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Authors: James White

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BOOK: Sector General Omnibus 1 - Beginning Operations
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Conway was tired, irritable and hungry. His reply was forestalled by Major Edwards who said, “No! Definitely not! O’Mara has given me strict instructions about this. With respect, Doctor, he forbids it even if you are stupid enough to volunteer. This is one species whose tapes are unusable. Dammit, I’m hungry and I don’t want more sandwiches!”
“Me, too,” said Conway.
“Why are doctors always
hungry
?” asked the CC officer.
“Gentlemen,” said the Captain tiredly.
“Speaking personally,” Conway said, “it is because my entire adult life had been devoted to the unselfish service of others and my wide powers of healing and surgical skill instantly available at any time of the day or night. The tenets of my great and altruistic profession demand no less. These sacrifices—the long hours, inadequate sleep and irregular meals—I suffer willingly and without complaint. If I should think of food more often than seems normal for lesser beings it is because some medical emergency may arise to make the next meal uncertain and eating now will enable me to bring a greater degree of skill—even laymen like yourselves
must appreciate the effect of malnutrition on mind and muscle—to the aid of my patient.”
He added dryly, “There is no need to stare, gentlemen. I am merely preparing my mind for contact with Surreshun’s people by pretending that modesty does not exist.”
For the remainder of the voyage Conway divided his time between Communications and Control talking to the Captain, Edwards and Surreshun. But by the time
Descartes
materialized inside the Meatball solar system he had gained very little useful information on the practice of medicine on the planet and even less about its medical practitioners.
Contact with his opposite numbers on Meatball was essential for the success of the assignment.
But curative surgery and medicine were very recent developments which had become possible only when the species learned how to rotate while remaining in one position. There were vague references to another species, however, who acted as physicians of sorts. From Surreshun’s description they seemed to be part physician, part parasite and part predator. Carrying one of them was a very risky business which very often caused imbalance, stoppage and death in the patient’s continually rotating body. The doctor, Surreshun insisted, was more to be feared than the disease.
With the limited translation facilities it was unable to explain how the beings communicated with their patients. Surreshun had never met one personally nor was it on rolling-together terms with anyone who had. The nearest it could express it was that they made direct contact with the patient’s soul.
“Oh Lord,” said Edwards, “what next?”
“Are you praying or just relieving your feelings?” asked Conway.
The Major grinned, then went on seriously, “If our friend uses the word ‘soul’ it is because your hospital translator carries the word with an equivalent Meatball meaning. You’ll just have to signal the hospital to find out what that overgrown electronic brain thinks a soul is.”
“O’Mara,” said Conway, “will begin wondering about my mental health again …”
By the time the answer arrived Captain Williamson had successfully made his apologies to the Meatball non-authorities and Surreshun had painted such a glowing picture of the utter strangeness of the Earth-humans that their welcome was assured.
Descartes
had been requested to
remain in orbit, however, until a suitable landing area had been marked out and cleared.
“According to this,” said Edwards as he passed the signal flimsy to Conway, “the computer’s definition of ‘soul’ is simply ‘the life of principle.’ O’Mara says the programmers did not want to confuse it with religious and philosophical factors by including material or immortal souls. So far as the translation computer is concerned if a thing is alive then it has a soul. Apparently Meatball physicians make direct contact with their patients’ life-principle.”
“Faith healing, do you think?”
“I don’t know, Doctor,” said Edwards. “It seems to me that your Chief Psychologist isn’t being much help on this one. And if you think
I’m
going to help by giving you Surreshun’s tape again, save your breath.”
Conway was surprised at the normal appearance of Meatball as seen from orbit. It was not until the ship was within ten miles of the surface that the slow wrinklings and twitchings of the vast carpets of animal tissue which crawled over the land surface became obvious, and the unnatural stillness of the thick, soupy sea. Only along the shorelines was there activity. Here the sea was stirred into a yellow-green forth by water-dwelling predators large and small tearing furiously at the living coastline while the “land” fought just as viciously back.
Descartes
came down about two miles off a peaceful stretch of coast in the center of an area marked with brightly colored floats, completely hidden in the cloud of steam produced by its tail flare. As the stern slipped below the surface, thrust was reduced and it came to rest gently on the sandy sea bottom. The great mass of boiled water produced by the flare drifted slowly away on the tide and the people began to roll up.
Literally, thought Conway.
Like great soggy doughnuts they rolled out of the green liquid fog and up to the base of the ship, then around and around it. When out-croppings of rock or a spiky sea growth got in the way they wobbled ponderously around it, sometimes laying themselves almost flat for an instant if forced to reverse direction, but always maintaining their constant rate of rotation and the maximum possible distance from each other.
Conway waited for a decent interval to allow Surreshun to descend the ramp and be properly welcomed by its non-friends. He was wearing a lightweight suit identical to the type used in the water breather’s section of the hospital, both for comfort and to show as much as possible of his oddly shaped body to the natives. He stepped off the side of the ramp
and fell slowly toward the sea bottom, listening to the translated voices of Surreshun, the VIPs and the louder members of the circling crowd.
When he touched bottom he thought he was being attacked at first. Every being in the vicinity of the ship tried to score the nearest possible miss on him and each one said something as it passed. The suit mike picked up the sound as a burbling grunt but the translator, because it was a simple message within the capabilities of the ship’s computer, relayed it as “Welcome stranger.”
There could be no doubt about their sincerity—on this cockeyed world the warmth of a welcome was directly proportional to the degree of strangeness. And they did not mind answering questions one little bit. From here on in, Conway was sure his job would be easy.
Almost the first thing he discovered was that they had no real need of his professional services.
It was a society whose members never stopped moving through and around “towns” which were simply facilities for manufacture, learning or research rather than large groupings of living quarters—on Meatball there were no living quarters. After a period of work on a mechanically rotated frame the doughnut slipped out of its retaining harness and rolled away to seek food, exercise, excitement or strange company somewhere across the sea bed.
There was no sleep, no physical contact other than for reproduction, no tall buildings, no burial places.
When one of the rollers stopped due to age, accident or a run-in with one of the predators or a poison-spined plant it was ignored. The generation of internal gases which took place shortly after death caused the body to float to the surface where the birds and fish disposed of it.
Conway spoke to several beings who were too old to roll and who were being kept alive by artificial feeding while they were rotated in their individual ferris wheels. He was never quite sure whether they were kept alive because of their value to the community or simply the subject of experimentation. He knew that he was seeing geriatrics being practiced, but other than a similar form of assistance with difficult births this was the only form of medicine he encountered.
 
 
Meanwhile the survey teams were mapping the planet and bringing in specimens by the boatload. Most of this material was sent to Sector General for processing and very soon detailed analysis suggestions for treatment began
coming from Thornnastor. According to the Diagnostician-Pathologist Meatball had a medical problem of the utmost urgency. Conway and Edwards, who had had a preliminary look at the data and a number of low-level flights over the planetary surface, could not have agreed more.
“We can begin a preliminary diagnosis of the planet’s troubles,” said Conway angrily, “which are caused by the rollers being too damned free with the use of nuclear weapons! But we still badly need a local appreciation of the medical situation and that we are not getting. The big question is—”
“Is there a doctor in the house?” said Edwards, grinning. “And if so, where?”
“Exactly,” said Conway. He did not laugh.
Outside the direct vision port the slow, turgid waves reflected the moonlight through a curtain of surface mist. The moon, which was approaching Roche’s Limit and disintegration, would pose the inhabitants of Meatball yet another major problem—but not for another million years or so. At the moment it was a great jagged crescent illuminating the sea, the two hundred feet of
Descartes
which projected above the surface and the strangely peaceful shoreline.
Peaceful because it was dead and the predators refused to eat carrion.
“If I built a rotating framework for myself would O’Mara … ?” began Conway.
Edwards shook his head. “Surreshun’s tape is more dangerous than you think—you were very lucky not to have lost all of your marbles, permanently. Besides, O’Mara has already thought of that idea and discarded it. Rotating yourself while under the influence of the tape, either in a swivel chair or in a gadget built by our machine shop, will fool your mind for only a few minutes, he says. But I’ll ask him again, if you like?”
“I’ll take your word for it,” said Conway. Thoughtfully, he went on, “The question I keep asking myself is where on this planet is a doctor most likely to be found. Suppose the answer is where the greatest number of casualties occur, that is, along the coastlines—”
“Not necessarily,” Edwards objected. “One doesn’t normally find a doctor in a slaughterhouse. And don’t forget that there is another intelligent race on this planet, the makers of those thought-controlled tools. Isn’t it possible that your doctors belong to this race and your answer lies outside the roller culture entirely?”
“True,” said Conway. “But here we have the willing cooperation of the natives and we should make all possible use of it. I shall ask permission,
I think, to follow one of our far-traveling doughnuts next time it sets off on a trip. It may be like having a third party along on a honeymoon and I may be told politely where to go with my request, but it is obvious that there are no doctors in the towns or settled areas and it is only the travelers who have a chance of meeting one. Meanwhile,” he ended, “let’s try to find that other intelligent species.”
Two days later Conway made contact with a nonrelative of Surreshun who worked in the nearby power station, a nuclear reactor in which he felt almost at home because it had four solid walls and a roof. The roller was planning a trip along an unsettled stretch of coast at the end of its current work period which, Conway estimated, would last two or three days. The being’s name was Camsaug and it did not mind Conway coming along provided he did not stay too close if certain circumstances arose. It described the circumstances in detail and without apparent shame.
Camsaug had heard about the “protectors,” but only at second or third hand. They did not cut people and sew them up again as Conway’s doctors did—it did not know what they did exactly, only that they often killed the people they were supposed to protect. They were stupid, slow-moving beings who for some odd reason stayed close to the most active and dangerous stretches of shore.
“Not a slaughterhouse, Major, a battlefield,” said Conway smugly. “You expect to find doctors on a battlefield …”
But they could not wait for Camsaug to start its vacation—Thornnastor’s reports, the samples brought in by the scoutships and their own unaided eyes left no doubt about the urgency of the situation.
Meatball was a very sick planet. Surreshun’s people had been much too free in the use of their newly discovered atomic energy. Their reason for this was that they were an expanding culture which could not afford to be hampered by the constant threat of the massive land beasts. By detonating a series of nuclear devices a few miles inland, taking good care that the wind would not blow the fallout onto their own living area, of course, they had killed large areas of the land beast. They were now able to establish bases on the dead land to further their scientific investigation in many fields.
They did not care that they spread blight and cancer over vast areas far inland—the great carpets were their natural enemy. Hundreds of their people were stopped and eaten by the land beasts every year and now they were simply getting their own back.
“Are these carpets alive and intelligent?” asked Conway angrily as
their scoutship made a low-level run over an area which seemed to be afflicted with advanced gangrene. “Or are there small, intelligent organisms living in or under it? No matter which, Surreshun’s people will have to stop chucking their filthy bombs about!”
BOOK: Sector General Omnibus 1 - Beginning Operations
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