way vision—”

  He stopped abruptly, staring at what Murchison was doing to her tools.

  A little crossly she said, “As the pathologist of the party it is my job to tell the patient what we look, or rather feel, like. This model has a much simplified respiratory, digestive and circulatory system and, as you can see, articulation at all the main joints. Naturally, as I know a little more about myself than anyone else, this representative of mankind is in fact female. Equally important, I do not want to needlessly confuse the patient by adding clothes.”

  Harrison did not have enough oxygen left to reply. They followed him into the digger and, while Conway made contact with the surface, Murchison instinctively raised her hand in farewell to the cavern and the shapes of the tool models scattered across the shelf. She must have been thinking very hard about her good-bye because her last model raised its hand also and kept it there while the digger crawled slowly out of mental range.

  Suddenly all three repeaters were alive and Dermod was staring at him, his face reflecting concern, relief and excitement in sequence and then altogether. He said, “Doctor, I thought we’d lost you—you blanked out four hours ago. But I can report progress. The incision is proceeding and all tool attacks ceased half an hour ago. There is no tool trouble reported from the tunnel seals, the decontamination teams, the transfusion shafts anywhere. Doctor, is this a temporary condition?”

  Conway let his breath go in a long, loud sigh of relief. Their patient was a very bright lad despite its physically slow reaction times. He shook his head and said, “You will have no more trouble from the tools. In fact, you will find them of assistance in helping maintain equipment and for use in awkward sections of the incision once we make it understand our needs. You can also forget about digging that isolation trench—our patient retains enough mobility to withdraw itself from the newly excised material—which means that ships which would have been tied up in digging that trench will now be free to extend the incision more rapidly, so that our operation will be completed in a fraction of the time originally thought necessary.

  “You see, sir,” Conway ended, “we now have the active cooperation of our patient.”

  Major surgery was completed in just under four months and Conway was ordered back to Sector General. Postoperative treatment would take a great many years and would proceed in conjunction with the exploration of Drambo and the closer investigation of its life-forms and cultures. Before leaving, while he was still seriously troubled by the thought of the casualty figures, Conway had once questioned the value of what they had done. A rather supercilious cultural contact specialist had tried to make it very simple for him by saying that difference, whether it was cultural, physiological or technological, was immensely valuable. They would learn much from the strata creature and the rollers while they were teaching them. Conway, with some difficulty, accepted that. He could also accept the fact that, as a surgeon, his work on Drambo was done. It was much harder to accept the fact that the pathology team, particularly one member of it, sti
ll had a lot of work to do.

  While O’Mara did not openly enjoy his anguish, neither did he display sympathy.

  “Stop suffering so loudly in silence, Conway,” said the Chief Psychologist on his return, “and sublimate yourself—preferably in quicklime. But failing that there is always work, and an odd case has just come in which you might like to look at. I’m being polite, of course. It is your case as of now. Observe.”

  The large visiscreen behind O’Mara’s desk came to life and he went on. “This beastie was found in one of the hitherto unexplored regions, the victim of an accident which virtually cut its ship and itself in two. Airtight bulkheads sealed off the undamaged section and your patient was able to withdraw itself, or some of itself, before they closed. It was a large ship, filled with some kind of nutrient earth, and the victim is still alive—or should I say half alive. You see, we don’t know which half of it we rescued. Well?”

  Conway stared at the screen, already devising methods of immobilizing a section of the patient for examination and treatment, of synthesizing supplies of that nutrient soil which now must be virtually sucked dry, and for studying the wreck’s controls to gain data on its sensory equipment. If the accident which had wrecked its ship had been due to an explosion in the power plant, which was likely, then this might well be the front half containing the brain.

  His new patient was not quite the Midgard Serpent but it did not fall far short of it. Twisting and coiling it practically filled the enormous hangar deck which had been emptied to accommodate it.

  “Well?” said O’Mara again.

  Conway stood up. Before turning to go he grinned and said, “Small, isn’t it?”

  BOOKS BY JAMES WHITE

  The Secret Visitor (1957)