Sector general omnibus, p.271
Sector General Omnibus, page 271
The emoting of Danalta and the Earth-human casualty diminished with distance to merge with the faint, background feelings of the medical team and the rest of the casualties. Without false modesty Prilicla knew that out of the entire Cinrusskin race he possessed one of the most sensitive and analytical empathic faculties his planetary history had ever recorded. For several long minutes he concentrated on using it.
And found nothing.
His disappointment was severe enough to make his limbs tremble. He knew that he was capable of detecting the emotional radiation of every species known to the Federation, right down to the tiny, savage feelings of non-sapient insects, but this was a thinking member of a new star-traveling species. Perhaps he had finally encountered one that thought and felt on a sensory level that was beyond his detection range. He was having feelings of personal doubt and inadequacy as well as disappointment.
Sometime and somewhere, he told himself as he lifted the scanner and keyed for the metal penetration setting, everything has to happen for the first time.
Prilicla moved closer until his head was only a few inches. from the bulbous swelling in the protective garment which, in the majority of life-forms, was the location of the cranium and the nerve center of the sensory equipment. Slowly and carefully he passed the scanner over the area, continuing for several minutes to scan with his feelings at ultra-short range while at the same time searching with the instrument for clinical signs of life in any underlying organic material. He could not believe it when he found neither. He even had trouble finding his voice.
“Friend Murchison,” he said finally, “I have a casualty here which requires further examination. Do you need me there?”
“We do, but not urgently,” the pathologist replied. It emitted a sudden burst of concern before it brought the feeling under control. “You have been with that one for over half an hour. The situation here is that all four casualties have been cut free of their suits but there are a few small areas where pieces of burned cloth-
ing and charred body tissue are adhering, which will require surgical separation. The escharred areas and deeper burn locations where obvious necrosis has taken place will need to be trimmed away and the sites covered with surrogate skin until proper replacement surgery is available at the hospital. Meanwhile, IV nutrients, rehydration, and replacement of lost protein is currently under way while the casualties are being supported on cushions of cool, sterile air. Their present condition is critical but stable, and one of them, the last one you sent to us, is barely on the plus side of terminal. We may lose that one. Earth-human vital organs don’t take kindly to being casseroled in their own juices. But you sound as if you might have another casualty for us. Is it a new boy on the block?”
Prilicla hesitated, then said, “I’m not yet certain whether it is a casualty for treatment or a new specimen for postmortem investigation. Certainly I’ve never encountered a life-form like this one before, or seen references to anything like it in the literature.”
“Sounds interesting,” said Murchison, its matter-of-fact tone belying the mounting curiosity it was feeling. “When can we see it? Shall I send Naydrad with a litter to—”
“No,” Prilicla broke in. He could feel the other’s surprise because normally he would never have spoken so sharply to a subordinate. In a gentler voice he went on. “I have the feeling that you have the clinical situation under control over there. Continue as you are doing, but do nothing else until or unless I tell YOU otherwise.”
“Sir,” it said, emoting intense puzzlement. The feeling was being shared and reinforced by Naydrad, Danalta, and the officers on Rhabwar who were monitoring the images and conversations coming from Terragar. But Prilicla needed answers himself before he could try to give them to others, and he had 0 pause for a moment to steady his shaking limbs before he could return to the scanner examination.
Since he was the only empath present, there was of course nobody to know of or feel his fear. The minds of the medical team were engaged exclusively with their own clinical concerns, but the people on the ambulance ship had little more to do than to monitor and observe his actions, and those observations would have included the minor and continuing tremor in his limbs. Very soon friend Fletcher would deduce the reason for his terror, if it and the others hadn’t done so already.
They knew as well as he did that the crew of Terragar had sought desperately to avoid all contact with their fellow officers and would-be rescuers, and that it was a virtual certainty that the entity he was trying to examine was the reason. It came as no surprise when the long period of silence was broken hesitantly by the captain.
“Doctor,” it said. “Possibly this is none of my clinical business, and I’ll understand if you tell me to shut up in your usual polite fashion, but your examination of the alien casualty puzzles me. I’ve been watching you for the past half an hour and have observed that while you began by closely approaching but not touching the creature, for reasons that I think we both understand, you are now making continuous contact with it. In what way has the situation changed? Is the creature no longer a threat to you, and, if so, why is your body language suggesting otherwise? And why are you examining every square inch of the body surface, including its hands and individual digits which, in my layperson’s opinion, are not usually the site of life-threatening injuries?”
Prilicla was silent for a moment while he tried to organize the results of his examination in a form that would not embarrass him when the recording was played back, as it would be many times, by the cultural-contact people.
“I began by assuming that the air inside its suit was one of the oxygen-and-inert combinations used by warm-blooded oxygen-breathers, and identified the species tentatively as physiological classification CHLI. Sub-surface scanner investigation of the suit, and a deeper, detailed examination of its content, revealed the presence of unique technology of a level of complexity that I am not qualified to assess. The subsequent forensic investigation suggests that the position and sharply defined area of heat damage to the suit—the head section, forward pair of limbs, and particularly the attached digits which are literally fused together—was sustained before, rather than after, the subject was taken on board Terragar. The later atmospheric heating effects suffered by the ship had no effect on the occupant. No doubt, friend Fletcher, you will wish me to help you to make a more thorough investigation at a more convenient time.
“To summarize,” he ended, “life—as we understand the term—is no longer present. I very much doubt that it ever was.” He felt the sudden burst of surprise and curiosity from the medical team, but it was on a low level because their attention was being concentrated on their Earth-human casualties. The captain’s emotional radiation was accompanied by words.
“Wait, Doctor,” it said. “Do I understand you correctly? Are you saying that the subject is a robot of unique and advanced design, and, and that it may be a casualty of war?”
“I’m unwilling to speculate on the available evidence, friend Fletcher,” Prilicla replied, “but judging by the sophistication of design and construction
in this mechanism, it may even be possible that we have discovered a non-organic form of intelligent life. But I advise extreme caution during any subsequent examination, because the actions of this creature or others like it may be the reason why Terragar was trying so hard to avoid contact with us. We won’t know more until or unless the ship’s officers are able to talk to us.
“Friend Murchison,” he added, “I’ll be with you in five minutes.”
“The sooner the better,” he heard Naydrad say. In spite of Murchison’s earlier, reassuring situation report, he could feel that it was speaking for all of them.
The field medical station was a prefabricated, modular structure designed for use at the scene of space construction accidents or planetary disaster-relief operations. It comprised a self-contained, multiple-species operating room to which recovery wards, medical-staff accommodation, and ancillary equipment could be added as required. The OR was already in use and Rhab-war’s pressor beams had lifted in the less urgently required sections together with a couple of general-purpose robots that were busily attaching them as he approached.
As if it were an unconscious emotional preparation for the serious clinical problems ahead, a childhood memory of his home world, like a waking dream, came flooding back to calm his mind. In those days it had been himself who had been assembling brightly-colored structures out of building-blocks on the sand, and peopling them with legendary creatures out of his imagination who had strange and varied capabilities for performing great deeds of good or evil on those in their power—short of ending their lives, that was, because violent death was something that even an adult Cinrusskin did not willingly think about. This stretch of golden beach could have been the same, as was the green fringe of vegetation inland that was too indistinct to appear alien and therefore different. But there all similarity ended.
The steep, low-gravity waves of Cinruss had been replaced by the low, smooth rollers that peaked and foamed only as they broke in the shallows; and here the people inhabiting the bright building blocks were more varied and wonderful than anything he could ever have imagined as a child, and death was something that they thought about, faced, and, in the majority of their cases, conquered every day of their lives.
But not today.
From Murchison and the other team members he felt the sudden burst of sorrow, self-criticism, and near anger characteristic of healers who had just lost a patient.
CHAPTER 8
When he joined them a few minutes later, Naydrad was moving the deceased casualty to an adjoining compartment on a litter with a closed, opaque cover. The features of Captain Fletcher looked silently down from the wall communicator screen, the fleshy edges of its mouth pressed tightly together and its strong feelings tenuous with distance. Two other casualties had been given preliminary treatment and were floating above an enclosed, air-cushioned bed while Murchison and Dan-alta were working on the remaining one. They were concentrating all of their attention on excising the areas of charred tissue while covering the less severely affected sections of the body surface with the thick, creamlike, clinging medication that had been developed for the treatment of DBDG burn cases. It would aid tissue regeneration, deaden pain on the patient’s return to consciousness, and protect against same-species airborne infection. The latter was the reason why it was the pathologist alone who was dressed for a full aseptic operational procedure.
Microorganisms that had originated on one planet could not cross the species barrier to affect or infect life-forms who had evolved on another. Naydrad felt the downdraft from Prilicla’s on its uncovered fur and looked up. I’m beginning to feel like a redundant limb here,” it said,
looking at the newly arrived casualty with feelings of concern and impatience ruffling its mind and its fur. “Will I help you to cut off its suit?”
As a specialist in heavy rescue, Naydrad was the hospital’s acknowledged expert at cutting all shapes and sizes of injured space casualties out of their environmental protection and underlying body coverings, if the species concerned wore them, without inflicting further damage to the living contents. It made no effort to salvage any part of the suit, but instead used its highspeed cutter to section the entire surface, leaving it with so many connected incisions that the pieces could be peeled away and discarded like the shell of a multiply cracked egg. Except in the places where the material and underlying skin had fused together into a single, charred mass, the uniform went the same way. While it was dealing with those areas, Naydrad positioned the patient for him on its frictionless bed of cooling air and began the rehydration process. Murchison and Danalta joined them without comment and smoothly took over the procedure while he withdrew to hover above the patient.
“How is it, sir?” said Murchison. They both knew that it wasn’t asking about the patient’s physical condition, which was clear to see, but the unseen emotional radiation that only he could detect. “Can it withstand major surgery?”
“It is better than I would have expected, and yes,” Prilicla replied. “It has suffered major trauma and as a result is deeply unconscious, but the emotional radiation is characteristic of a being who, unconsciously, is still fighting to survive. That situation could change for the worse if we don’t operate quickly.
“This patient,” he went on for the benefit of the recorders, “took shelter in a heavy metal equipment cabinet. It was found in the kneeling position with its body folded forward at the waist and steadied by one hand. That hand and its lower limbs were in lengthy contact with metal whose heat was conducted through the suit fabric to the feet and knees so that these areas have sustained deep charring that involves the underlying circulatory system, muscles, and associated nerve networks. The other two casualties have already lost their feet and lower limbs. We may be able to save the hand on this one, which seems to have been holding a non-conducting tool to keep it from direct contact with the hot metal. Your feelings, friend Murchison, and those of the rest of you, indicate that you have come to a decision, but I must ask the question verbally.
“Is there general agreement,” he ended, “that the lower legs should be removed without delay?”
He was aware of their feelings, so there was no real need for them to speak, but Murchison, who had its own, peculiarly Earth-human form of empathy, was feeling Prilicla’s need for support and reassurance.
“Yes,” it said firmly.
Before anyone else could reply, there was an interruption in the form of the captain clearing its breathing passages. It said, “Much as I dislike watching major operative procedures, especially on fellow officers of my own species who are personally known to me, I’ve been forcing myself to do so. The reason is that, to my medically untutored mind, and considering the literal hell they went through on that ship, it seems to me that there is a strong possibility that none of these casualties will survive.”
It hesitated for a moment, and he was able to detect distant feelings of embarrassment mixed with determination as it went on. “To me the most urgent priority here is the gathering of information, knowledge that could be of vital importance to a great many beings throughout the Federation. After all, your patients were intent on killing themselves, so restoring one of them to a condition in which he can tell us why is . . .”
“Friend Fletcher,” Prilicla broke in gently, “your words are giving rise to intense feelings of disagreement and anger which the medical team is trying hard not to verbalize, and in the present circumstances those words are an unwanted distraction. The clinical condition of the three casualties is critical but stable, and it is possible that they may not survive, much less regain consciousness.”
“In that case,” the captain said, “why not bring one of them round in case they die before they can give us the information we need? It will be tough on the person concerned, but they are Monitor Corps, after all, and would be the first to understand the priorities in this situation.”
For a long moment Prilicla tried hard to reduce the tremor that the other’s suggestion had caused in his limbs, but succeeded only in keeping his operating hands steady. Finally he spoke.
“We will discuss this matter at a more convenient time,” he said, without his customary politeness. “You may continue to observe, but you will refrain from making any further suggestions until the procedure has been completed.”
The captain remained silent but watchful during the remainder of the operation, and the additional surgery needed on the other two casualties. Prilicla assumed that the other was breathing through its nasal openings because never before had he seen Earth-human lips pressed so tightly and continuously together. But when it was obvious to the layest of laypersons, which the captain was not, that the procedures on all three patients was completed, it spoke again.
Dr. Prilicla,” said the captain, “we must have a serious talk as soon as possible after—”
“Captain Fletcher!” Murchison broke in, its words calm and cold and quiet, although the feelings that accompanied them shared none of those qualities. “Dr. Prilicla has been operating here for nearly two hours, to which must be added its rescue time on Terragar. By now a space officer in your position must be aware of the physical limitations of the GLNO life-form, including its lack of stamina which requires that it rest frequently and often. We’re all tired right now, and not just the boss . . .”
It broke off as the captain raised a hand for silence and said sharply, “I’m well aware of my senior medical officer’s requirements, and I had been about to say that we must talk very seriously as soon as possible after it has rested. It may well be that the situation we have here transcends any considerations of medical ethics. Sleep well, Doctor.”
After a final check of the patients’ monitors, Murchison, Naydrad, and himself retired, leaving Danalta on watch. In the shape-changer’s utterly savage home-planet environment, all life-forms who required regular periods of unconsciousness to recharge their organic batteries had not survived their unsleeping natural enemies to develop intelligence, so remaining awake was no hardship for it. In the present situation it extruded an eye and a large, sensitive ear which it kept trained on the patient monitors. There were times when Prilicla almost envied the unsleeping Danalta, but not often, because normally he needed and welcomed those periods of non-thinking and non-feeling when he did not have to empathize with anything or anybody.
