Sector General Omnibus 2 - Alien Emergencies (6 page)

There was something wrong.

“Don’t shoot,” said Conway, quietly but firmly, then asked, “Are you afraid, Lieutenant?”

“I don’t normally use this thing,” said Brenner, looking puzzled, “but I can. No, I’m not afraid.”

“And I’m not afraid because you have that gun,” said Conway. “Prilicla is protected and has nothing to fear. So who…” He indicated the empath’s trembling feelers. “
…is
afraid?”

“It is, friend Conway,” said Prilicla, indicating the barnacle. “It is afraid and confused and intensely curious.”

Conway nodded. He could see Prilicla beginning to react to his intense relief. He said, “Nudge it outside, Prilicla, when the Lieutenant opens the door—just in case of accidents. But gently.”

As soon as it was outside, O’Mara’s voice roared from the communicator.

“What the blazes have you done?”

Conway tried to find a simple answer to an apparently simple question. He said, “I suppose you could say that I have prematurely initiated a planetary re-entry sequence…”

The report from
Torrance
arrived just before Conway reached O’Mara’s office. It said that one of the two stars had a light-gravity planet which was inhabitable while showing no indications of advanced technology, and that the other possessed a large, fast-spinning world which was so flattened at the poles that it resembled two soup bowls joined at the rims. On the latter world the atmosphere was dense and far-reaching, gravity varied between three Gs at the poles to one-quarter G at the equator, and surface metals were nonexistent. Very recently, in astronomical terms, the world had spiraled too close to its sun and planet-wide volcanic activity and steam had rendered the atmosphere opaque.
Torrance
doubted that it was still habitable.

“That supports my theory,” said Conway excitedly when O’Mara had relayed the report to him, “that the bird and the barnacles, and the other insect life-form, originate from the same planet. The barnacles are parasites, of course, with a small individual brain capacity, but intelligent when linked and operating as a gestalt. They must have known that their planet was heading for destruction for centuries, and decided to escape. But just think of what it must have taken to develop a space-travel capability completely without metal…”

Somehow they had learned how to trap the giant birds from the heavy-gravity polar regions and to control them with their tendrils—the barnacles were a physically weak species and their ability to control non-intelligent hosts was the only strength they had. The birds, Conway now knew, were a non-intelligent species as were the tendril-less beetles. They had taken control of the birds and had flown them high above the equator, commanding maximum physical effort to achieve the required height and velocity for the linkup with the final propulsion stage—the beetles. They also had been controlled by the barnacles, perhaps fifty to each parasite, and they had attached themselves to the areas behind the wings in a gigantic, narrow cone.

Meanwhile the bird had been shaped and paralyzed into the configuration of a supersonic glider, its claws removed to render it aerodynamically clean, and injected with the secretions which would arrest the processes of decomposition. The crew had then sealed it and themselves in position and gone into hibernation for the duration of the voyage using the bird’s tissue for life-support.

Once in position the propulsion cone comprising millions of insects, hundreds of thousands of which were the intelligent controllers, had begun firing. They had done so very evenly and gently, so as not to shatter or crush the narrow apex of the cone where it was attached to the bird. The beetles could be made to deliver their tiny modicum of thrust whether they were alive or dead and, even with their ability to seal themselves inside a hard coating, the propulsion controllers had not lived for very long—they also were expendable. But in dying they had helped an organic starship carrying a few hundred of their fellows to achieve escape velocity from their doomed planet and its sun.

“…I don’t know how they intended to position the bird for re-entry,” Conway went on admiringly, “but atmospheric heating was intended to trigger the organic melting process when they had braked sufficiently, allowing the barnacles to pull free of the bird and fly to the surface under their own wing-power. In my hurry to get rid of the coating I applied heat over a wide area of the forward section, which simulated re-entry conditions and—”

“Yes, yes,” said O’Mara testily. “A masterly exercise in medical deduction and sheer blasted luck! And now, I suppose, you will leave me to clean up after you by devising a method for communicating with these beasties and arranging for their transport to their intended destination. Or was there something else you wanted?”

Conway nodded. “Brenner tells me that his scoutship flotilla, using an extension of the search procedure for overdue ships, could cover the volume of space between the home and destination stars. There are probably other birds, perhaps hundreds of them—”

O’Mara opened his mouth and looked ready to emulate a bombardier beetle. Conway added hastily, “I don’t want them brought here, sir. The Corps can take them where they are going, melt them on the surface to avoid re-entry casualties, and explain the situation to them.

“They’re colonists, after all—not patients.”

Senior Physician Conway wriggled into a slightly less uncomfortable position in a piece of furniture that had been designed for the comfort of a six-legged, exoskeletal Melfan, and said in an aggrieved tone, “After twelve years’ medical and surgical experience in the Federation’s biggest multienvironment hospital, one would expect the next logical step up the promotional ladder would be to something more prestigious than…than an ambulance driver!”

There was no immediate response from the other four beings who were waiting with him in the office of the Chief Psychologist. Doctor Prilicla clung silently to the ceiling, the position it favored when in the company of more massive and well-muscled beings than itself. Sharing an Illensan bench were the spectacularly beautiful Pathologist Murchison and a silver-furred, caterpiller-like Kelgian charge nurse called Naydrad, also in silence. It was Major Fletcher, who as a recent visitor to the hospital had been given the office’s only physiologically suitable chair, who broke the silence.

Seriously, he said, “You will not be allowed to drive, Doctor.”

It was plain that Major Fletcher was still very conscious of the bright new ship commander’s insignia decorating the sleeve of his Monitor Corps tunic, and that he was already concerned about the welfare of the vessel so soon to be his. Conway remembered feeling the same way about his first pocket scanner.

“Not even an ambulance driver,” said Murchison, laughing.

Naydrad joined the conversation with a series of moaning, whistling sounds, which translated as, “In an establishment like this one, Doctor, do you expect logic?”

Conway did not reply. He was thinking that the hospital grapevine, a normally dependable form of vegetable life, had been carrying the news for days that a senior physician, Conway himself, was to be permanently attached to an ambulance ship.

On the ceiling, Doctor Prilicla was beginning to quiver in response to his emotional radiation, so Conway tried to bring his feelings of confusion and disappointment and hurt pride under control.

“Please do not concern yourself unnecessarily over this matter, friend Conway,” said the little empath, the musical trills and clicks of its Cinrusskin speech overlaying the emotionless translated words. “We have yet to be informed officially of the new assignment, and the probability is that you may be pleasantly surprised, Doctor.”

Prilicla, Conway knew, was not averse to telling lies if by so doing it could improve the emotional atmosphere of a situation. But not if the improvement would last for only a few seconds or minutes and be followed by even more intense feelings of anger and disappointment.

“What makes you think so, Doctor?” Conway asked. “You used the word
probability
and not
possibility
. Have you inside information?”

“That is correct, friend Conway,” the Cinrusskin replied. “I have detected a source of emotional radiation that entered the outer office several minutes ago. It is identifiable as belonging to the Chief Psychologist, and the emoting is purposeful, with the type of minor-key worrying associated with the carriage of authority and responsibility. I cannot detect the kind of feelings that should be present if the imparting of unpleasant news to someone was being planned. At present Major O’Mara is talking to an assistant, who is also unaware of any potential unpleasantness.”

Conway smiled and said, “Thank you, Doctor. I feel much better now.”

“I know,” said Prilicla.

“And I feel,” said Nurse Naydrad, “that such discussion of the
being O’Mara’s feelings verges on a breach of medical ethics. Emotional radiation is privileged information, surely, and should not be divulged in this fashion.”

“Perhaps you have not considered the fact,” Prilicla replied, using the form of words which was the closest it could ever come to telling another being it was wrong, “that the being whose emotional radiation was under discussion is not a patient, friend Naydrad, and that the being most closely resembling a patient in this situation is Doctor Conway, who is concerned about the future and requires reassurance in the form of information on the non-patient’s emotional radiation…”

Naydrad’s silvery fur was beginning to twitch and ripple, indicating that the Kelgian charge nurse was about to reply. But the entrance of the non-patient from the outer office put an end to what could have been an interesting ethical debate.

O’Mara nodded briefly to everyone in turn, and took the only other physiologically suitable seat in the room, his own. The Chief Psychologist’s features were about as readable as a lump of weathered basalt, which in some respects they resembled, but the eyes which regarded them were backed by a mind so keenly analytical that it gave O’Mara what amounted to a telepathic faculty.

Caustically, he began: “Before I tell you why I have asked for you four in particular to accompany Major Fletcher, and give you the details of your next assignment, which no doubt you have already learned in outline, I have to give you some background information of a non-medical nature.

“The problem of briefing people like yourselves on this subject,” he went on, “is that I cannot afford to make assumptions regarding your level of ignorance in matters outside your specialties. Should some of this information seem too elementary, you are at liberty to allow your attention to wander, so long as I don’t catch you at it.”

“You have our undivided attention, friend O’Mara,” said Prilicla, who, of course, knew this to be a fact.

“For the time being,” Naydrad added.

“Charge Nurse Naydrad!” Major Fletcher burst out, his reddening face clashing with the dark green of his uniform. “You are being something less than respectful to a senior officer. Such offensive behavior will not be tolerated on my ship, nor shall I—”

O’Mara held up his hand and said dryly, “I didn’t take offense, Major, and neither should you. Up until now, your career has been free of close personal contact with e-ts, so your mistake is understandable. It is unlikely to be repeated when you learn to understand the thought processes and behavior of the beings who will be working with you on this project.

“Charge Nurse Naydrad,” O’Mara went on, politely for him, “is a Kelgian, a caterpillar-like life-form whose most noticeable feature is an all-over coat of silver-gray fur. You will already have noticed that Naydrad’s fur is constantly in motion, as if a strong wind was continually blowing it into tufts and ripples. These are completely involuntary movements triggered by its emotional reactions to outside stimuli. The evolutionary reasons for this mechanism are not clearly understood, not even by the Kelgians themselves, but it is generally believed that the emotionally expressive fur complements the Kelgian vocal equipment, which lacks emotional flexibility of tone. However, you must understand that the movements of the fur makes it absolutely clear to another Kelgian what it feels about the subject under discussion. As a result, they always say exactly what they mean because what they think is plainly obvious—at least to another Kelgian. They cannot do otherwise. Unlike Doctor Prilicla, who is always polite and sometimes edits the truth to remove the unpleasant bits, Charge Nurse Naydrad will invariably tell the truth regardless of your rank or your feelings. You will soon grow used to it, Major.

“But I did not intend to give a lecture on Kelgians,” he continued. “I did intend to discuss briefly the formation of what is now called the Galactic Federation…”

On the briefing screen behind him there appeared suddenly a three-dimensional representation of the galactic double spiral with its major stellar features and the edge of a neighboring galaxy, shown at distances that were not to scale. As they watched and listened a short, bright line of yellow light appeared near the rim, then another and another—the links between Earth and the early Earth-seeded colonies, and the systems of Orligia and Nidia, which were the first extraterrestrial cultures to be contacted. Another cluster of yellow lines appeared, the worlds colonized or contacted by Traltha.

Several decades had passed before the worlds available to the
Orligians, Nidians, Tralthans and Earth-humans were made available to each other. (Beings tended to be suspicious in those days, on one occasion even to the point of war.) But time as well as distance was being compressed on this representation.

The tracery of golden lines grew more rapidly as contact, then commerce, was established with the highly advanced and stable cultures of Kelgia, Illensa, Hudlar, Melf and, if any, their associated colonies. Visually it did not seem to be an orderly progression. The lines darted inwards to the galactic center, doubled back to the rim, seesawed between zenith and nadir, and even made a jump across intergalactic space to link up with the Ian worlds—although in that instance it had been the Ians who had done the initial traveling. When the lines connected the worlds of the Galactic Federation, the planets known to contain intelligent and, in their own sometimes peculiar fashions, technically and philosophically advanced life, the result was an untidy yellow scribble resembling a cross between a DNA molecule and a bramble bush.

“…Only a tiny fraction of the Galaxy has been explored by us or by any of the other races within the Federation,” O’Mara continued, “and we are in the position of a man who has friends in far countries but has no idea of who is living in the next street. The reason for this is that travelers tend to meet more often than people who stay at home, especially when the travelers exchange addresses and visits regularly…”

Providing there were no major distorting influences en route and the exact co-ordinates of the destination were known, it was virtually as easy to travel through subspace to a neighboring solar system as to one at the other end of the Galaxy. But one had first to find an inhabited solar system before its coordinates could be logged, and that was proving to be no easy task.

Very, very slowly, a few of the smaller blank areas in the star charts were being mapped and surveyed, but with little success. When the survey scoutships turned up a star with planets, it was a rare find—even rarer when the planets included one harboring life. And if one of the native life-forms was intelligent, jubilation, not unmixed with concern over what might be a possible threat to the Pax Galactica, swept the worlds of the Federation. Then the Cultural Contact specialists of the Monitor Corps were sent to perform the
tricky, time-consuming and often dangerous job of establishing contact in depth.

The Cultural Contact people were the elite of the Monitor Corps, a small group of specialists in e-t communications, philosophy and psychology. Although small, the group was not, regrettably, overworked…

“…During the past twenty years,” O’Mara went on, “they have initiated First Contact procedure on three occasions, all of which resulted in the species concerned joining the Federation. I will not bore you with details of the number of survey operations mounted and the ships, personnel and materiel involved, or shock you with the cost of it all. I mention the Cultural Contact group’s three successes simply to make the point that within the same time period this hospital became fully operational and also initiated First Contacts, which resulted in seven new species joining the Federation. This was accomplished not by a slow, patient buildup and widening of communications until the exchange of complex philosophical and sociological concepts became possible, but by giving medical assistance to a sick alien.”

The Chief Psychologist stared at each of them in turn, and it was obvious that he did not need Prilicla to tell him that he had their undivided attention. “I’m oversimplifying, of course. You had the medical and/or surgical problem of treating a hitherto unknown life-form. You had the hospital’s translation computer, the second largest in the Galaxy, and Monitor Corps communications specialists to assist where necessary. Indeed, the Corps was responsible for rescuing many of the extraterrestrial casualties. But the fact remains that all of us, by giving medical assistance, demonstrated the Federation’s good will towards e-ts much more simply and directly than could have been done by any long-winded exchange of concepts. As a result, there has recently been a marked change of emphasis in First Contact policy…”

Just as there was only one known way of traveling in hyperspace, there was only one method of sending a distress signal if an accident or malfunction occurred and a vessel was stranded in normal space between the stars. Tight-beam subspace radio was not a dependable method of interstellar communication, subject as it was to interference and distortion caused by intervening stellar bodies, as well as
requiring inordinate amounts of a vessel’s power—power which a distressed ship was unlikely to have available. But a distress beacon did not have to carry intelligence. It was simply a nuclear-powered device which broadcast a location signal, a subspace scream for help, which ran up and down the usable frequencies until, in a matter of minutes or hours, it died.

Because all Federation ships were required to file course and passenger details before departure, the position of the distress signal was usually a good indication of the physiological type of species that had run into trouble, and an ambulance ship with a matching crew and life-support equipment was sent from Sector General or from the ship’s home planet.

But there were instances, far more than were generally realized, when the disasters involved beings unknown to the Federation in urgent need of help, help which the would-be rescuers were powerless to give.

Only when the rescue ship concerned had the capability of extending its hyperdrive envelope to include the distressed vessel, or when the beings could be extricated safely and a suitable environment prepared for them within the Federation ship, were they transported to Sector General. The result was that many hitherto unknown life-forms, being of high intelligence and advanced technology, were lost except as interesting specimens for dissection and study. But an answer to this problem had been sought and, perhaps, found.

It had been decided to equip one very special ambulance ship that would answer only those distress signals whose positions did not agree with the flight plans filed by Federation vessels.