Read Sector General Omnibus 1 - Beginning Operations Online

Authors: James White

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BOOK: Sector General Omnibus 1 - Beginning Operations
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Something smashed into his back with a force that knocked the breath out of him. For a heart-freezing moment he thought his air-tanks had gone, his suit torn open and that he was already sucking frenziedly at vacuum. But his gasp of pure terror brought air rushing into his lungs. Conway had never known canned air to taste so good.
The AACL’s tentacle had only caught him a glancing blow—his back wasn’t broken—and the only damage was a wrecked suit radio.
“Are you all right?” Conway asked anxiously when he had Williamson settled in the compartment above. He had to press his helmet against the other’s—that was the only way he could make himself heard now.
For several minutes there was no reply, then the weary, pain-wrecked near-whisper returned.
“My arms hurt. I’m tired,” it said haltingly. “But I’ll be OK when … they take me … inside.” Williamson paused, his voice seemed to gather strength from somewhere and he went on, “That is if there is anybody left alive in the hospital to treat me. If you don’t stop our friend down there …”
Sudden anger flared in Conway. “Dammit, do you never give up?” he burst out. “Get this, I’m not going to kill an intelligent being! My radio’s gone so I don’t have to listen to Lister and Mannon yammering at me, and all I’ve got to do to shut you up is pull my helmet away from yours.”
The Monitor’s voice had weakened again. He said, “I can still hear Mannon and Lister. They say the wards in Section Eight have been hit now—that’s the other low-gravity section. Patients and doctors are pinned flat to the floor under three Gs. A few more minutes like that and they’ll never get up—MSVKs aren’t at all sturdy, you know …”
“Shut up!” yelled Conway. Furiously, he pulled away from contact.
When his anger had abated enough for him to see again, Conway observed that the Monitor’s lips were no longer moving. Williamson’s eyes were closed, his face gray and sweaty with shock and he did not seem to be breathing. The drying chemicals in his helmet kept the face-plate from fogging, so that Conway could not tell for sure but the Monitor could very easily be dead. With exhaustion held off by repeated pep-shots, then his injuries on top of that, Conway had expected him to be dead long since. For some peculiar reason Conway felt his eyes stinging.
He had seen so much death and dismemberment over the last few hours that his sensitivity to suffering in others had been blunted to the point where he reacted to it merely as a medical machine. This feeling of loss, of bereavement, for the Monitor must be simply a resurgence of that sensitivity, and temporary. Of one thing he was sure, however, nobody was going to make this medical machine commit a murder. The Monitor Corps, Conway now knew, was responsible for a lot more good than bad, but he was not a Monitor.
Yet O’Mara and Lister were both Monitors and Doctors, one of them renowned throughout the Galaxy. Are you better than they are? a little
voice nagged in his mind somewhere. And you’re all alone now, it went on, with the hospital disorganized and people dying all over the place because of that being down there. What do you think your chances of survival are? The way you came is plugged with wreckage and nobody can come to your aid, so you’re going to die, too. Isn’t that so?
 
 
Desperately Conway tried to hang on to his resolution, to draw it tightly around him like a shell. But that insistent, that cowardly voice in his brain was putting cracks in it. It was with a sense of pure relief that he saw the Monitor’s lips moving again. He touched helmets quickly.
“ … Hard for you, a Doctor,” the voice came faintly, “but you’ve got to. Just suppose you were that being down below, driven mad with fear and pain maybe, and for a moment you became sane and somebody told you what you had done—what you were doing, and the deaths you had caused …” The voice wavered, sank, then returned. “Wouldn’t you
want
to die rather than go on killing … ?”
“But I
can’t
… !”
“Wouldn’t you
want
to die, in its place?”
Conway felt the defensive shell of his resolution begin to disintegrate around him. He said desperately, in a last attempt to hold firm, to stave off the awful decision, “Well, maybe, but I couldn’t kill it even if I tried—it would tear me to pieces before I got near it …”
“I’ve got a gun,” said the Monitor.
Conway could not remember adjusting the firing controls, or even taking the weapon from the Monitor’s holster. It was in his hand and trained on the AACL below, and Conway felt sick and cold. But he had not given in to Williamson completely. Near at hand was a sprayer of the fast-setting plastic which, when used quickly enough, could sometimes save a person whose suit had been holed. Conway planned to wound the being, immobilize it, then re-seal its suit with cement. It would be a close thing and risky to himself, but he could not deliberately kill the being.
Carefully he brought his other hand up to steady the gun and took aim. He fired.
When he lowered it there was not much left except shredded twitching pieces of tentacles scattered all over the room. Conway wished now that he had known more about guns, known that this one shot explosive bullets, and that it had been set for continuous automatic fire …
Williamson’s lips were moving again. Conway touched helmets out
of pure reflex. He was past caring about anything anymore.
“ … It’s all right, Doctor,” the Monitor was saying. “It isn’t anybody …”
“It isn’t anybody now,” Conway agreed. He went back to examining the Monitor’s gun and wished that it wasn’t empty. If there had been one bullet left, just one, he knew how he would have used it.
 
 
“It was hard, we know that,” said Major O’Mara. The rasp was no longer in his voice and the iron-gray eyes were soft with sympathy, and something akin to pride. “A doctor doesn’t have to make a decision like that usually until he’s older, more balanced, mature, if ever. You are, or were, just an over-idealistic kid—a bit on the smug and self-righteous side maybe—who didn’t even know what a Monitor really was.”
O’Mara smiled. His two big, hard hands rested on Conway’s shoulders in an oddly fatherly gesture. He went on, “Doing what you forced yourself to do could have ruined both your career and your mental stability. But it doesn’t matter, you don’t have to feel guilty about a thing. Everything’s all right.”
Conway wished dully that he had opened his face-plate and ended it all before those Engineers had swarmed into the gravity grid control room and carried Williamson and himself off to O‘Mara. O’Mara must be mad. He, Conway, had violated the prime ethic of his profession and killed an intelligent being. Everything most definitely was not all right.
“Listen to me,” O‘Mara said seriously. “The Communications boys managed to get a picture of the crashed ship’s control room, with the occupant in it, before it hit. The occupant was not your AACL, understand? It was an AMSO, one of the bigger life-forms who are in the habit of keeping a non-intelligent AACL-type creature as pets. Also, there are no AACLs listed in the hospital, so the beastie you killed was simply the equivalent of a fear-maddened dog in a protective suit.” O’Mara shook Conway’s shoulder until his head wobbled. “Now do you feel better?”
Conway felt himself coming alive again. He nodded wordlessly.
“You can go,” said O’Mara, smiling, “and catch up on your sleep. As for the reorientation talk, I’m afraid I haven’t the time to spare. Remind me about it sometime, if you still think you need it …”
During the fourteen hours in which Conway slept, the intake of wounded dropped to a manageable trickle, and news came that the war was over. Monitor engineers and maintenance men succeeded in clearing the wreckage and repairing the damaged outer hull. With pressure restored, the internal repair work proceeded rapidly, so that when Conway awoke and went in search of Dr. Mannon he found patients being moved into a section which only hours ago had been a dark, airless tangle of wreckage.
He tracked his superior down in a side ward off the main FGLI Casualty section. Mannon was working over a badly burned DBLF whose caterpillar-like body was dwarfed by a table which was designed to take the more massive Tralthan FGLIs. Two other DBLFs, under sedation, showed as white mounds on a similarly outsize bed against the wall, and another lay twitching slightly on a stretcher-carrier near the door.
“Where the blazes have you been?” Mannon said in a voice too tired to be angry. Before Conway could reply he went on impatiently, “Oh, don’t tell me. Everybody is grabbing everybody else’s staff, and junior interns have to do as they’re told …”
Conway felt his face going red. Suddenly he was ashamed of that fourteen hours sleep, but was too much of a coward to correct Mannon’s wrong assumption. Instead he said, “Can I help, sir?”
“Yes,” said Mannon, waving toward his patients. “But these are going to be tricky. Punctured and incised wounds, deep. Metallic fragments still within the body, abdominal damage and severe internal hemorrhage. You won’t be able to do much without a tape. Go get it. And come straight back, mind!”
A few minutes later he was in O’Mara’s office absorbing the DBLF physiology tape. This time he didn’t flinch from the Major’s hands. While the headband was being removed he asked, “How is Corpsman Williamson?”
“He’ll live,” said O’Mara dryly. “The bones were set by a Diagnostician. Williamson won’t dare die …”
Conway rejoined Mannon as quickly as possible. He was experiencing the characteristic mental double-vision and had to resist the urge to crawl on his stomach, so he knew that the DBLF tape was taking. The caterpillar-like inhabitants of Kelgia were very close to Earth-humans both in basic metabolism and temperament, so there was less of the confusion he had encountered with the earlier Telfi tape. But it gave him
an affinity for the beings he was treating which was actually painful.
The concept of gun, bullet and target was a very simple one—just point, pull the trigger, and the target is dead or disabled. The bullet didn’t think at all, the pointer didn’t think enough, and the target … suffered.
Conway had seen too many disabled targets recently, and lumps of metal which had plowed their way into them leaving red craters in torn flesh, bone splinters and ruptured blood vessels. In addition there was the long, painful process of recovery. Anyone who would inflict such damage on a thinking, feeling entity deserved something much more painful than the Monitor corrective psychiatry.
A few days previously Conway would have been ashamed of such thoughts—and he was now, a little. He wondered if recent events had initiated in him a process of moral degeneration, or was it that he was merely beginning to grow up?
Five hours later they were through. Mannon gave his nurse instructions to keep the four patients under observation, but told her to get something to eat first. She was back within minutes carrying a large pack of sandwiches and bearing the news that their dining hall had been taken over by Tralthan Male Medical. Shortly after that Dr. Mannon went to sleep in the middle of his second sandwich. Conway loaded him onto the stretcher-carrier and took him to his room. On the way out he was collared by a Tralthan Diagnostician who ordered him to a DBDG casualty section.
This time Conway found himself working on targets of his own species and his maturing, or moral degeneration, increased. He had begun to think that the Monitor Corps was too damned soft with some people.
 
 
Three weeks later Sector General was back to normal. All but the most seriously wounded patients had been transferred to their local planetary hospitals. The damage caused by the colliding spaceship had been repaired. Tralthan Male Medical had vacated the dining hall, and Conway no longer had to snatch his meals off assorted instrument trolleys. But if things were back to normal for the hospital as a whole, such was not the case with Conway personally.
He was taken off ward duty completely and transferred to a mixed group of Earth-humans and e-ts—most of whom were senior to himself—taking a course of lectures in Ship Rescue. Some of the difficulties experienced in fishing survivors out of wrecked ships, especially those
which contained still-functioning power sources, made Conway open his eyes. The course ended with an interesting, if back-breaking, practical which he managed to pass, and was followed by a more cerebral course in e-t comparative philosophy. Running at the same time was a series on contamination emergencies: what to do if the methane section sprung a leak and the temperature threatened to rise above minus one-forty, what to do if a chlorine-breather was exposed to oxygen, or a water-breather was strangling in air, or vice-versa. Conway had shuddered at the idea of some of his fellow students trying to give him artificial respiration—some of whom weighed half a ton!—but luckily there was no practical at the end of that course.
Every one of the lecturers stressed the importance of rapid and accurate classification of incoming patients, who very often were in no condition to give this information themselves. In the four-letter classification system the first letter was a guide to the general metabolism, the second to the number and distribution of limbs and sense organs, and the rest to a combination of pressure and gravity requirements, which also gave an indication of the physical mass and form of protective tegument a being possessed. A, B and C first letters were water-breathers. D and F warm-blooded oxygen-breathers into which classification most of the intelligent races fell. G to K were also oxygen-breathing, but insectile, light-gravity beings. L and M were also light-gravity, but bird-like. The chlorine-breathers were contained in the O and P classifications. After that came the weirdies-—radiation-eaters, frigid-blooded or crystalline beings, entities capable of changing physical shape at will, and those possessing various forms of extra-sensory powers. Telepathic species such as the Telfi were given the prefix V. The lecturers would flash a three-second picture of an e-t foot or a section of tegument onto the screen, and if Conway could not rattle off an accurate classification from this glimpse, sarcastic words would be said.
It was all very interesting stuff, but Conway began to worry a little when he realized that six weeks had passed without him even seeing a patient. He decided to call O’Mara and ask what for—in a respectful, roundabout way, of course.
“Naturally you want back to the wards,” O’Mara said, when Conway finally arrived at the point. “Dr. Mannon would like you back, too. But I may have a job for you and don’t want you tied up anywhere else. But don’t feel that you are simply marking time. You are learning some useful stuff, Doctor. At least, I hope you are. Off.”
As Conway replaced the intercom mike he was thinking that a lot of the things he was learning had regard to Major O‘Mara himself. There wasn’t a course of lectures on the Chief Psychologist, but there might well have been, because every lecture had O’Mara creeping into it somewhere. And he was only beginning to realize how close he had come to being kicked out of the hospital for his behavior during the Telfi episode.
O’Mara bore the rank of Major in the Monitor Corps, but Conway had learned that within the hospital it was difficult to draw a limiting line to his authority. As Chief Psychologist he was responsible for the mental health of all the widely varied individuals and species on the staff, and the avoidance of friction between them.
Given even the highest qualities of tolerance and mutual respect in its personnel, there were still occasions when friction occurred. Potentially dangerous situations arose through ignorance or misunderstanding, or a being could develop a xenophobic neurosis which might affect its efficiency, or mental stability, or both. An Earth-human doctor, for instance, who had a subconscious fear of spiders would not be able to bring to bear on an Illensan patient the proper degree of clinical detachment necessary for its treatment. So it was O’Mara’s job to detect and eradicate such signs of trouble—or if all else failed—remove the potentially dangerous individual before such friction became open conflict. This guarding against wrong, unhealthy or intolerant thinking was a duty which he performed with such zeal that Conway had heard him likened to a latter-day Torquemada.
E-ts on the staff whose home-planet histories did not contain an equivalent of the Inquisition likened him to other things, and often called him them to his face. But in O’Mara’s book Justifiable Invective was not indicative of wrong thinking, so there were no serious repercussions.
O’Mara was
not
responsible for the psychological shortcomings of patients in the hospital, but because it was so often impossible to tell when a purely physical pain left off and a psychosomatic one began, he was consulted in these cases also.
The fact that the Major had detached him from ward duty could mean either promotion or demotion. If Mannon wanted him back, however, then the job which O‘Mara had in mind for him must be of greater importance. So Conway was pretty certain that he was not in any trouble with O’Mara, which was a very nice way to feel. But curiosity was killing him.
Then next morning he received orders to present himself at the office of the Chief Psychologist …
BOOK: Sector General Omnibus 1 - Beginning Operations
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