Hospital Station

I

It must have been one of the big colonial transports of the type which carried four generations of colonists between the stars before the hyper-drive made such gargantuan ships obsolete, Conway thought, as he stared at the great tear-drop shape framed in the direct vision port beside O’Mara’s desk. With the exception of the pilot’s greenhouse, its banks of observation galleries and view ports were blocked off by thick metal plating, and braced solidly from the outside to withstand considerable internal pressure. Even beside the tremendous bulk of Sector General it looked huge.

“You are to act as liaison between the hospital here and the doctor and patient from that ship,” said Chief Psychologist O’Mara, watching him closely. “The doctor is quite a small life-form. The patient is a dinosaur.

Conway tried to keep the astonishment he felt from showing in his face. O’Mara was analyzing his reactions, he knew, and perversely he wanted to make the other’s job as difficult as possible. He said simply, “What’s wrong with it?”

“Nothing,” said O’Mara.

“It must be psychological, then …

O’Mara shook his head.

“Then what is a healthy, sane and intelligent being doing in a hos—”

“It isn’t intelligent.”

Conway breathed slowly in and out. O’Mara was obviously playing guessing games with him again-not that Conway minded that, provided he was given a sporting chance to guess the right answers. He looked again at the great mass of the converted transport, and meditated.

Putting hyper-drive engines into that great sow of a ship had cost money, and the extensive structural alterations to the hull a great deal more. It seemed an awful lot of trouble to go to for a …

“I’ve got it!” said Conway grinning. “It’s a new specimen for us to take apart and investigate …

“Good Lord, no!” cried O’Mara, horrified. He shot a quick, almost frightened look at a small sphere of plastic which was half hidden by some books on his desk, then went on seriously, “This whole business has been arranged at the highest level — a sub — assembly of the Galactic Council, no less. As to what exactly it is all about neither I nor anyone else in Sector General knows. Possibly the doctor who accompanied the patient and who has charge of it may tell you sometime …

O’Mara’s tone at that point implied that he very much doubted it.

However, all that the hospital and yourself are required to do is cooperate.

Apparently the being who was the doctor in the case came from a race which had been only recently discovered, O’Mara went on to explain, which had tentatively been given the classification VUXG: that was, they were a life-form possessing certain psi faculties, had the ability to convert practically any substance into energy for their physical needs and could adapt to virtually any environment. They were small and well-nigh indestructible.

The VUXG doctor was telepathic, but ethics and the privacy taboo forbade it using this faculty to communicate with a non-telepathic life form, even if its range included the Earth-human frequency. For that reason the Translator would be used exclusively. This doctor belonged to a species long-lived both as individuals and in recorded history, and in all that vast sweep of time there had been no war.

They were an old, wise and humble race, O’Mara concluded; intensely humble. So much so that they tended to look down on other races who were not so humble as they. Conway would have to be very tactful because this extreme, this almost overbearing humility might easily be mistaken for something else.

Conway looked closely at O’Mara. Was there not a faintly sardonic glean in those keen, iron-gray eyes and a too carefully neutral expression on that square-chiseled competent face? Then with a feeling of complete bafflement he saw O’Mara wink.

Ignoring it, Conway said, “This race, they sound stuck up to me.”

He saw O’Mara’s lips twitch, then a new voice broke in on the proceedings with dramatic suddenness. It was a flat, toneless, Translated voice which boomed, “The sense of the preceding remark is not clear to me. We are stuck-adhering-up where?” There was a short pause, then, “While I admit that my own mental capabilities are very low, at the same time I would suggest in all humility that the fault may not altogether lie with me, but be due in part to the lamentable tendency for you younger and more impractical races to make sense-free noises when there is no necessity for a noise to be made at all.”

It was then that Conway’s wildly searching eyes lit on the transparent plastic globe on O’Mara’s desk. Now that he was really looking at it he could see several lengths of strapping attached to it, together with the unmistakable shape of a Translator pack. Inside the container there floated a something …

“Dr. Conway,” said O’Mara dryly, “meet Dr. Arretapec, your new boss.” Mouthing silently, he added, “You and your big mouth!”

The thing in the plastic globe, which resembled nothing so much as a withered prune floating in a spherical gob of syrup, was the VUXG doctor! Conway felt his face burning. It was a good thing that the Translator dealt only with words and did not also transfer their emotional — in this instance sarcastic-connotations, otherwise he would have been in a most embarrassing position.

“As the closest cooperation is required,” O’Mara went on quickly, and the mass of the being Arretapec is slight, you will wear it while on duty.” O’Mara deftly suited actions to his words and strapped the container onto Conway’s shoulder. When he had finished he added, “You can go, Dr. Conway. Detailed orders, when and where necessary, will be given to you direct by Dr. Arretapec.”

It could only happen here, Conway thought wryly as they left. Here he was with an e-t doctor riding on his shoulder like a quivering, transparent dumpling, their patient a healthy and husky dinosaur, and the purpose of the whole business was something which his colleague was reluctant to clarify. Conway had heard of blind obedience but blind cooperation was a new — and he thought, rather stupid — concept.

On the way to Lock Seventeen, the point where the hospital was joined to the ship containing their patient, Conway tried to explain the organization of Sector Twelve General Hospital to the extra-terrestrial doctor. Dr. Arretapec asked some pertinent questions from time to time, so presumably he was interested.

Even though he had been expecting it, the sheer size of the converted transport’s interior shocked Conway. With the exception of the two levels nearest the ship’s outer skin, which at the moment housed the artificial gravity generators, the Monitor Corps engineer had cut away everything to leave a great sphere of emptiness some two thousand feet in diameter. The inner surface of this sphere was a wet and muddy shambles. Great untidy heaps of uprooted vegetation were piled indiscriminately about, most of it partially trampled into the mud. Conway also noticed that quite a lot of it was withered and dying.

After the gleaming, aseptic cleanliness which he was used to Conway found that the sight was doing peculiar things to his nervous system. He began looking around for the patient.

His gaze moved out and upward across the acres of mud and tumbled vegetation until, high above his head on the opposite side of the sphere the swamp merged into a small, deep lake. There were shadowy movements and swirling below its surface. Suddenly a tiny head mounted on a great sinuous neck broke the surface, looked around, then submerged again with a tremendous splash.

Conway surveyed the distance to the lake and the quality of the terrain between it and himself. He said, “It’s a long way to walk, I’ll get an antigravity belt …

“That will not be necessary,” said Arretapec. The ground abruptly flung itself away from them and they were hurtling toward the distant lake.

Classification VUXG, Conway reminded himself when he got his breath back; possessing certain psi faculties.

They landed gently near the edge of the lake. Arretapec told Conway that it wanted to concentrate its thinking processes for a few minutes and requested him to keep both quiet and still. A few seconds later an itching started deep inside his ear somewhere. Conway manfully refrained from poking at it with his finger and instead kept all his attention on the surface of the lake.

Suddenly a great gray-brown, mountainous body broke the surface, a long tapering neck and tail slapping the water with explosive violence. For an instant Conway thought that the great beast had simply bobbed to the surface like a rubber ball but then he told himself that the bed of the lake must have shelved suddenly under the monster, giving an optically similar effect. Still threshing madly with neck, tail and four massive columnar legs the giant reptile gained the lake’s edge and floundered onto, or rather into, the mud, because it sank over its knee joints. Conway estimated that the said knee-joints were at least ten feet from ground level, that the thickest diameter of the great body was about eighteen feet and that from head to tail the brute measured well over one hundred feet. He guessed its weight at about 80,000 pounds. It possessed no natural body armor but the extreme end of its tail, which showed surprising mobility for such a heavy member, had an osseous bulge from which spouted two wicked, forward-curving bony spikes.

As Conway watched, the great reptile continued to churn up the mud in obvious agitation. Then abruptly it fell onto its knees and its great neck curved around and inward until its head muzzled underneath its own underbelly. It was a ridiculous but oddly pathetic posture.

“It is badly frightened,” said Arretapec. “These conditions do not adequately simulate its true environment.”

Conway could understand and sympathize with the beast. The ingredients of its environment were no doubt accurately reproduced but rather than being arranged in a lifelike manner they had just been thrown together into a large muddy stew. Probably not deliberately, he thought, there must have been some trouble with the artificial gravity grids on the way out to account for this jumbled landscape. He said:

“Is the mental state of the patient of importance to the purpose of your work?”

“Very much so,” said Arretapec.

“Then the first step is to make it a little more happy with its lot,” said Conway, and went down on his haunches. He took a sample of the lake water, the mud and several of the varieties of vegetation nearby. Finally he straightened up and said, “Is there anything else we have to do here?”

“I can do nothing at present,” Arretapec replied. The Translated voice was toneless and utterly without emotion, naturally, but from the spacing of the words Conway thought that the other sounded deeply disappointed.