New Writings in SF 18 - [Anthology] Read online

  The pilot’s face made Conway fight the urge to laugh. It looked like that of a half made-up clown. Furious concentration had drawn Harrison’s brows into a ridiculous scowl while his lower lip, which he had been chewing steadily since takeoff, was a wide, blood-red bow of good humour.

  Conway said, ‘The tools can’t operate in this area and, except for a little background radiation caused by fallout, there is no danger. You can land safely.’

  ‘Your trust in my professional ability,’ said the pilot, ‘is touching.’

  From their condition of unlevel flight they curved into a barely controlled, tail-first dive. The surface crept, then rushed up at them. Harrison checked the rush with full emergency thrust. There were metallic tearing noises and the rest of the lights on his board turned red.

  ‘Harrison, pieces of you are dropping off...’ began Descartes’ radioman, then they touched down.

  For days afterwards the observers argued about it, trying to decide whether it had been a landing or a crash. The shock absorber legs buckled, the stern section took some more of the shock as it tried to telescope amidships and the acceleration couches took the rest—even when the ship toppled, crashed on to its side and a broad, flickering wedge of daylight appeared in the plating a few feet away. The rescue copter was almost on top of them.

  ‘Everybody out,’ said Harrison. ‘The pile shielding has been damaged.’

  Looking at the dead and discoloured surface around them, Conway thought again of his patient. Angrily, he said, ‘A little more radiation hereabout won’t make much difference.’

  ‘To your patient, no,’ said the lieutenant urgently. ‘But, perhaps selfishly, I was thinking of my future offspring. After you.’

  During the short trip to the mother ship Conway stared silently out of the port beside him and tried hard not to feel frightened and inadequate. His fear was due to reaction after what could easily have been a fatal crash plus the thought of an even more dangerous trip he would have to make in a few days time, and any doctor with a patient who stretched beyond the limits of visibility in all directions could not help feeling small. He was a single microbe trying to cure the body containing it, and suddenly he longed for the normal doctor-patient relationships of his hospital—even though very few of his patients or colleagues could be considered normal.

  Sector General was a multi-environmental hospital, a vast, complex fabrication of metal which hung in space like a man-made moon. Inside its three hundred and eighty-four levels were reproduced the environments of all the intelligent life-forms known to the Galactic Federation, a biological spectrum ranging from the ultra-frigid methane species through the more normal oxygen- and chlorine-breathing types up to the exotic beings who existed by the direct conversion of hard radiation. And in addition to the patients, whose number and physiological classification were a constant variable, there was a medical and maintenance staff which was composed of sixty-odd differing life-forms with sixty different sets of mannerisms, body odours and ways of looking at life.

  The medical staff of Sector General was an extremely able, dedicated, but not always serious group of people who were fanatically tolerant of all forms of intelligent life— had this not been so they could never have served in a multi-environment hospital in the first place. They prided themselves that no case was too big, too small, or too hopeless, and their professional reputation and facilities were second to none. But until now they had never been faced with a patient the size of a sub-continent, a case which might well be both too big and too hopeless.

  Even if the hospital could have been moved into a close orbit around Drambo and each member of its medical staff assigned to this one patient, it still would not have been enough. He needed a veritable army of medics to treat this one. Instead he had a few hundred doctors and an army, if only he could find a way of using it medically instead of tactically.

  He sometimes wondered if it might not be better to have sent a general to medical school than to give a doctor control of a whole sector sub-fleet.

  * * * *

  Three

  Only six of the Monitor Corps heavies were grounded on Drambo, their landing legs planted firmly in the shallows a few miles off one of the dead sections of coastline. The others filled the morning and evening sky like regimented stars. His medical teams were grouped in and around the grounded ships, which rose out of the thick, soupy sea-like grey beehives. The Earth-humans like himself lived on board while the e-ts, none of whom breathed air, were quite happy roughing it on the sea bed. For them Drambo was a home from home, an improvement over conditions on their worlds of Hudlar, Melf, and Chalderescol. He also had the support—moral rather than physical—given by the rollers who were much more vulnerable on their own home planet than were any of the e-ts.

  He had called what he hoped would be the final pre-op meeting in the cargo hold of Descartes, which was filled with Drambon sea water whose content of animal and plant life had been filtered out so that the beam of the projector would have a sporting chance of fighting its way to the screen attached to the forward bulkheads.

  Protocol demanded that the Drambons present opened the proceedings. Watching their spokesman, Surreshun, rolling like a great flaccid doughnut around the clear space in the centre of the deck, Conway wondered once again how such a ridiculously vulnerable species had been able to survive and evolve a highly complex, technology-based culture—though it was just possible that an intelligent dinosaur would have had similar thoughts about early Man.

  Surreshun belonged to a species which did not possess a heart or, indeed, any other form of muscular pump to circulate its blood. Physically it resembled a large, fleshy doughnut which rolled continually because to stop rolling was to die—its ring-like body circulated while its blood, operating on a form of gravity feed system, remained still. Even the simplest form of medical treatment or surgery on a Drambon necessitated the doctor and the entire theatre staff with their instruments and lighting being attached to an elaborate ferris wheel and rotating with their patient.

  Surreshun was followed by Garoth, the Hudlar Senior Physician who was in charge of the patient’s medical treatment. Hudlar was a high-gravity world whose natives absorbed their food directly from the thick, soup-like air. Unlike Surreshun, Garoth was invulnerable to practically everything. It was quite happy on Drambo, the sea was thick with food, the light gravity made it feel frisky and its armour-plated hide allowed it to ignore everything in the way of animal and vegetable nastiness that the planet could throw up. Garoth’s chief concern was with the devising and implementation of artificial feeding in areas where incisions would cut the throat tunnels between the coastal mouths and the inland pre-stomachs. Again unlike Surreshun, it did not say very much, but let the projector do all the talking.

  The big screen was filled by a picture of an auxiliary mouth shaft situated about two miles inland of the planned incision line. Every few minutes a copter or small supply ship grounded beside the shaft, discharged its load of freshly dead animal life from the coastal shallows and departed, while Corpsmen with loaders and earth-moving machinery pushed the food over the lip. Possibly the amount and quality of the food was less than that which was drawn in naturally, but when the throat was sealed during the major operation this would be the only way that large areas of the patient could be supplied with food.

  Aseptic procedures were impossible in an operation on this scale so that pumping equipment drawing sea water from the coast was drawn through large-diameter plastic piping. It poured in a steady stream—except when tools cut the pipeline—into the food shaft, supplying the strata creature with needed working fluid and at the same time wetting the walls so that leucocytes could be slipped down from time to time to combat the effects of any dangerous plant life which might have been introduced during feeding.

  They were seeing a drill, of course, performed at one of the feeding installations a few days earlier, but there were more than fifty auxiliary mouths in a similar state of readiness st
rung out along the proposed incision line.

  Suddenly there was a silvery blur of motion on the ground beside the pump housing and a Corpsman hopped a few yards on one foot before falling to the ground. His boot with his other foot still in it lay on its side where he had been standing and the tool, no longer silvery, was already cutting its way beneath the blood-splashed surface.

  ‘Tool attacks are increasing in frequency and strength,’ said Garoth in Translated, and necessarily emotionless, tones. ‘They are also displaying considerable initiative. Your idea of clearing an area around the feeding installations of all eye plants so that the tools would have to operate blind, and would have to bounce around feeling for targets, worked only for a short time. Doctor. They devised a new trick, that of sliding along a few inches below the surface, blind, of course, then suddenly extruding a point or a cutting blade and stabbing or swinging with it before retreating under the surface again. If we can’t see them, mental control is impossible, and guarding every working Corpsman with another carrying a metal detector has not worked very well so far—it has simply given the tool a better chance of hitting someone.

  ‘And just recently,’ Garoth concluded, ‘there are indications of the tools linking up into five, six, and in one case ten-unit combinations. The Corpsman who reported this died a few seconds later, before he was able to finish his report. The condition of his vehicle supports this theory, however.’

  Conway nodded grimly and said, ‘Thank you, Doctor. But now I’m afraid that you’ll have to withstand air attacks as well. On the way here we taught the patient how gliders work, and it learned fast....’ He went on to describe the incident, adding Murchison’s latest pathological findings and their deductions and theories on the nature of their patient. As a result the meeting quickly became a debate and was degenerating into a bitter argument before he had to pull rank and get his human and e-t doctors back to a state of clinical detachment.

  The heads of the Melfan and Chalder teams made their report practically as a duet. Although not as naturally well-protected as the Hudlars, the crab-like, water-breathing Melfans had the mobility to out-run anything they were unable to fight. The Chalder Senior Physician who was floating near the roof of the hold like a forty-foot nightmare of teeth, talons, and tentacles had rarely been called on to use its natural weaponry, because the mere sight of one was usually enough to frighten off anything or anyone ignorant of the fact that they were members of one of the most intelligent and sensitive species in the Federation.

  Like Garoth they had both been concerned with the nonsurgical aspects of the patient’s treatment. To a hypothetical observer ignorant of the true scope of their problem, this medical treatment could have been mistaken for a very widespread mining operation, agriculture on an even larger scale and mass kidnapping. Both were strongly convinced, and Conway agreed with them, that the wrong way to treat a skin cancer was by amputation of the affected limb.

  The amounts of radioactive material deposited by fallout in the central areas were relatively small, and their effects spread fairly slowly into the depths of the patient’s body. But even this condition would be ultimately fatal if something was not done to check it and, since the areas affected by light fallout were too numerous and occurred in too many inoperable locations, they had skinned off the poisoned surface with earth-moving machinery and pushed it into heaps for later decontamination. The remainder of the treatment involved helping the patient to help itself.

  A picture appeared suddenly on the screen of a section of subsurface tunnel under one of the areas affected by fallout. There were dozens of life-forms in the tunnel, most of them farmer fish with stubby arms sprouting from the base of their enlarged heads while the others drifted or undulated towards the observer’s position like great, transparent slugs.

  For a living section of the strata creature it looked none too healthy. The farmer fish, whose function was the cultivation and control of internal plant life, moved slowly, bumping into each other and the leucocytes which, normally transparent, were displaying the milky coloration which occurred shortly before death. The radiation sensor readings left no doubt as to what they were dying from.

  ‘These specimens were rescued shortly afterwards,’ said the Chalder, ‘and transferred to sick-bays in the larger ships and to Sector General. Both fish and leeches respond to the same decontamination and regeneration treatments given to our own people who have been exposed to a radiation overdose. They were then returned to carry on their good work.’

  ‘That being,’ the Melfan joined in, ‘absorbing the radiation from the nearest poisoned plant or fish and getting themselves sick again.’

  O’Mara had accused Conway of treating Sector General like some kind of e-t sausage machine, although the hospital was curing everything Drambon that they possibly could, and the Monitor Corps medics had merely looked long-suffering when they weren’t looking extremely busy.

  By themselves neither the hospital nor treatment facilities on the capital ships were enough to swing the balance. To allow the patient to fight these local infections properly it required massive transfusions of the leucocyte life-form from other, and healthier, strata creatures.

  When he had first suggested the transfusion idea Conway had been worried in case the patient would reject what were, in effect, another creature’s antibodies. But this had not happened, and the only problems encountered were those of transportation and supply as the first single, carefully selected kidnappings became continual wholesale abduction.

  * * * *

  On the screen appeared a sequence showing one of the special commandos withdrawing leucocytes from a small and disgustingly healthy strata creature on the other side of the planet. The entry shaft had been in use for several weeks and the motion of the strata creature had caused it to bend in several places, but it was still usable. The corpsmen dropped from the copters and into the sloping tunnel, running and occasionally ducking to avoid the lifting gear which would later haul their catch to the surface. They wore lightweight suits and carried only nets. The leucocytes were their friends. It was very important for them to remember that.

  The leucocytes possessed a highly developed empathic faculty which allowed them to distinguish the parent body’s friends from its foes simply by monitoring their emotional radiation. Provided the Corpsmen kidnappers thought warm, friendly thoughts while they went about their business, they were perfectly safe. But it was hard and often frustrating work, netting and hauling and transferring the massive and inert slugs into the transport copters. Sweating and short-tempered as they frequently were, it was not easy to radiate feelings of friendship and helpfulness towards their charges. Circumstances arose in which a Corpsman gave way to a flash of anger or irritation—at an item of his own equipment, perhaps—and for such lapses many of them died.

  Rarely did they die singly. At the end of the sequence Conway watched the entire crew of a transport copter taken out within a few minutes, because it was next to impossible for a man to think kindly thoughts towards a being who had just killed a crew-mate—by injecting a poison which triggered off muscular spasms so violent that the man broke practically every bone in his body—even if his own life did depend on it. There was no protection and no cure. Heavy duty spacesuits tough enough to resist the needle points of the leeches’ probes would not have allowed enough mobility for the Corpsmen to do their job, and the creatures killed just as quickly and thoroughly and unthinkingly as they cured.

  ‘To summarise,’ said the Chalder as it blanked the screen, ‘the transfusion and artificial feeding operations are going well at present, but if casualties continue to mount at this rate the supply will fall dangerously short of the computed demand. I therefore recommend, most strongly, that surgery be commenced immediately.’

  ‘I agree,’ added the Melfan. ‘Assuming that we must proceed without either the consent or co-operation of the patient, we should start immediately.’

  ‘How immediate?’ broke in Captain Williamson
, speaking for the first time. ‘It takes time to deploy a whole sector sub-fleet over the operative field. My people will need final briefings and, well, I think the Fleet Commander is a little worried about this one. Up to now his operations have been purely military.’

  Conway was silent, trying to force himself to the decision he had been avoiding for several weeks. Once he gave the word to start, once he began cutting on this gargantuan scale, he was committed. There would be no chance to withdraw and try again later, there were no specialists that he could fall back on if the going got too tough and, worst of all, there was no time for dithering because already the patient’s condition had been left untreated for far too long.

  ‘Don’t worry. Captain,’ said Conway, trying hard to radiate the confidence and reassurance which he did not feel. ‘So far as your people are concerned, this has become a military operation. I know that in the beginning you treated it as a disaster relief exercise on an unusually large scale, but now it has become indistinguishable from war in your minds, because in war you have to expect heavy casualties. I’m very sorry about that, sir. I never expected such heavy losses and I’m personally very sorry that I taught those tools to glide this morning, because that stunt will cost a lot more ...’