Sector general omnibus, p.252
Sector General Omnibus, page 252
“Sir?” he said.
O’Mara gave his name and service ID code and said, “I arrived within the past hour on Trosshannon and would like a berth on anything you have going to Traltha, Melf, Kelgia, or Earth. The destination isn’t important but the stopover time is. I don’t want to spend too much of my leave on Nidia.”
“Nidian low ceilings give me trouble, too” the other said, smiling, “but if you need to stay here for a while, there’s always the Earth-human officers’ quarters on the base. They’re very comfortable.”
“Thank your’ said O’Mara, returning the smile and looking pointedly at the other’s impeccable uniform, “but on Nidia Base I wouldn’t feel that I was on leave. Have you anything going anywhere soon?”
“I know what you mean” said the NCO. “Give me a moment to check, sir.”
On the base, O’Mara thought as the other began tapping keys, the uniform dress regulations would be less relaxed, and there would be a lot more saluting and fellow officers displaying too much friendly curiosity about his background. He was technically an officer but nobody, himself included, had ever considered him to be a gentleman. There could be trouble if their curiosity became too persistent. O’Mara thought that he would rather squeeze himself into a room in one of the local Nidian hotels.
“You’re in luck, sir” said the other suddenly, and hesitated. “Well, you might be in luck. How about Kreskhallar, Melfan registry, a medium-sized passenger vessel with a mixed-species crew and with accommodation for warm-blooded oxygen-breathers, leaving from Dock Thirty-Seven just three and a half hours from now. It operates a continuous, round-trip, cut-price sightseeing tour of the big five-Melf, Earth, Traltha, Kelgia, Nidia, and back to Melf. Currently the passengers are mostly Kelgian on some kind of startraveling literary convention, it says here, with other-species passengers joining and leaving at their home planets. The luxury rating isn’t high, sir, only two stars, and with all those DBLFs . . .
“Thank you,” O’Mara broke in, “I’ll take it.”
The NCO looked concerned. He said, “Sir, if you’re not used to them, Kelgians can be a bit hard to take even one at a time. Before I book you in, are you sure about this?”
O’Mara nodded. “Go ahead, SergeantP he said, “I’m used to working with Kelgians.”
“You are?” said the other, giving him another close but unobstrusive visual examination as he tapped keys. Pla~ly his curiosity got the better of him because he went on, “If you don’t mind me asking, sir, what ship?”
“No ship? he said. “Sector General?
“Oh? said the sergeant, looking impressed. He was still sitting at his console but somehow he gave the impression that he was standing at attention as he added, “Enjoy your leave, sir.”
As he had no idea what the food would be like on a two-star passenger vessel, or how long it would be before they served it, O’Mara decided to play safe by refueling in one of the complex’s multi-species restaurants. The place reminded him of the hospital’s main dining hail, but with the addition of wall murals showing Nidian land- and seascapes, and loud background music whose planet of origin he did not recognize but which was terrible. It had a discordant, urgent beat that, he decided, was intended to make the diners eat faster to escape from it. Out of sheer contrariness he ate slowly, blocking the music from his mind while he tried to think about what he could do with himself over the next six weeks, until it was time to board.
It was Kreskhallar’s passenger liaison officer, Larragh-Yal, an obviously overworked or perhaps just overwrought Nidian, who welcomed him aboard, wished him a pleasant voyage, and gave him directions to his cabin in a voice which, even through the translator, suggested that its mind was on other things. Probably, he thought wryly, the shipload of Kelgians. He was given a locator that would tell him how to get to the dining and recreation rooms, the observation deck, and the other passenger services, and asked if he had any special requirements.
“Only peace and quiet? said O’Mara. “I’ll be staying in my cabin most of the time.”
“With this bunch of furry sword-and-sorcery fanatics we have on board? it said, sounding relieved that he might turn out to be one of that rare breed, a minimum-maintenance passenger, “I don’t blame you, Lieutenant. But if you should need anything, the locator card will find me. I, ah, expect you already know th~t the Monitor Corps will reimburse our company for your travel fare, basic cabin accommodation, food, and a moderate quantity of liquid refreshment. Anything else you will have to pay for yourself.”
O’Mara nodded. “There will be nothing else.”
“I don’t want to sound mean, Lieutenant,” the other went on, nor do I have to stick too closely to the regulations in your case. After all, you’re the only Monitor Corps officer on the ship. Your presence would raise the morale of our security people as well as having a steadying influence on some of the passengers.
“Larragh-Yal? said O’Mara firmly, “I’m on leave.”
“Of course, sir? said the other. “But a sheathed weapon is still a deterrent.”
His cabin was about half the size of his quarters at the hospital, but comfortable if one only wanted to sleep rather than stay there most of the time. There were a viewscreen and a menu of multi-species entertainment tapes that looked old and tired even by Sector General standards, but the amenities did not include a food dispenser. If he wanted to eat alone he would have to order cabin service. The extra cost didn’t worry him, but the type of person he had once been did not feel happy with the idea of another intelligent entity becoming his servant for however short a time, nor did he know how an officer was expected to behave in that situation. He would feel awkward and embarrassed by the whole business.
The alternative was to use the ship’s dining room and meet people, some of whom, Larragh-Yal had implied, might not be too happy to meet him.
The whole idea was ridiculous. He had been working so long with Monitor Corps specialists-and he had even become one himself-that he had almost forgotten that the force’s primary function was the maintenance of the Pax Galactica, a duty it had performed so well over the past century since its formation that it had been given other jobs to do. Its vast, Emperor-class capital ships, each one capable of wrecking a planet although none of them ever had, were on standby for disaster-relief or ~-~olonizationsupport operations, because a vessel that could level a whole country could clear and till an awful lot of fallow land for settlers. The thousands of lesser ships, the light and heavy cruisers, transports and small communications vessels, while still retaining their weaponry and their highly trained and disciplined multi-species crews, practiced the arts of peace rather than war-although, on the rare occasions when widespread violence occurred which posed a threat to Federation stability, no matter how many ships and land forces had to be deployed or how much firepower was required to regulate the situation, it was always referred to as a police action. But usually the violence and the lawbreakers were stopped before it got that far, by infiltration, subversion, and other nonviolent dirty tricks. O’Mara had heard that the specialist Corps psychologists who now handled the first-contact situations had been nasty, devious, and quite brilliant in that form of activity, and he wondered if the polished and urbane Major Craythorne had ever had a hand in stopping a war or, he corrected himself, a riot that required police action on a planetary scale.
As the Galactic Federation’s executive and law-enforcement arm, the Monitor Corps had rendered redundant the large, national armies that once had fought each other on the member worlds, and taken over as the galaxy’s peacekeeper. In essence, regardless of the wide range of specialist duties the Corpsmen now performed, each and every one was regarded as a policeman, a form of life that was never supposed to be off-duty even when on leave. If, as Larragh-Yal had said, there were a few potential troublemakers among the passengers, they were people he could not help meeting when he went to the dining room or anywhere else on the ship, and they might not be happy with the idea of what they thought was a policeman mixing with them and trying to spoil their fun. O’Mara sighed and began to unpack.
He was finished by the time the launch warning and thirtysecond countdown was relayed over the ships’s PA sysm, and he watched through the cabin’s direct-vision port as Retlin Complex dropped away and the city proper and then more and more of the surrounding countryside crawled into his field of view. There had been no sensation of motion in spite of the high takeoff acceleration; the old vessel’s gravity compensators, at least, were working. He had been taken to space construction sites on ships where they hadn’t been, and traveling with a bunch of spacesick and regurgitating other-species workmates was not an experience he wanted to repeat. The planetary surface shrank until Nidia filled the viewport. He continued to watch it, telling himself that the ship was simply a scaled-down Sector General without doctors and he shouldn’t worry about it, until they were at jump distance and suddenly there was nothing to see but the flickering grey fog of hyperspace.
Shortly afterward the PA cleared its throat and said, “For the information of passengers who have come aboard at Nidia, the first Meal of Welcome for the next leg of our tour will be served in the dining room in three standard hours’ time. As you probably already know, it has become a tradition that all passengers, except for members of those species who do not customarily use body coverings or decorations, should wear formal dress for this occasion. Thank you for your attention.”
O’Mara was feeling hungry again. In three hours’ time he would be starving.
He dressed in full uniform, the first time he had done so since Sergeant Wenalont had fitted him with it, and feeling safe in the knowledge that as the only Monitor on board he would have to neither give nor return salutes, but to be doubly sure he folded his beret under the shoulder tab. As he stared at himself in the cabin mirror he thought that he looked well, very well, and remembered some of the other things the technical sergeant and tailor had said to him. He wondered if the passenger list included any young, unattached Earth-human females, then sadly put the tls
He was a Corps psychologist, O’Mara reminded himself as he stared at his image, but he had to admit that he looked like everybody’s idea of a hefty, scowling policeman.
CHAPTER 16
The room had provision for seating three hundred diners, he saw from the entrance, and even though there were only about two hundred and fifty passengers present, there were no single or empty tables. Instead there were rows of long, twenty-place tables with species-suitable furniture that could be moved around if different physiological classifications wanted to eat and talk together, which many of them were doing. The Orligian headwaiter-or, since it was fully dressed, possibly headwaitress-came forward to lead him to an unoccupied space at a table.
It was probably ship regulation dress, but he thought the black trousers and the hairy head and hands projecting from the neck and cuffs of the stiff, white tunic made it look ridiculous as well as feel very uncomfortable because Orligians usually wore nothing but a light harness that allowed the air to penetrate their fur and cool their bodies.
He was shown to a table containing fourteen Kelgian passengers, a Nidian, two Melfans, and one from Earth, and, inevitably, given the place opposite the Earth-human female.
She was dark-haired, young, and slim, and wore the minimum of jewelry on her head and ears and on the front of her highcollared, formal dress, which fitted her like a thin coat of black paint. Back at the hospital the Earth-human nurses had taken to wearing their whites very tight because, they insisted, it aided them in making fast changes into their other-species environmental protection suits, even though the style did not suit some of them. With this one it did.
O’Mara gave her a brief nod and did the same to the few other-species diners who had turned to look at him, then sat down quickly and fixed his eyes on the menu display. Doubtless Craythorne would have said and done something different, but he just wanted to eat and not talk. That was not to be.
“Good evening, Lieutenant,” she said pleasantly. “I’m afraid it’s a fixed menu on the first night out, and for the rest of the time too, as a matter of fact, although the Earth-human food they serve is usually quite good. If you don’t like it or have any special preferences, you’ll just have to starve.”
“I am starving? said O’Mara, looking up at her, “and I’ve no special preferences. Food is just fuel.”
The Kelgian in the seat beside him spiked its fur in shock and said, “A culinary barbarian! But what else can one expect of a large, over-muscled carnivore. Probably a messy eater, too.”
The young woman looked suddenly concerned. She said quickly, “Lieutenant, please don’t feel offended, Kelgians always say
. . . exactly what they feel, ma’am? O’Mara finished for her. He tried to smile, an exercise to which his facial muscles were long unused, then glanced toward the Kelgian and added, “I don’t have mobile fur to show you how I feel, friend, but right now I am feeling very hungry but not, I think, hungry enough to eat you.
“There is doubt in your mind?” said the other.
Before O’Mara could reply there was a quiet, triple chime that came from somewhere inside their table, the place panel in front of him slid aside, and the first course rose into sight.
“Saved by the bell? said the Kelgian as it bent its over its own platter.
O’Mara didn’t have to speak again until the meal was finished, by which time he was pleasantly distended and feeling well disposed toward everyone in general but not, he told himself firmly, toward anyone in particular.
“You’re looking much happier, Lieutenant,” said the young woman. “What do you think of the ship’s food now?”
“It’s still only fuel? said O’Mara, “but premium grade.”
“That is a very large and energy-hungry body you have there,” she said. “But I’d say, even before we get to see you in a swimsuit, that you are a heavy energy user as well because you don’t seem to store any of it as fat. Do you like to swim?”
“The water restrictions on space service don’t allow it,” he replied. “I can’t swim.”
“Then I’d be happy to teach you,” she said, “just for the company. It isn’t a big pool, but the Kelgians, who make up most of the passenger list, don’t like getting their fur wet and the Melfans just sink and crawl about on the bottom so they say they might as well stay in air. We’re the only Earth-humans on board and will have the place to ourselves most of the time. There wouldn’t be many otherspecies onlookers to embarrass you if you didn’t do well at first. I’ve never taught anyone to swim before so it might be fun. Are you called anything else besides Lieutenant, Lieutenant?”
“O’Mara,” he said. “But about the pool, I’m not sure that I could . . .
“Joan? she said.
“Kledenth? said the Kelgian beside him, “if anyone is interested.”
“I don’t want to sound pushy? she continued, “but believe it or not, you’re the first Earth-human we’ve had on this trip and I’m dying to talk with someone who doesn’t need a translator. And of course you could swim, or at least stay afloat. If y~u take a deep breath and don’t quite empty your lungs, you won’t sink, and if you did get into trouble, I’d be there to grab you and hold your head above water. All you really need to swim is a bit of confidence?
O’Mara didn’t reply.
“Alternatively? she went on, “there’s the exercise machinery if you want to get hot and sweaty, unless you prefer playing table games like chess or scremman. Or there’s the observation gallery, where you can guzzle umpteen varieties of different other-planetary booze until you begin to see things crawling about in hyperspace outside. Which reminds me, do you know what Chorrantir, our only Tralthan passenger, said about alcoholics on its home world? It said that eventually they begin seeing pink Earth-humans.”
“Oh, God? he said, and smiled in spite of himself.
“Come on, Lieutenant O’Mara? Joan persisted. “That uniform looks good on you, but everybody on the ship knows by now that we have a Monitor on board, so you should relax and take it off What do you say?”
“This conversation? said Kledenth suddenly, “is much more interesting than the endless talking from my friends down the table about other-world legends and the heroic, or sometimes utterly reprehensible, figures who populate them. To some of these people it has become a religion rather than a hobby. Well, what do you say, O’Mara?”
“Nothing,” he said uncomfortably. “I’m still thinking about it.”
“But there’s nothing to think about? Kledenth went on, its fur rippling in small, uneven waves. “I know that you Earthhumans don’t have our ability to outwardly express inner feelings without ambiguity but, even to me, in this situation the bare words are more than adequate. The female concerned is young and probably physically attractive to you-although as a Kelgian I consider it to be an unsightly life-form whose wobbly chest lumps give it a ridiculous, top-heavy look-and plainly feeling bored and possibly sexually frustrated because she was the only member of ~ species among the passengers. Now a same-species male has come among us and the situation has changed for the better. Again I cannot speak with authority, O’Mara, but presumably you, too, are beautiful or have other male attributes which she finds attractive . . .
O’Mara felt his face growing warm. He tried to halt the other with an upraised hand, but either it didn’t know the significance of the gesture or was simply ignoring it.
. . . To me it is clear? Keldenth went on, “that this invitation to widen your experience by learning to swim will, I understand, require you to divest yourselves of all or most of those ridiculous body coverings, and place you in a situation of close physical intimacy which is also, if my understanding of Earth-human sexual practices is correct, the usual prelude to mating. I can foresee you having an interesting and enjoyable voyage. So what do you say, O’Mara?”
