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Authors: James White

Sector General Omnibus 1 - Beginning Operations (44 page)

BOOK: Sector General Omnibus 1 - Beginning Operations
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During the remainder of the day there was no great response, nor had he expected any, but on the second day nursing staff of all shapes and species began approaching him with elaborate secrecy to tell of incidents which invariably had happened to a third party. Conway noted times and places carefully while showing no curiosity whatever regarding the identities of the persons concerned. Then on the morning of the third day Mannon sought him out during his rounds.
“You’re really working at this thing, aren’t you, Conway,” Mannon said harshly, then added, “I’m grateful. Loyalty is nice even when it’s misplaced. But I wish you would stop. You’re heading for serious trouble.”
Conway said, “You’re the one in trouble, Doctor, not me.”
“That’s what you think,” said Mannon gruffly. “I’ve just come from O’Mara’s office. He wants to see you. Forthwith.”
A few minutes later Conway was being waved into the inner sanctum by one of O‘Mara’s assistants, who was trying hard to warn him of impending doom with his eyebrows while commiserating with him by turning down the corners of his mouth. The combination of expressions looked so ridiculous that Conway found himself inside before he realized it, facing a very angry O’Mara with what must have been a stupid grin on his face.
The psychologist stabbed a finger in the direction of the least comfortable
chair and shouted, “What the blazes do you mean by infesting the hospital with a disembodied intelligence?”
“What … ?” began Conway.
“ … Are you trying to make a fool of yourself?” O’Mara stormed on, disregarding him. “Or make a fool out of
me
? Don’t interrupt! Granted you’re the youngest Senior in the place and your colleagues—none of whom specialize in applied psychology, let me add—think highly of you. But such idiotic and irresponsible behavior is worthy only of a patient in the psychiatric wards!
“Junior staff discipline is going to pot, thanks to you,” O’Mara went on, a little more quietly. “It is now becoming the done thing to make mistakes! Practically every Charge Nurse in the place is screaming for me—me!—to get rid of the thing! All
you
did was invent this invisible, undetectable, insubstantial monster—apparently the job of getting rid of it is the responsibility of the Chief Psychologist!”
O’Mara paused to catch his breath, and when he continued his tone had become quiet and almost polite. He said, “And don’t think that you are fooling anyone. Boiled down to its simplest terms, you are hoping that if enough other mistakes are made your friend’s will pass relatively unnoticed. And stop opening and closing your mouth—your turn to talk will come! One of the aspects of this whole situation which really troubles me is that I share responsibility for it in that I gave you an insoluble problem hoping that you might attack it from a new angle—an angle which might give a partial solution, enough to let our friend off the hook. Instead you created a new and perhaps worse problem!
“I may have exaggerated things a little because of excusable annoyance, Doctor,” O’Mara went on quietly, “but the fact remains that you may be in serious trouble over this business. I don’t believe that the nursing staff will deliberately make mistakes—at least, not of the order which would endanger their patients. But
any
relaxation of standards is dangerous, obviously. Do you begin to see what you’ve been doing, Doctor?”
“Yes, sir,” said Conway.
“I see that you do,” O’Mara said with uncharacteristic mildness. “And now I would like to know why you did it. Well, Doctor?”
Conway took his time about answering. This was not the first time he had left the Chief Psychologist’s office with his ego singed around the edges, but this time it looked serious. The generally held opinion was that when O‘Mara was not unduly concerned over, or in some cases when
he actually liked an individual, the psychologist felt able to relax with them and be his bad-tempered, obnoxious self, but when O’Mara became quiet and polite and not at all sarcastic, when he began treating a person as a patient rather than a colleague in other words, that person was in trouble up to his or its neck.
Finally, Conway said, “At first it was simply a story to explain why I was being so nosy, sir. Nurses don’t tell tales and it might have looked as if that was what I wanted them to do. All I did was suggest that as Doctor Mannon was in all respects fit, outside physical agencies such as e-t bacteria or parasites and the like were ruled out because of the thoroughness of our aseptic procedures. You, sir, had already reassured us regarding his mental condition. I postulated an … an outside, nonmaterial cause which might or might not be consciously directed.
“I haven’t anything so definite as a theory about it,” Conway went on quickly. “Nor did I mention disembodied intelligences to anyone, but something odd happened in that theater, and not only during the time of Mannon’s operation …”
He described the echo effect Prilicla had detected while monitoring Mannon’s emotional radiation, and the similar effect when Naydrad had had the accident with the knife. There was also the later incident of the Melfan intern whose sprayer wouldn’t spray—their mandibles weren’t suited to surgical gloves so that they painted them with plastic before an op. When the intern had tried to use the sprayer it oozed what the Melfan described as metallic porridge. Later the sprayer in question could not be found. Perhaps it had never existed. And there were other peculiar incidents. Mistakes which seemed a little too simple for trained staff to make—errors in instrument counts, dropping things, and all seeming to involve a certain amount of temporary mental confusion and perhaps outright hallucination.
“ … So far there has not been enough to make a statistically meaningful sample,” Conway went on, “but they are enough to make me curious. I’d give you their names if I wasn’t sworn to keep them confidential, because I think
you
would be interested in the way they describe some of these incidents.”
“Possibly, Doctor,” said O’Mara coldly. “On the other hand I might not want to lend my professional support to a figment of your imagination by investigating such trivia. As for the near-accidents with scalpels and the other mistakes, it is my opinion that some people are lucky, others
a little bit stupid at times, while others are fond of pulling other peoples’ legs. Well, Doctor?”
Conway took a firmer grip on the arms of his chair and said doggedly, “The dropped scalpel was an FROB Type Six, a very heavy, unbalanced instrument. Even if it had struck handle first it would have spun into Naydrad’s side a few inches below the point of impact and caused a deep and serious wound—if the blade had any actual physical existence at all! This is something I’m beginning to doubt. That is why I think we should widen the scope of this investigation. May I have permission to see Colonel Skempton and if necessary contact the Corps survey people, to check on the origins of recent arrivals?”
The expected explosion did not come. Instead O’Mara’s voice sounded almost sympathetic as he said, “I cannot decide whether you are honestly convinced that you’re onto something or simply that you’ve gone too far to back down without looking ridiculous. So far as I’m concerned you couldn’t look anymore ridiculous at the moment. You should not be afraid to admit you were wrong, Doctor, and begin repairing some of the damage to discipline your irresponsibility has caused.”
O’Mara waited precisely ten seconds for Conway’s reply, then he said, “Very well, Doctor. See the Colonel. And tell Prilicla I’m rearranging its schedule—it may be helpful to have your emotional echo-detector available at all times. Since you insist on making a fool of yourself you might as well do it properly. Afterward—well, we will be very sorry to see Mannon go, and in all honesty I suppose I must say the same about you. Both of you are likely to be on the same ship out …”
A few seconds later he was dismissed very quietly.
 
 
Mannon himself had accused Conway of misguided loyalty and now O‘Mara had suggested that his present stand was the result of not wanting to admit to a mistake. He had been given an out, which he had refused to take, and now the thought of service in the smaller multienvironment hospital, or even a planet-side establishment where the arrival of an e-t patient would be considered a major event, was beginning to come home to him. It gave him an unpleasantly gone feeling in the abdominal area. Maybe he was basing his theory on too little evidence and refusing to admit it. Maybe the odd errors were part of an entirely different puzzle, with no connection whatever with Mannon’s trouble. As he strode along
the corridors, taking evading action or being evaded every few yards, the impulse grew in him to rush back to O’Mara, say yes to everything, apologize abjectly and promise to be a good boy. But by the time he was ready to give into it he was outside Colonel Skempton’s door.
Sector General was supplied and to a large extent maintained by the Monitor Corps, which was the Federation’s executive and law-enforcement arm. As the senior Corps officer in the hospital, Colonel Skempton handled traffic to and from the hospital in addition to a horde of other administrative details. It was said that the top of his desk had never been visible since the day it arrived. When Conway was shown in he looked up, said “Good morning,” looked down at his desk and said, “Ten minutes …”
It took much longer than ten minutes. Conway was interested in traffic from odd points of origin, or ships which had called at such places. He wanted data on the level of technology, medical science and physiological classification of their inhabitants—especially if the psychological sciences or psionics were well-developed or if the incidence of mental illness was unusually high. Skempton began excavating among the papers on his desk.
But the supply ship, ambulances and ships pressed into emergency service as ambulances which had arrived during the past few weeks had originated from Federation worlds which were well known and medically innocuous. All except one, that was—the Cultural Contact and Survey vessel
Descartes.
It had landed, very briefly, on a most unusual planet. She was on the ground, if it could be called that, for only a few minutes. None of the crew had left the ship, the air-locks had remained sealed and the samples of air, water and surface material were drawn in, analyzed and declared interesting but harmless. The pathology department of the hospital had made a more thorough analysis and had had the same thing to say.
Descartes
had called briefly to leave the samples and a patient …
“A
patient
!” Conway almost shouted when the Colonel reached that point in his report. Skempton would not need an empathic faculty to know what he was thinking.
“Yes, Doctor, but don’t get your hopes up,” said the Colonel. “He had nothing more exotic than a broken leg. And despite the fact e-t bugs find it impossible to live on beings of another species, a fact which simplifies the practice of extraterrestrial medicine no end, ship medics are constantly on the lookout for the exception which is supposed to prove the rule. In short, he was suffering only from a broken leg.”
“I’d like to see him anyway,” said Conway.
“Level Two-eighty-three, Ward Four, name of Lieutenant Harrison,” said Skempton. “Don’t slam the door.”
But the meeting with Lieutenant Harrison had to wait until late that evening, because Prilicla’s schedule needed time to rearrange and Conway himself had duties other than the search for hypothetical disembodied intelligences. The delay, however, was fortunate because much more information was made available to him, gathered during rounds and at mealtimes, even though the data was such that he did not quite know what to do with it.
The number of boobs, errors and mistakes was surprising, he suspected, only because he had not interested himself in such things before now. Even so, the silly, stupid mistakes he encountered, especially among the highly trained and responsible OR staff, were definitely uncharacteristic, he thought. And they did not form the sort of pattern he had expected. A plot of times and places should have shown an early focal point of this hypothetical mental contagion becoming more widespread as the disease progressed. Instead the pattern indicated a single focus moving within a certain circumscribed area—the Hudlar theater and its immediate surroundings. Whatever the thing was, if there was anything there at all, it was behaving like a single entity rather than a disease.
“ … Which is ridiculous!” Conway protested. “Even
I
didn’t seriously believe in a disembodied intelligence—it was a working hypothesis only. I’m not
that
stupid!”
He had been filling Prilicla in on the latest developments while they were on the way to see the Lieutenant. The empath kept pace with him along the ceiling for a few minutes in silence, then said inevitably, “I agree.”
Conway would have preferred some constructive objections for a change, so he did not speak again until they had reached 283-Four. This was a small private ward off a larger e-t compartment and the Lieutenant seemed glad to see them. He looked, and Prilicla said that he felt, bored.
“Apart from some temporary structural damage you are in very good shape, Lieutenant,” Conway began, just in case Harrison was worried by the presence of two Senior Physicians at his bed. “What we would like to talk about is the events leading up to your accident. If you wouldn’t mind, that is.”
“Not at all,” said the Lieutenant. “Where do you want me to start? With the landing, or before that?”
BOOK: Sector General Omnibus 1 - Beginning Operations
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