Read Sector General Omnibus 1 - Beginning Operations Online

Authors: James White

Sector General Omnibus 1 - Beginning Operations (21 page)

BOOK: Sector General Omnibus 1 - Beginning Operations
7.84Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads
But the Colonel merely nodded and dropped the subject. Conway relaxed, a little, and said quickly, “Dr. Prilicla, I would like a discussion with you on the patient’s emotional state during the past few minutes, but later. Thank you again, gentlemen, for your advice and assistance …”
He was practically kicking them out, and their expressions told him that they knew it—there was going to be some very searching questions asked about his behavior in this affair by O’Mara, but at the moment Conway didn’t care. When they had gone he told Kursedd to make a visual check on the patient’s condition every half-hour, and to call him if there was any change. Then he headed for his room.
Conway often groused at the tininess of the place where he slept, kept his few personal possessions, and infrequently entertained colleagues, but now its very smallness was comforting. He sat down as there was no room to pace about. He began to extend and fill in the picture which had come in a single flash of insight back in the ward.
Really, the thing had been staring him in the face from the very beginning. First there had been the wreck’s artificial gravity grids—Conway had stupidly overlooked the fact that they did not have to be
operated at full power, but could be turned to any point between zero and five-Gs. Then there had been the air-supply layout—confusing only because he had not realized that it had been designed to many different forms of life instead of only one. And there had been the physical condition of the survivor, and the color of the outer hull—a nice, urgent, dramatic orange. Earth ships of that type, even surface vessels, were traditionally painted white.
The wreck was an ambulance ship.
But interstellar vessels of any kind were products of an advanced technical culture which must cover, or shortly hope to cover, many solar systems. And when a culture progressed to the point where such ships reached the stage of simplification and specialization which had been reached here, then that race was highly advanced indeed. In the Galactic Federation only the cultures of Illensa, Traltha and Earth had reached that stage, and their spheres of influence were tremendous. How could a culture of that size have remained hidden for so long?
Conway squirmed uneasily in his couch: he had the answer to that question, too.
Summerfield had said that the wreck was the worst damaged section of a ship, the other half of which could be presumed to have continued under its own power to the nearest repair base. So the section containing the survivor had been torn from the ship during the original accident, which meant that the course constants of this unpowered fragment had to be the same as that of the ship as a whole before the disaster.
The ship had been coming, then, from a planet which was listed as uninhabited. But in a hundred years someone could have set up a base there, or even a colony. And the ambulance ship had been heading away from that world and into intergalactic space …
A culture which had crossed from one Galaxy to plant a colony on the fringes of this one, Conway thought grimly, had to be treated with great respect. And caution. Especially since its only representative so far could not, by any stretch of toleration or semantic work-juggling, be considered nice. And the survivor’s race, probably highly advanced medically might not take kindly to news that someone was botching the treatment of one of their sick. On the present evidence Conway thought that they would not take kindly to anything or anybody.
Interstellar wars of conquest were logistically impossible, Conway knew. But the same did not apply to simple wars of annihilation, where planetary atmospheres were exploded or otherwise rendered useless forever
with no thought of eventual occupation or assimilation. Remembering his last contact with the patient, Conway wondered if at last they had encountered a completely vicious and inimical race.
The communicator buzzed suddenly. It was Kursedd reporting that the patient had been quiet for the last hour, but that the growth seemed to be spreading rapidly and threatened to cover one of the being’s breathing openings. Conway said he would be along presently. He put out a call for Dr. Prilicla, then sat down again.
He dare not tell anyone of his discovery, Conway told himself as he resumed his interrupted thought. To do so would mean a force of Monitors swarming out there to make premature contact—premature, that was, so far as Conway was concerned. For he was afraid that that first meeting between cultures would be in the nature of an ideological head-on collision, and the only possibility of cushioning the shock would be if the Federation could show that they had rescued, taken care of, and cured one of the intergalactic colonists.
Of course there was the possibility that the patient was atypical of its race, that it was mentally ill as O’Mara had suggested. But Conway doubted if the aliens would consider that an excuse for not curing it. And against that idea was the fact that the patient had had logical—to it—reasons for being afraid and hating the person trying to help it. For a moment Conway wondered wildly if there was such a thing as a contraterrene mind, a mentality wherein assistance produced feelings of hate instead of gratitude. Even the fact of its being found in an ambulance was no reassurance. To people like himself the concept of an ambulance had altruistic implications, errands of mercy, and so on. But many races, even within the Federation, tended to look upon illness as mere physical inefficiency and corrected it as such.
As he left his room Conway did not have the faintest idea of how to go about curing his patient. Neither, he knew, did he have much time to do it in. At the moment, Captain Summerfield, Hendricks and the others investigating the wreck were too dazzled by a multiplicity of puzzles to think about anything else. But it was only a matter of time before they got around to it, a matter of days or even hours, and then they would come to the same conclusions as had Conway.
Shortly thereafter the Monitor Corps would make contact with the aliens, who would naturally want to know about their ailing brother, who by that time would have to be either cured or well on the way to recovery.
Or else.
The thought which Conway tried desperately to keep from thinking was:
What if the patient died … ?
 
 
Before beginning the next examination he questioned Prilicla regarding the patient’s emotional state, but learned nothing new. The being was now motionless and practically unconscious. When Conway spoke to it via the Translator it emoted fear, even when Prilicla assured him that it understood what he was saying.
“I will not harm you,” Conway said slowly and distinctly into the Translator, moving closer as he spoke, “but it is necessary that I touch you. Please believe me, I mean no harm …” He looked enquiringly at Prilicla.
The GLNO said, “Fear and … and helplessness. Also acceptance mixed with threats … no, warnings. Apparently it believes what you say, but is trying to warn you about something.”
This was more promising, Conway thought. It was warning him, but it didn’t mind him touching it. He moved closer and gently touched the being with his gloved hand on one of the unaffected areas of tegument.
He grunted with the violence of the blow which knocked his arm aside. He backed away hurriedly, rubbing his arm, then switched off the Translator so as to give vent to his feelings.
After a respectful pause, the GLNO said, “We have obtained a very important datum, Dr. Conway. Despite the physical reaction, the patient’s feelings toward you are exactly the same as they were before you touched it.”
“So what?” said Conway irritably.
“So that the reaction must be involuntary.”
Conway digested that for a moment, then said disgustedly, “It also means we can’t risk a general anesthetic, even if we had one, because the heart and lungs use involuntary muscles, too. That’s another complication. We can’t knock it out and it won’t cooperate …” He moved to the ward control panel and pushed buttons. The clamps holding the net opened and the net itself was whisked away by a grab. He went on, “It keeps injuring itself on that net, you can see where it has nearly lost another appendage.”
Prilicla objected to the removal of the net, saying that if the patient was free to move about it was more likely than ever to injure itself. Conway pointed out that in its present posture—head to tail and underbelly,
which contained its five sets of tentacles, facing outward—it could do little moving about. And now that he thought of it, that position looked like the perfect defensive stance for the creature. It reminded him of the way an Earth cat lies on its side during a fight, so as to bring all four of its claws to bear. This was a ten-legged cat who could defend itself from all directions at once.
Built-in involuntary reactions of that order were the product of evolution. But why should the being adopt this defensive position and make itself completely unapproachable at the time when it needed help the most …?
Suddenly, like a great light bursting in his mind, Conway knew the answer. Or, he amended with cautious excitement, he was near ninety percent sure that he did.
 
 
They had all been making wrong assumptions about this case from the start. His new theory hinged on the fact that they had made a further wrong assumption, single, simple and basic. Given that then the patient’s hostility, physical posture and mental state could all be explained. It even indicated the only possible line of treatment to be taken. Best of all, it gave Conway reason for thinking that the patient might not belong to the type of vicious and implacably hostile race which its behavior had led him to believe.
The only trouble with the new theory was that it, also, might be wrong.
His first wild enthusiasm waned and his degree of certainty dropped to the mid-eighties. Another trouble was that he could not possibly discuss his intended line of treatment with anyone. To do so might mean demotion, and to insist on carrying through with it would mean his dismissal from the hospital should the patient die. What he contemplated was as serious as that.
Conway approached the patient again and switched on the Translator. He knew before he spoke what the reaction would be so it was probably an act of wanton cruelty to say the words, but he had to test this theory once more for his own reassurance. He said, “Don’t worry, young fellow, we’ll have you back the way you were in no time …”
The reaction was so violent that Dr. Prilicla, whose empathic faculty made it feel everything which the patient felt at full intensity, had to leave the ward.
It was only then that Conway finally made his decision.
 
 
During the three days which followed, Conway visited the ward regularly. He took careful notes on the rate of growth of the thick, fibrous encrustation which now covered two thirds of the patient’s body. There could be no doubt that it was both accelerating and growing thicker. He sent specimens to Pathology, which reported that the patient appeared to be suffering from a peculiar and particularly virulent form of skin cancer and asked if curative radiation or surgery was possible. Conway replied that in this opinion neither were possible without grave danger to the patient.
About the most constructive thing he did during that time was to post instructions that anyone contacting the patient via Translator was to avoid trying to reassure it at all costs. The being had suffered too much already from that form of well-meaning stupidity. If Conway could have forbidden entrance to the ward to everyone but Kursedd, Prilicla and himself he would have done so.
But the greater part of his time was spent in trying to convince himself that he was doing the right thing.
Conway had been deliberately avoiding Dr. Mannon since the original examination. He did not want his old friend discussing the case with him, because Mannon was too smart to be foisted off with double talk, and Conway could not tell even him the truth. He thought longingly that the ideal situation would be for Captain Summerfield to be kept too busy at the wreck to put two and two together, for O’Mara and Skempton to forget his existence, and for Mannon to keep his nose completely out of the affair.
But that was not to be.
 
 
Dr. Mannon was waiting for him in the ward when he made his second morning visit on the fifth day. Properly he requested Conway’s permission to look at the patient. Then with this polite formality over he said, “ … Listen, you young squirt, I’m getting fed up with you gazing abstractedly at your boots or the ceiling every time I come near you—if I hadn’t got the hide of a Tralthan I’d feel slighted. I know, of course, that newly-appointed Seniors take their responsibilities very heavily for the first few weeks, but your recent behavior has been downright rude.”
He held up his hand before Conway could speak, and went on, “I
accept your apology, and now to business. I’ve been talking to Prilicla and the people up in Pathology. They tell me that the growth now completely covers the body, that it is opaque to X rays of safe intensities and that the replacement and workings of the patient’s internal organs can now only be guessed at. You can’t cut the stuff away under anesthetic because paralyzing the appendages might knock out the heart, too. Yet an operation is impossible with those limbs whipping about. At the same time the patient is weakening and will continue to do so unless given food, which can’t be done unless its mouth is freed. To complicate matters further your later specimens show that the growth is extending inward rapidly as well, and there are indications that if the operation isn’t done quickly the mouth and tail will have fused together. Is that, in a rather large nutshell, it?”
Conway nodded.
Mannon took a deep breath, then plunged on, “Suppose you amputate the limbs and remove the covering growth from head and tail, replacing the tegument with a suitable synthetic. With the patient able to take nourishment it would shortly be strong enough for the process to be repeated over the rest of its body. It is a drastic procedure, I admit. But in the circumstances it seems to be the only one which could save the patient’s life. And there is always the possibility of successful grafting or artificial members—”
BOOK: Sector General Omnibus 1 - Beginning Operations
7.84Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

The Bed and the Bachelor by The Bed, the Bachelor
Hook'd by Taisha S. Ryan
Just Married...Again by Charlotte Hughes
The Bookshop on Autumn Lane by Cynthia Tennent
Because of a Girl by Janice Kay Johnson
1913 by Florian Illies