Sector general omnibus, p.281
Sector General Omnibus, page 281
Prilicla gestured towards the sealed door in front of them and said, “Keet,” then pointed back at the compartment they had just left.
“Jas-am,” came the reply.
“We’re talking!” For a moment the captain’s relief and pleasure at the breakthrough swamped most of the survivor’s emotional radiation, but not the urgency.
“Not yet,” Prilicla said. “We’re exchanging personal-name sounds, but it’s only a start.”
“Rhabwar here,” the voice of Haslam sounding in their earpieces said. “I’m afraid the Doctor is right, Captain. The computer needs more for an accurate translation: verbs, accompanying actions, explanations, and a bigger vocabulary to link the words together.”
“Friend Haslam,” he said, “Show the pictures of planets and native species again, please, but just those for Earth and Cinruss. Then patch in one of the survivor life-forms and a world with no geographical features.”
Prilicla watched the tiny repeater screen in his suit as this was done. He said, “Fletcher is from Earth, Prilicla is from Cinruss, Keet is from . . .” and waited.
Without hesitation the voice from the robot said, “Flet-cha, Ert; Pil-ik-la, Cin-russ; Keet, Tro-lan.”
“We’re getting there, Doctor,” Haslam said excitedly; then, in a tone almost of apology it went on. “Names and places of origin help, but they aren’t enough for the computer to begin structuring the language. We still need verbs and related actions.”
Unlike its outsize parent in Sector General, Rhabwar’s translation computer did not carry a record of all of the intelligence-bearing clicks, moans, hisses, and chirps that were used as speech by the members of the Galactic Federation, a vast store of data which enabled it to compare the input of the new languages that were discovered from time to time and produce a translation. But the ambulance ship had proved on several previous occasions that it could do the same job, with a little on-site help.
“Friend Fletcher,” he said, pointing at the material in the other’s transparent satchel, “I need a short piece of fine cable that can be pulled apart easily, and a short length of piping. Do you have one that is thin-walled and breaks without shattering into pieces?”
He felt the captain’s puzzlement dissolve in a flood of comprehension. It produced the cable, wrapped it around his hand and pulled it apart, then he produced—not a pipe, but a length of thin sleeving—and snapped it in two before handing the four pieces to him. It said, “Yes and no, Doctor. This breaks without splintering, but it needs an Earth-human’s muscles to do it.”
Prilicla indicated a section of undamaged piping through one of the transparent access hatches, then pointed back the way they had come towards the other survivor’s position. Holding a piece of the broken pipe in each hand, he brought
them slowly together at the faces of the original fracture and did the same with the severed wiring. He repeated the movements several time before speaking.
“Wire, pipes,” he said, pointing at the captain and himself. “We join wires and pipes. We fix wires and pipes. We repair"— he made a wide gesture that included the ship all around them— “everything.”
Through its robot crew member’s sensors, the first survivor already knew that they repaired things, although it had not known the word for what they had been doing. He waited, straining to detect the first feelings of comprehension that would tell him that it understood the other, more important message that he was trying to send. And when the crew robot spoke again, he knew that it did.
“Pil-ik-la, Flet-cha,” it said. “Fix Jasam.”
The captain gave a loud, barking laugh of sheer relief, which it cut short abruptly in case it might have been mistaken for a threatening sound by the survivor. On Rhabwar, Haslam sounded equally pleased.
“That’s it!” said the lieutenant. “We have a translation. Just talk to it naturally and mime only if you think it might not understand a new action. The conversation will be a bit stilted until you build up a vocabulary, but the computer is happy. I’m relaying the translation through your headsets. Nice work. Any other instructions?”
Prilicla’s body was shaking with a slow, even tremor of pleasure and relief that was tempered slightly by the remembered emotional radiation from the second survivor, Jasam, which indicated that clinically it was in very bad shape.
“Stand by, friend Haslam,” he said. “I need you to project more pictures. Edit the previous run to show only the recovery of space-wreck casualties, then add something on their transfer to and treatment on Rhabwar. Be brief regarding the treatment, too much detail on surgical procedures might give the impression that we go in for physical torture. Concentrate on the before-and-after aspects, the badly injured casualties, and then showing them cured. Run them as soon as you can.”
Turning towards the inner door and the robot hovering in front of it, he brought the two pieces of pipe together slowly and said, “I fix slowly,” and repeated the action and words several times; then he moved them quickly into contact and said, “I fix quickly.” Then he pointed back the way they had come and added, “I fix Jasam quickly,” emphasizing the last word.
He felt understanding and agreement coloring the ever-present deep concern, and said, “Keet, the word for that is 'yes.''
He pointed in the direction of Jasam and used the broken pipe to indicate, he hoped, that they were both broken. Then he raised a hand to his eyes before pointing first at an undamaged section of piping and then at the inner door of Keet’s compartment.
“To fix the broken Jasam,” he mimed as he said the words, “I must see the unbroken Keet.”
Again there was understanding, but with it there was a sudden return of the earlier fear and hatred.
“Keep that accursed druul away from us!” it said, so loudly that it must have been its equivalent of a shout. “I don’t trust it! We are both weakened and helpless and it will eat us. We thought that interstellar space, at least, would be clear of such vermin!”
Prilicla tried to ignore the captain’s scandalized emotional radiation, and said reassuringly, “Don’t be afraid, Fletcher won’t touch you. Fletcher fixes machines. Prilicla fixes people.”
The captain’s low-voiced comment was lost in the sound of the inner door hissing open.
It revealed a small compartment whose interior was an almost-solid mass of support brackets, piping, and cable runs leading into a flattened oval dish at its center. The upper half of the receptacle had a sealed, transparent cover that gave a clear view of the co-captain of the ship. Physically Keet was classification CHLI and closely resembled its robot crew member in size and shape except that instead of the silvery metal skin there was the veined brownish-pink of organic tissue. A continuous control-and-sensor-input panel laterally encircled the inner surface of the body container, and the operating keys were within easy reach of the creature’s short digits. Its food, water-supply, and waste-extraction systems had been surgically implanted into the relevant organs.
Prilicla’s body shook briefly with a feeling composed of pity, revulsion, and the claustrophobic fear known only to free-flying beings like himself when he realized that the ship’s organic crew had been confined to their control and life-support pods with no freedom to move, not even around their own ship.
They had been installed with the rest of the ship’s equipment.
From his medical satchel he took his scanner, reversed it so that Keet could see the viewplate, and demonstrated its function by touching it against parts of his own body, before moving it close to the other’s pod.
“This will not hurt you,” he said. “It will enable me to see inside your body so that I can understand and fix anything that is wrong.”
“Will you be able to fix Jasam, too?”
Its speech was going and coming through his translator now, clearly and with the possibility for misunderstanding being reduced with every word. The prime rule during a first-contact situation was to find out as much a possible about the other life-form so as to further reduce that risk, and to tell the truth at all times.
But it was also sound medical practice to encourage a patient to talk about itself, or any other pleasant subject in which it was interested, so as to take its mind off a frightening or possibly embarrassing examination.
“I will try to fix Jasam,” he said. “But to do that, I must first discover everything I can about you and your people. For the best results I would like to have full knowledge, even though there is no way of knowing which pieces of information will be helpful during the repairs, so just tell me about your partner, your lives, your customs, the food you eat, and the things you like to do. In the event of an unsuccessful repair, which is a faint possibility, who and where are your next of kin? You are a completely new and scientifically advanced life-form and everything you say will be interesting and useful.
“Tell me about yourself, and your world.”
CHAPTER 20
A few minutes into the examination there was an interruption. The two courier ships had arrived and, although they were keeping station at the requested distance, their impatience for a full report on the situation could almost be felt. The courier captains’ voices were being relayed through Rhabwar to the alien ship so that Prilicla and Fletcher, but not the alien casualties, could hear them.
“This is not a good time to stop and make reports, friend Fletcher,” said Prilicla without looking up from the scanner. “Just tell them that . . .”
“I know what to tell them,” said the other, and went on briskly. “A very delicate first-contact situation is proceeding as we speak. The alien vessel has a crew of two, both physiological classification CHLI; one is seriously injured and the other less so. The medical examination and the contact procedure are being conducted by Dr. Prilicla and are complicated by the fact that the casualties have a rabid fear of all DBDG life-forms regardless of size, apparently because of our close resemblance to a natural enemy on their home planet. All of the proceedings so far have been recorded in case of accidents, but I ask that you wait to avoid taking back an incomplete report that could be updated from hour to hour.”
“Understood, sir,” came the reply. “Over and listening out.”
At first the casualty seemed anxious to talk about the druul, and how much its race hated and feared them, rather than about its world or itself. The proximity of Fletcher was doubtless responsible for that. Prilicla continued to speak and to radiate verbal and emotional reassurance while he plied his scanner and the captain kept its distance. Gradually the subject widened but it always veered back to the hated druul. Keet’s species called themselves the Trolanni, and their world Trolann, and over the past few centuries it had become a savage, frightful place of unending war for its diminishing resources against the druul
and the other organic and inorganic pollutants that were fast making the once-populous world uninhabitable for both of its intelligent species, as well as for most other forms of life above the insect level.
Many attempts had been made to check the self-poisoning of their overcrowded world and to impose strict controls on the high degree of industrialization needed to support it if irreversible chemical changes were not to increase the level of toxicity to the point where the planetary biosphere would no longer be able to support life. But preventative and curative measures on that scale required personal sacrifices, self-control, and the cooperation of everyone concerned. A large minority of the Trolanni, and all of the druul, refused to give it.
Possibly there were individuals who thought differently, but as a population the druul decided that the problem would be solved if the Trolanni and their food supply were considered a natural resource and used exclusively for the benefit and continued survival of the druul.
As a species the druul were small, bipedal, vicious, fast-breeding, and utterly implacable where enemies, sapient or otherwise, were concerned. From the dawn of history their rate of scientific and technological achievement had been equal to the Trolanni, so that the wars they had fought had been forced to a stop rather than being won. In spite of many peace overtures by the Trolanni, the two species had lived in a state of unfriendly coexistence until a war that was no longer stoppable was being fought for the diminishing resources of the stinking, polluted, near-corpse that was their planet. For many generations the druul had practiced cannibalism, eating even the sickly young or the elderly or otherwise unproductive people of their own race. They could not be defeated because there were always more of them hungry and ready to fight. Apart from a few pockets of weakening resistance and the latest Trolanni technology which defended them, the planet belonged to the druul.
The only solution was for the Trolanni to find a new, unpolluted and peaceful home.
“You found a new home here,” said Prilicla gently. “What went wrong?”
“A technical failure of some kind,” said Keet, radiating feelings of minor embarrassment and apology. “I’m not the propulsion specialist. After finding an ideal world it seemed as if we couldn’t return home with the news. But we had signaling devices, two of them, untried because none of the searchsuits had used them before then. The first one malfunctioned and seriously damaged the hull. The second one was modified, but it destroyed the doll who released it. Then the ship with the druuls in it arrived.”
“They weren’t druuls,” said Prilicla. “It was a rescue ship that came to help you.”
“I’m sorry,” said Keet. “I know that, now.”
Prilicla withdrew the scanner and moved back. He had all the physiological data he needed for a preliminary assessment of the other casualty’s condition, but a lot more non-medical information was needed. He said, “I’ll stay in contact with you, but we’re moving over to look at Jasam now. Tell it not to be afraid; neither friend Fletcher nor myself mean it any harm. Why did you attack the first rescue ship?”
“We didn’t,” it replied quickly. “It attacked our protective suit . . .”
For the few minutes it took them to transfer to the other control module, Prilicla listened to Keet’s reassuring words to its life-mate and felt the growing trust in Fletcher and himself that accompanied them even though they were feelings that Jasam had yet to share.
“. . . That is what the druul have been doing to us for hundreds of years,” it continued, “and many of our scientists think that they no longer know why they do it. As individuals they are predominantly machines designed to attack and penetrate our protective suits, as a nut is cracked to uncover its edible kernel, although all too often the kernel itself is destroyed by the ferocity of the onslaught so that there is no reward for the tiny, organic fraction that controls the machines they have become. We Trolanni, at least, are whole, sapient, and civilized, if very sickly, people inside our protective suits, although with this two-body searchsuit with its vastly greater proportion of machine-to-or-ganic life, we were forced to become more like the druul . . .”
So they thought of their ship as a searchsuit, a bigger, more complex and specialized version of the individual protective garment than those that the planet-based druul forced them to wear. Interesting. Prilicla could feel the captain’s mounting excitement as Keet continued speaking, but he knew that friend Fletcher would not interrupt the flow of information with a question that would shortly be answered.
“. . . In this instance,” it went on, “our hull protection was designed to safeguard us for the short time we were in atmosphere before we entered space, where so far the druul have been unable to go. The protection operates continuously in a state of high alert, and instantly disrupts the computer-operated control and life-support systems of any attacking machine-encased druul. But we never expected to find them, or beings just like them, between the stars. That was terrifying for us and there was nothing we could do.”
“It would help us to help Jasam and yourself,” Prilicla said gently, “if your protective device could be switched off. Can it?”
“No,” said Keet, “at least not by us. To do that, specialist knowledge and devices are needed and these are available only on our home world. It must not be switched off because its protection is needed during our second trip through atmosphere, hopefully on our way home to report success in finding a new world. But instead . . . Please, will Jasam live?”
Sometimes, Prilicla thought, as he noted the damage to its life-mate as well as the traces of dried body fluid that were staining the joins where the metal and organic interface was visible, it was not always advisable to tell the truth even in a first-contact situation.
“There is a strong possibility that we’ll be able to save its life,” he said.
“But not in here,” said the captain on their personal frequency that did not go through the translator. Quickly and concisely it went on to explain why while Prilicla tried to provide a more optimistic translation for the two Trolanni, continuing his scanner examination of the second casualty as he spoke.
Jasam’s injuries had been due to the structural damage to its side of the searchsuit, caused by the explosive failure of the first beacon they had released, which in turn had caused multiple fracturing and dislocation of the life-support plumbing that had been surgically implanted into its body. Its resultant external and internal wounds were extensive and serious, he explained, but with the right treatment they would not be life-threatening. He personally had repaired organic damage that was much more severe and had returned the entity concerned to full health.
“But in this case,” he went on, “the right treatment would first involve removing Jasam and yourself from your vessel—”
“And leave us without a suit!” Keet broke in. “And, and life support? We’ve already lost our dolls—Jasam’s destroyed, and mine damaged beyond the ability to do sensitive repair work. No!”
They called their robot crew members “dolls,” Prilicla thought, and the accompanying emotional radiation was indicative of the feelings held for a friend and helper as well as for a pet or plaything. Curious—but satisfying that curiosity would have to wait until the more urgent problem of removing them from their ship-sized protective suit was settled.
