Hospital Station

II

His living quarters were in a tiny sub-assembly which would one day form the theater surgical ward and adjoining storage compartments of the hospital’s low-gravity MSVK section. Two small rooms with a connecting section of corridor had been pressurized and fitted with artificial gravity grids for O’Mara’s benefit, the rest of the structure remaining both airless and weightless. He drifted along short, unfinished corridors whose ends were open to space, staring into the bare, angular compartments which slid past. They were all full of trailing plumbing and half-built machinery the purpose of which it was impossible to guess without actually taking an MSVK educator tape. But all the compartments he examined were either too small to hold the alien or they were open in one direction to space. O’Mara swore with restraint but great feeling, pushed himself out to one of the ragged edges of his tiny domain and glared around him.

Above, below and all around him out to a distance of ten miles floated pieces of hospital, invisible except for the bright blue lights scattered over them as a warning to ship traffic in the area. It was a little like being at the center of a dense globular star cluster, O’Mara thought, and rather beautiful if you were in a mood to appreciate it. He wasn’t, because on most of these floating sub-assemblies there were pressor-beam men on watch, placed there to fend off sections which threatened to collide. These men would see and report it to Caxton if O’Mara took his baby alien outside even for feeding.

The only answer apparently, he told himself disgustedly as he retraced his way, was nose-plugs.

Inside the lock he was greeted by a noise like a tinny foghorn. It blared out in long, discordant blasts with just enough interval in between to make him dread the arrival of the next one. Investigation revealed bare patches of hide showing through the last coat of food, so presumably his little darling was hungry again. O’Mara went for the sprayer.

When he had about three square yards covered there was an interruption. Dr. Pelling arrived.

The project doctor took off his helmet and gauntlets only, flexed the stiffness out of his fingers and growled, “I believe you hurt your leg. Let’s have a look.”

Pelling could not have been more gentle as he explored O’Mara’s injured leg, but what he was doing was plainly a duty rather than an act of friendship. His voice was reserved as he said, “Severe bruising and a couple of pulled tendons is all — you were lucky. Rest. I’ll give you some stuff to rub on it. Have you been redecorating?”

“What …?” began O’Mara, then saw where the doctor was looking. “That’s food compound. The little so-and-so kept moving while I was spraying it. But speaking of the youngster, can you tell me—”

“No, I can’t,” said Pelling. “My brain is overloaded enough with the ills and remedies of my own species without my trying to stuff it with FROB physiology tapes. Besides, they’re tough-nothing can happen to them!” He sniffed loudly and made a face. “Why don’t you keep it outside?”

“Certain people are too soft — hearted,” O’Mara replied bitterly. “They are horrified by such apparent cruelties as lifting kittens by the scruff of the neck …

“Humph,” said the doctor, looking almost sympathetic. “Well, that’s your problem. See you in a couple of weeks.”

“Wait!” O’Mara called urgently, hobbling after the doctor with one empty trouser leg flapping. “What if something does happen? And there has to be rules about the care and feeding of these things, simple rules. You can’t just leave me to … to …

“I see what you mean,” said Pelling. He looked thoughtful for a moment, then went on, “There’s a book kicking around my place somewhere, a sort of Hudlarian first aid handbook. But it’s printed in Universal

“I read Universal,” said O’Mara.

Pelling looked surprised. “Bright boy. All right, I’ll send it over.” He nodded curtly and left.

O’Mara closed the bedroom door in the hope that this might cut down the intensity of the food smell, then lowered himself carefully into the living room couch for what he told himself was a well-deserved rest. He settled his leg so that it ached almost comfortably and began trying to talk himself into an acceptance of the situation. The best he could achieve was a seething, philosophical calm.

But he was so weary that even the effort of feeling angry became too much for him. His eyelids dropped and a warm deadness began creeping up from his hands and feet. O’Mara sighed, wriggled and prepared to sleep …

The sound which blasted him out of his couch had the strident, authoritative urgency of all the alarm sirens that ever were and a volume which threatened to blow the bedroom door off its runners. O’Mara grabbed instinctively for his spacesuit, dropped it with a curse as he realized what was happening, then went for the sprayer.

Junior was hungry again …!

During the eighteen hours which followed it was brought home to O’Mara how much he did not know about infant Hudlarians. He had spoken many times to its parents via Translator, and the baby had been mentioned often, but somehow they had not spoken of the important things. Sleep, for instance.

Judging from recent observation and experience, infant FROBs did not sleep. In the all too short intervals between feeds they blundered around the bedroom smashing all items of furniture which were not metal and bolted down — and these they bent beyond recognition or usefulness — or they huddled in a corner knotting and unknotting their tentacles. Probably this sight of a baby doing the equivalent of playing with its fingers would have brought coos of delight from an adult Hudlarian, but it merely made O’Mara sick and cross-eyed.

And every two hours, plus or minus a few minutes, he had to feed the brute. If he was lucky it lay quiet, but more often he had to chase it around with the sprayer. Normally FROBs of this age were too weak to move about — but that was under Hudlar’s crushing gravity-pull and pressure. Here in conditions which were to it less than one quarter-G, the infant Hudlarian could move. And it was having fun.

O’Mara wasn’t: his body felt like a thick, clumsy sponge saturated with fatigue. After each feed he dropped onto the couch and let his bone-weary body dive blindly into unconsciousness. He was so utterly and completely spent, he told himself after every spraying, that he could not possibly hear the brute the next time it complained — he would be too deeply out. But always that blaring, discordant foghorn jerked him at least half awake and sent him staggering like a drunken puppet through the motions which would end that horrible, mind-wrecking din.

After nearly thirty hours of it O’Mara knew he couldn’t take much more. Whether the infant was collected in two days or two months the result as far as he was concerned would be the same; he would be a raving lunatic. Unless in a weak moment he took a walk outside without his suit. Pelling would never have allowed him to be subjected to this sort of punishment, he knew, but the doctor was an ignoramus where the FROB life-form was concerned. And Caxton, only a little less ignorant, was the simple, direct type who delighted in this sort of violent practical joke, especially when he considered that the victim deserved everything he got.

But just suppose the section chief was a more devious character than O’Mara had suspected? Suppose he knew exactly what he was sentencing him to by leaving the infant Hudlarian in his charge? O’Mara cursed tiredly, but he had been at it so constantly for the last ten or twelve hours that bad language had ceased to be an emotional safety valve. He shook his head angrily in a vain attempt to dispel the weariness which clogged his brain.

Caxton wasn’t going to get away with it.

He was the strongest man on the whole project, O’Mara knew, and his reserves of strength must be considerable. All this fatigue and nervous twitching was simply in his mind, he told himself insistently, and a couple of days with practically no sleep meant nothing to his tremendous physique — even after the shaking up he’d received in the accident. And anyway, the present situation with the infant couldn’t get any worse, so it must soon begin to improve. He would beat them yet, he swore. Caxton would not drive him mad, or even to the point of calling for help.

This was a challenge, he insisted with weary determination. Up to now he had bemoaned the fact that no job had fully exploited his capabilities. Well, this was a problem which would tax both his physical stamina and deductive processes to the limit. An infant had been placed in his charge and he intended taking care of it whether it was here for two weeks or two months. What was more, he was going to see that the kid was a credit to him when its foster parents arrived …

After the forty-eighth hour of the infant FROB’s company and the fiftyseventh since he had had a good sleep, such illogical and somewhat maudlin thinking did not seem strange to O’Mara at all.

Then abruptly there came a change in what O’Mara had accepted as the order of things. The FROB after complaining, was fed and refused to shut up!

O’Mara’s first reaction was a feeling of hurt surprise; this was against the rules. They cried, you fed them, they stopped crying — at least for a while. This was so unfair that it left him too shocked and helpless to react.

The noise was bedlam, with variations. Long, discordant blasts of sound beat over him. Sometimes the pitch and volume varied in an insanely arbitrary manner and at others it had a grinding, staccato quality as if broken glass had got into its vocal gears. There were intervals of quiet, varying between two seconds and half a minute, during which O’Mara cringed waiting for the next blast. He struck it out for as long as he could — a matter of ten minutes or so — then he dragged his leaden body off the couch again.

“What the blazes is wrong with you?” O’Mara roared against the din. The FROB was thoroughly covered by food compound so it couldn’t be hungry.

Now that the infant had seen him the volume and urgency of its cries increased. The external, bellows — like flap of muscle on the infant’s back — used for sound production only, the FROBs being non-breathers — continued swelling and deflating rapidly. O’Mara jammed the palms of his hands against his ears, an action which did no good at all, and yelled, “Shut up!”

He knew that the recently orphaned Hudlarian must still be feeling confused and frightened, that the mere process of feeding it could not possibly fulfill all of its emotional needs — he knew all this and felt a deep pity for the being. But these feelings were in some quiet, sane and civilized portion of his mind and divorced from all the pain and weariness and frightful onslaughts of sound currently torturing his body. He was really two people, and while one of him knew the reason for the noise and accepted it, the other-the purely physical O’Mara-reacted instinctively and viciously to stop it.

“Shut up! SHUT UP!” screamed O’Mara, and started swinging with his fists and feet.

Miraculously after about ten minutes of it, the Hudlarian stopped crying.

O’Mara returned to the couch shaking. For those ten minutes he had been in the grip of a murderous, uncontrollable rage. He had punched and kicked savagely until the pains from his hands and injured leg forced him to stop using those members, but he had gone on kicking and screeching invective with the only other weapons left to him, his good leg and tongue. The sheer viciousness of what he had done shocked and sickened him.

It was no good telling himself that the Hudlarian was tough and might not have felt the beating; the infant had stopped crying so he must have got through to it somehow. Admittedly Hudlarians were hard and tough, but this was a baby and babies had weak spots. Human babies, for instance, had a very soft spot on the top of their heads..

When O’Mara’s utterly exhausted body plunged into sleep his last coherent thought was that he was the dirtiest, lowest louse that had ever been born.

Sixteen hours later he awoke. It was a slow, natural process which brought him barely above the level of unconsciousness. He had a brief feeling of wonder at the fact that the infant was not responsible for waking him before he drifted back to sleep again. The next time he wakened was five hours later and to the sound of Waring coming through the airlock.

“Dr. P-Pelling asked me to bring this,” he said, tossing O’Mara a small book. “And I’m not doing you a favor, understand — it’s just that he said it was for the good of the youngster. How is it doing?”

“Sleeping,” said O’Mara.

Waring moistened his lips. “I’m — I’m supposed to check. C–C-Caxton says so.

“Ca-Ca-Caxton would,” mimicked O’Mara.

He watched the other silently as Waring’s face grew a deeper red. Waring was a thin young man, sensitive, not very strong, and the stuff of which heroes were made. On his arrival O’Mara had been overwhelmed with stories about this tractor-beam operator. There had been an accident during the fitting of a power pile and Waring had been trapped in a section which was inadequately shielded. But he had kept his head and, following instructions radioed to him from an engineer outside, had managed to avert a slow atomic explosion which nevertheless would have taken the lives of everyone in his section. He had done this while all the time fully convinced that the level of radiation in which he worked would, in a few hours time, certainly cause his death.

But the shielding had been more effective than had been thought and Waring did not die. The accident had left its mark on him, however, they told O’Mara. He had blackouts, he stuttered, his nervous system had been subtly affected, they said, and there were other things which O’Mara himself would see and was urged to ignore. Because Waring had saved all their lives and for that he deserved special treatment. That was why they made way for him wherever he went, let him win all fights, arguments and games of skill or chance, and generally kept him wrapped in a swathe of sentimental cottonwool.

And that was why Waring was a spoiled, insufferable, simpering brat.

Watching his white-lipped face and clenched fists, O’Mara smiled. He had never let Waring win at anything if he could possibly help it, and the first time the tractor-beam man had started a fight with him had also been the last. Not that he had hurt him, he had been just tough enough to demonstrate that fighting O’Mara was not a good idea.

“Go in and have a look,” O’Mara said eventually. “Do what Ca-Ca Caxton says.

They went in, observed the gently twitching infant briefly and came out. Stammering, Waring said that he had to go and headed for the airlock. He didn’t often stutter these days, O’Mara knew; probably he was scared the subject of the accident would be brought up.

“Just a minute,” said O’Mara. “I’m running out of food compound, will you bring—”

“G-get it yourself!”

O’Mara stared at him until Waring looked away, then he said quietly, “Caxton can’t have it both ways. If this infant has to be cared for so thoroughly that I’m not allowed to either feed or keep it in airless conditions, it would be negligence on my part to go away and leave it for a couple of hours to get food. Surely you see that. The Lord alone knows what harm the kid might come to if it was left alone. I’ve been made responsible for this infant’s welfare so I insist …

“B-b — but it won’t—”

“It only means an hour or so of your rest period every second or third day,” said O’Mara sharply. “Cut the bellyaching. And stop sputtering at me, you’re old enough to talk properly.”

Waring’s teeth came together with a click. He took a deep, shuddering breath then with his jaws still clenched furiously together he exhaled. The sound was like an airlock valve being cracked. He said:

“It … will … take … all of … my next two rest periods. The FROB quarters … where the food is kept … are being fitted to the main assembly the day after tomorrow. The food compound will have to be transferred before then.”

“See how easy it is when you try,” said O’Mara, grinning. “You were a bit jerky at first there, but I understood every word. You’re doing fine. And by the way, when you’re stacking the food tanks outside the airlock will you try not to make too much noise in case you wake the baby?”

For the next two minutes Waring called O’Mara dirty names without repeating himself or stuttering once.

“I said you were doing fine,” said O’Mara reprovingly. “You don’t have to show off.”