Hospital Station

VI

The Monitor was no longer angry, Conway saw as they finished with their current patient and moved onto the next. Instead there was an expression on the other’s face oddly reminiscent of a parent about to lecture an offspring on some of the unpleasant facts of life.

“Basically,” said Williamson as he gently peeled back a field dressing of a wounded DBLF, “your trouble is that you, and your whole social group, are a protected species.”

Conway said, “What?”

“A protected species,” he repeated. “Shielded from the crudities of present-day life. From your social strata-on all the worlds of the Union, not only on Earth — come practically all the great artists, musicians and professional men. Most of you live out your lives in ignorance of the fact that you are protected, that you are insulated from childhood against the grosser realities of our interstellar so-called civilization, and that your ideas of pacifism and ethical behavior are a luxury which a great many of us simply cannot afford. You are allowed this luxury in the hope that from it may come a philosophy which may one day make every being in the Galaxy truly civilized, truly good.”

“I didn’t know,” Conway stammered. “And… and you make us — me, I mean — look so useless …”

“Of course you didn’t know,” said Williamson gently. Conway wondered why it was that such a young man could talk down to him without giving offense; he seemed to possess authority somehow. Continuing, he said, “You were probably reserved, untalkative and all wrapped up in your high ideals. Not that there’s anything wrong with them, understand, it’s just that you have to allow for a little gray with the black and white. Our present culture,” he went on, returning to the main line of discussion,

“is based on maximum freedom for the individual. An entity may do anything he likes provided it is not injurious to others. Only Monitors forgo this freedom.”

“What about the 'Normals’ reservations?” Conway broke in. At last the Monitor had made a statement which he could definitely contradict. “Being policed by Monitors and confined to certain areas of country is not what I’d call freedom.”

“If you think back carefully,” Williamson replied, “I think you will find that the Normals — that is, the group on nearly every planet which thinks that, unlike the brutish Monitors and the spineless aesthetes of your own strata, it is truly representative of its species — are not confined. Instead they have naturally drawn together into communities, and it is in these communities of self-styled Normals that the Monitors have to be most active. The Normals possess all the freedom including the right to kill each other if that is what they desire, the Monitors being present only to see that any Normal not sharing this desire will not suffer in the process.

“We also, when a sufficiently high pitch of mass insanity overtakes one or more of these worlds, allow a war to be fought on a planet set aside for that purpose, generally arranging things so that the war is neither long nor too bloody.” Williamson sighed. In tones of bitter self-accusation he concluded, “We underestimated them. This one was both.”

Conway’s mind was still balking at this radically new slant on things. Before coming to the hospital he’d had no direct contact with Monitors, why should he? And the Normals of Earth he had found to be rather romantic figures, inclined to strut and swagger a bit, that was all. Of course, most of the bad things he had heard about Monitors had come from them. Maybe the Normals had not been as truthful or objective as they could have been …

“This is all too hard to believe,” Conway protested. “You’re suggesting that the Monitor Corps is greater in the scheme of things than either the Normals or ourselves, the professional class!” He shook his head angrily. “And anyway, this is a fine time for a philosophical discussion!”

“You,” said the Monitor, “started it.”

There was no answer to that.

It must have been hours later that Conway felt a touch on his shoulder and straightened to find a DBLF nurse behind him. The being was holding a hypodermic. It said, “Pep-shot, Doctor?”

All at once Conway realized how wobbly his legs had become and how hard it was to focus his eyes. And he must have been noticeably slowing down for the nurse to approach him in the first place. He nodded and rolled up his sleeve with fingers which felt like thick, tired sausages.

“Yipe!” he cried in sudden anguish. “What are you using, a six-inch nail?”

“I am sorry,” said the DBLF, “but I have injected two doctors of my own species before coming to you, and as you know our tegument is thicker and more closely grained than yours is. The needle has therefore become blunted.”

Conway’s fatigue dropped away in seconds. Except for a slight tingling in hands and feet and a grayish blotching which only others could see in his face he felt as clear-eyed, alert and physically refreshed as if he had just come out of a shower after ten hours sleep. He took a quick look around before finishing his current examination and saw that here at least the number of patients awaiting attention had shrunk to a mere handful, and the number of Monitors in the room was less than half what it had been at the start. The patients were being taken care of, and the Monitors had become patients.

He had seen it happening all around him. Monitors who had had little or no sleep on the transport coming here, forcing themselves to carry on helping the overworked medics of the hospital with repeated pep-shots and sheer, dogged courage. One by one they had literally dropped in their tracks and been taken hurriedly away, so exhausted that the involuntary muscles of heart and lungs had given up with everything else. They lay in special wards with robot devices massaging their hearts, giving artificial respiration and feeding them through a vein in the leg. Conway had heard that only one of them had died.

Taking advantage of the lull, Conway and Williamson moved to the direct vision panel and looked out. The waiting swarm of ships seemed only slightly smaller, though he knew that these must be new arrivals. He could not imagine where they were going to put these people — even the habitable corridors in the hospital were beginning to overflow now, and there was constant re-arranging of patients of all species to make more room. But that wasn’t his problem, and the weaving pattern of ships was an oddly restful sight …

“Emergency,” said the wall annunciator suddenly. “Single ship, one occupant, species as yet unknown requests immediate treatment. Occupant is in only partial control of its ship, is badly injured and communications are incoherent. Stand by at all admittance locks …

Oh, no, Conway thought, not at a time like this! There was a cold sickness in his stomach and he had a horrible premonition of what was going to happen. Williamson’s knuckles shone white as he gripped the edge of the view port. “Look!” he said in a flat, despairing tone, and pointed.

An intruder was approaching the waiting swarm of ships at an insane velocity and on a wildly erratic course. A stubby, black and featureless torpedo shape, it reached and penetrated the weaving mass of ships before Conway had time to take two breaths. In milling confusion the ships scattered, narrowly avoiding collision both with it and each other, and still it hurtled on. There was only one ship in its path now, a Monitor transport which had been given the all-clear to approach and was drifting in toward an admittance lock. The transport was big, ungainly and not built for fast acrobatics — it had neither the time nor the ability to get out of the way. A collision was certain, and the transport was jammed with wounded …

But no. At the last possible instant the hurtling ship swerved. They saw it miss the transport and its stubby torpedo shape foreshorten to a circle which grew in size with heart-stopping rapidity. Now it was headed straight at them! Conway wanted to shut his eyes, but there was a peculiar fascination about watching that great mass of metal rushing at him. Neither Williamson nor himself made any attempt to jump for a spacesuit — what was to happen was only split seconds away.

The ship was almost on top of them when it swerved again as its injured pilot sought desperately to avoid this greater obstacle, the hospital. But too late, the ship struck.

A smashing double-shock struck up at them from the floor as the ship tore through their double skin, followed by successively milder shocks as it bludgeoned its way into the vitals of the great hospital. A cacophony of screams — both human and alien — arose briefly, also whisflings, rustlings and guttural jabbering as beings were maimed, drowned, gassed or decompressed. Water poured into sections containing pure chlorine. A blast of ordinary air rushed through a gaping hole in the compartment whose occupants had never known anything but trans Plutonian cold and vacuum-the beings shriveled, died and dissolved horribly at the first touch of it. Water, air and a score of different atmospheric mixtures intermingled forming a sludgy, brown and highly corrosive mixture that steamed and bubbled its way out into space. But long before that had happened the air-tight seals had slammed shut, effectively containing the terrible wound made by that bulleting ship.