The compleat collected s.., p.284
The COMPLEAT Collected SFF Works, page 284
"... and eventually make it realize that it isn't alone and that someone, us, is trying to help it ..."
THE NOISE in that confined space was incredible.
McCullough opened his eyes to see chunks of tentacles and shell being torn off his Two. Then he saw why the Threes were so excited: the weapon with its odd double stock and very ordinary magazine and barrel, and the being who was holding it.
He saw, too, the four manipulators encircling the alien's head, three of which were so badly damaged that it was a miracle it was able to hold the weapon at all, and the awful, Two-inflicted scars running the length of its body. He looked last at its eyes, and for a long time neither of them did anything. Then the alien pushed its machine-gun away, and McCullough, now that his taped report had come to an end, began calling Hollis and Walters on his suit radio.
Chapter Twenty-Two
BOTH SUPPLY rockets with their water, food and spare spacesuits went off course.
When he told him about it Walter's voice was strained. McCullough could imagine the pilot's feelings—the fear of how the doctor might react, his pleas for help which the pilot could not possibly give him and Walters's own, personal fear of the long voyage home with Hollis in a vehicle which had already passed the time limit for operational safety. When the pilot went on speaking, his cheerfulness was obviously forced.
He said, "Brady feels terrible about this. He says you did the right thing despite his and everyone else's opposition. He's sorry for the things he said to you, and he says he deserved everything you said to him. He—well, he's beginning to sound like Churchill—the debt owed you by the whole of humanity, the immeasurable social and scientific advances this first contact will bring about, and so on. He wishes there was only some way to bring all of us back."
The pilot broke off, then said awkwardly, "You said earlier how terrific a thing it would be to travel to another solar system ..."
McCullough and Hollis looked at each other, and the alien watched both of them. They were in the antechamber of the generator blister, where the physicist had just completed repairs. The e-t had followed them there as it followed them everywhere. Sometimes the being made noises at them or waved its mandible or exchanged sketches. But mostly it just hung there and watched.
It was possible that the being was security conscious or anxious lest they commit further acts of sabotage. But McCullough did not think so. To his way of thinking the e-t was simply glad of the company. Any company.
To Walters he said. "It seemed like a fine idea at the time, but I wasn't thinking straight just then. No doubt someone will bust a gut to get going, and soon. If, as I am convinced, we can duplicate the Ship's drive. But I prefer to go home."
"But, sir ..."
"Hollis's suit is still in one piece, and I have an idea. Last week it would not have been a good idea."
... Because last week Berryman and Drew were alive and both P-ships would have been needed to get them home ...
By the time he had finished explaining, Walters was much happier. The pilot said briskly, "Two days should be enough for the job, but I'll contact Brady at once asking for a course based on a four-day countdown. That will give us time to check our ship. And ... and I'll tell them we want return tickets for three!"
He had to explain his idea to the alien then, but that was not too difficult because the old adage about a good picture being worth two thousand words held true even among extra-terrestrials. But the result was that the alien stuck even closer to him from then on, especially when Hollis was working on P-One. And it kept forcing things on him, things like odd pieces of equipment, the lovely, glowing murals and carvings, books and film spools as well as food and water. McCullough explained graphically about fuel reserves and weight allowances and knew that the alien understood, but it still continued to give him things.
Then early in the second day Hollis completed his work on P-One. On the Ship a large cargo hatch swung open; and Walters, moving very slowly and carefully, edged toward it. The two P-ships were docked nose to nose, and Hollis had stripped P-One of all its projecting antenna, collectors and sensory equipment and had completely removed the return fuel tanks and motors so that the bare command module would fit, just nicely, into the large cargo lock.
Walters slid the stripped-down P-One into the cargo lock, detached it from P-Two and withdrew. The outer seal was closed and pressure restored. Hollis, McCullough and the alien began transferring quantities of food, water, artifacts, photographs and sketches which they had placed in the corridor into the module. Then they wedged it firmly into the lock chamber—a present from Earth for a culture an unguessable number of light-years away.
And suddenly it was time to go.
IT HAD been relatively easy to exchange simple concepts via sketchpad, but there was no way at all for him to tell what it was thinking during those last few minutes in the airlock. It was just a great, fat, caterpillar, an LSD nightmare with too many eyes and mouths in all the wrong places, for him to be able to read such a subtle thing as a facial expression—and the problem cut both ways. All he could do was look at it for a few minutes while it looked at him, then follow Hollis into P-One.
The cargo hatch swung open, air whistled into space and Walters came edging back with P-Two. He docked, they transferred themselves and their stores and artifacts into P-Two and drifted away again. The cargo hatch closed, Walters used steering thrust briefly, and the great Ship fell slowly away from them.
For a long time McCullough did not speak. He was thinking about the alien he had just left and its Ship and the beings who had sent her out, and wondering what they would think of his people—the people who had left three of their dead aboard, killed while trying to clear the Ship of a particularly nasty form of vermin. And in one of the cargo locks there was a human artifact, a tiny, ridiculous, fragile shell which had carried three human beings more than fifty million miles out to their Ship. He did not know what they would think about his people, but that P-ship should tell them a lot.
Walters had completed a last attitude check and was listening to Control during the last few seconds of the countdown when the generator blisters on the Ship glowed suddenly. In an instant it had shrunk from sight.
Hollis gave a great sigh of relief. "I was worried in case I'd botched the repair job," he said. Then he looked closely at McCullough and added, "Don't worry, Doctor, our friend will be all right. It's going home."
Walters was moving his lips silently. Suddenly he pressed the thrust button and said, "So are we!"
The End
Vertigo
Sector General 03.2
New Writings in SF-12 – 1968
Continuing the new series of Sector Twelve General Hospital stories, which commenced in New Writings In S-F 7 with "Invader", Doctors Conway and Trilicla and the staff of the vast hospital in space are faced with saving the life of a first astronaut in space. However, both the patient and his home planet were very strange indeed.
Chapter One
AFTER that one brief and hectic touch-down when the clearing they had chosen as a landing area had suddenly opened an enormous mouth and tried to swallow them, the Survey and Cultural Contact vessel Descartes had returned to continue its study of Meatball from orbit.
Christened Meatball because Galactic Survey Reference NT117/136/5 was verbally cumbersome and because Descartes' Captain had steadfastly refused the honour of having such an odd and distasteful place named after him, the planet had to be seen to be believed. Its oceans were a thick, living soup, its inland seas and lakes a turgid, heaving stew and its land masses, or what on a normal planet would correspond to a land surface, were a multi-layer carpet of slow-moving animal life.
In many places there were mineral outcroppings and areas of rocky soil which supported vegetable life and other forms of vegetation grew in the water or rooted themselves temporarily on the 'land' surface, their chief purpose being the assimilation of wastes. But generally the planet was covered by a thick layer of animal life which in some areas was several miles deep. This organic layer was subdivided into strata which crawled and slipped and fought their way through each other to gain access to necessary top-surface vegetation or subsurface minerals, or simply to choke off and cannibalise each other. In the course of this slow, gargantuan conflict these living geologic strata heaved themselves into hills and valleys, altering the shape of lakes and coastlines and changing the topography of the planet from week to week.
The data gathered by Descartes before and during the landing attempt led to a great deal of theorising and discussion.
It was generally agreed that if the planet possessed intelligent life it should take two forms. The first type would be large—one of the tremendous living carpets which could anchor itself to the underlying rock or soil for mineral supplies and also push extensions towards the surface for the purpose of breathing, ingestion and the disposal of wastes. It should also possess a means of defence around its perimeter to keep less intelligent strata from insinuating themselves between it and the ground below or from slipping over it and cutting it off from the surface water, food and air. They were assuming, of course, that real intelligence in a massive organism would require a permanent base from which to develop.
The second possibility might be a very small life-form. It should be smooth-skinned and flexible to enable it to slip between the intersurfaces of the strata animals on its way to and from the surface, and it should be able to withstand considerable pressure and to move fast enough to escape the ingestive processes of the larger types whose movements and metabolism would be relatively slow. At the same time this second type should be large enough to live off the smaller animal and vegetable matter of the seas and non-living land surfaces and their fixed base, if they needed one, might be a cave or tunnel system in the underlying rock.
Specimens, of the first type were spread across the planetary surface for all to see, but they showed no indications of being intelligent, and traces of the second type were still being formed.
It was perhaps inevitable that when the long awaited indication of intelligent life at last appeared the majority of the ship's observers were looking somewhere else, that it did not appear in the batteries of telescopes that were being trained on the surface or on the still and cine films being taken by Descartes' planetary probes, but on the vessel's close-approach radar screens.
CLOSE IN time but at a point distant in space, in the office of the Chief Psychologist of Sector Twelve General Hospital, the world of Meatball and its inhabitants were likewise the subject of a serious and single-minded discussion. Present were Major O'Mara the chief psychologist, Senior Physicians Mannen, Prilicla and Conway, and a small, metallic ... something ... which squirmed and quivered and changed its shape from moment to moment.
A few seconds earlier it had been an elaborately decorated ash-tray and before that a rather lobsided bust of Shakespeare but now, because more than one person was thinking at it simultaneously, it resembled a small, solidified nightmare.
"Maybe we shouldn't do this," said Mannen suddenly. "We may be inflicting grave psychological damage, a form of schizophrenia perhaps ..."
"I'm not the psychologist," said Conway, laughing, "but I find the idea of a psychotic monkey-wrench difficult to accept ..."
"I am, and I refuse to commit myself," said O'Mara drily. He went on, "But we are getting away from the point of this discussion, which is to discover a means of obtaining more, many more, of these ... these ..." He broke off, breathed heavily through his nose and continued, "Normally I am not a covetous man, but when you consider all the things we could do with them, of what the Hospital could do with just ten of them, or even five ..."
Sector General was a multi-environmental hospital, a tremendous, 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. In addition to the patients, whose number and physiological classification was 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 their facilities had not included that surgeon's wish-fulfillment dream come true, an instrument which would take any desired shape and degree of sharpness, an all-purpose surgical tool which was subject to the user's mental as well as manual control.
"... But we have only one of the things!" O'Mara continued vehemently. "We need more! This one found its way—or was directed, rather—on board Descartes during that momentary landing on Meatball. If we were doing the right thing we would put it back where we found it—obviously it is of enormous value. This means that we will have to buy them or conduct some form of trade for them. But to do so we must first be able to communicate with the owners."
He glanced at the three doctors in turn, then went on sardonically, "One hesitates to mention such sordid commercial matters to pure-minded, dedicated medical men like yourselves, but I must do so if only to explain why, when Descartes eventually makes contact with the beings who own these tools, I want you three to head the team which will investigate the medical situation on Meatball.
"Our interest will not be entirely commercial, of course," he added quickly, "but it seems to me that if we have to go in for the practice of barter and exchange, the only thing we have to trade is our medical knowledge and services ..."
IN DESCARTES' control-room the Captain jabbed a button on his console and said sharply, "Communications ...?"
"We have it, sir," came the reply. "A telescope locked on to the radar bearing—the image is on your repeater screen Five. It is a two- or three-stage chemically fuelled vehicle with the second stage still firing. This means we will be able to reconstruct its flight path and pinpoint the launch area with fair accuracy. It is emitting complex patterns of radio frequency radiation indicative of high-speed telemetry channels. The second stage has just cut out and is falling away. The third stage, if it is a third stage, has not ignited ... It's in trouble!"
The alien spacecraft, a slim, shining cylinder pointed at one end and thickened and blunt at the other, had begun to tumble. Slowly at first but with steadily increasing speed it swung and whirled end over end.
"Ordnance?" asked the Captain.
"Apart from the tumbling action," said a slower, more precise voice, "the vessel seems to have been inserted into a very neat circular orbit. It is most unlikely that this orbit was taken up by accident. The lack of sophistication relative, that is—in the vehicle's design and the fact that its nearest approach to us will be a little under two hundred miles all point to the conclusion that it is either an artificial satellite or a manned orbiting vehicle rather than a missile directed at this ship.
"If it is manned," the voice added with more feeling, "the crew must be in serious trouble ..."
"Yes," said the Captain, who treated words like nuggets of some rare and precious metal. He went on, "Astrogation, prepare intersecting and matching orbits, please. Power Room, stand by."
As the tremendous bulk of Descartes closed with the tiny alien craft it became apparent that, as well as tumbling dizzily end over end, the other vessel was leaking. The rapid spin made it impossible to say with certainty whether it was a fuel leak from the unfired third stage or air escaping from the command module if it was, in fact, a manned vehicle.
The obvious procedure was to check the spin with tractor beams as gently as possible so as to avoid straining the hull structure, then de-fuel the unfired third stage to remove the fire hazard before bringing the craft alongside. If the vessel was manned and the leak was of air rather than fuel, it could then be taken into Descartes' cargo hold where rescue and first contact proceedings would be possible—at leisure since Meatball's air was suited to human beings and the reverse, presumably, also held true.
It was expected to be a fairly simple rescue operation, at first ...
"Tractor stations Six and Seven, sir. The alien spacecraft won't stay put. We've slowed it to a stop three times and each time it applies steering thrust and recommences spinning. For some reason it is deliberately fighting our efforts to bring it to rest. The speed and quality of the reaction suggests direction by an on-the-spot intelligence. We can apply more force, but only at the risk of damaging the vessel's hull—it is incredibly fragile by present-day standards, sir."
"I suggest using all necessary force to immediately check the spin, opening its tanks and jettisoning all fuel into space then whisking it into the cargo hold. With normal air pressure around it again there will be no danger to the crew and we will have time to ..."
"Astrogation, here. Negative to that, I'm afraid, sir. Our computation shows that the vessel took off from the sea—more accurately, from beneath the sea, because there is no visible evidence of floating gantries or other launch facilities in the area. We can reproduce Meatball air because it is virtually the same as our own, but not that animal and vegetable soup they use for water, and all the indications point towards the crew being water-breathers."
