Star Surgeon

CHAPTER 17

By the eighth day all the extra-terrestrial patients had been evacuated and with them had gone nearly four-fifths of the hospital’s staff. On the levels which maintained extremes of temperature, pressure or gravity the power was withdrawn causing the ultra-frigid solids to melt and gasify and the dense or superheated atmospheres to condense into a sludgy liquid mess on the floors. Then as the days passed more and more Corpsmen of the Engineering Division arrived, converting the one-time wards into barracks and tearing out large sections of the outer hull so that they could erect projector bases and launching platforms. Dermod’s idea now was that Sector General should defend itself instead of relying completely on the fleet, which had already shown that it wasn’t capable of stopping everything. By the twenty-fifth day Sector General had made the transition from being a defenseless hospital into what amounted to a heavily armed military base.

Because of its tremendous size and vast reserves of power-several times greater than that of the mobile forces defending it — the weapons were many and truly formidable. Which was as well because on the twenty-ninth day they were tested to the utmost in the first major attack by the enemy.

It lasted for three days.

Conway knew that there were sound, logical reasons for the Corps fortifying the hospital as they had done, but he didn’t like it. Even after that fantastic, three-day long attack when the hospital had been hit four times-again with chemical warheads, luckily he still felt wrong about it: Every time he thought of the tremendous structure which had been dedicated to the highest ideals of humanity and medicine being made into an engine of destruction, geared to a hellish and unnatural ecology wherein it produced its own casualties, Conway felt angry and sad and not a little sickened by the whole ghastly mess. Sometimes he was apt to give vent to his opinions …

It was five weeks after the beginning of the evacuation and he was lunching with Mannon and Prilicla. The main dining hall was no longer crowded at mealtimes and green uniformed Corpsmen heavily outnumbered the e-ts at the tables, but there were still upward of two hundred extra-terrestrials in the place and this was what Conway was currently objecting to.

I still say it’s a waste,” he said angrily, “a waste of lives, of medical talent, everything! All the cases are, and will continue to be, Monitor casualties. Every one an Earth-human. So there are no juicy e-t cases for them to work on. The e-t staff should be sent home!

“Present company included,” he ended, with a glare at Prilicla before he turned to face Mannon.

Dr. Mannon made an incision in his steak and hefted a generous forkful mouth ward. Since the disappearance of all his light-gravity patients he had had his LSVO and MSVK tapes erased and so had no mental restrictions placed on his diet. In the five weeks since the evacuation he had noticeably put on weight.

“To an e-t,” he said reasonably, “we are juicy e-ts.”

“You’re quibbling,” said Conway. “What I’m objecting to is senseless heroics.”

Mannon raised his eyebrows. “But heroics are nearly always senseless,” he said dryly, “and highly contagious as well. In this case I’d say the Corps started it by wanting to defend this place, and because of that we felt obliged to stay also to look after the wounded. At least a few of us feel like that, or we think a few of us feel like that.

“The sane, logical thing to do would have been to get while the going was good,” Mannon continued, not quite looking at Conway, “and not a word would have been said to those who got. But then these sane, logical people have colleagues or, uh, friends who they suspect might be in the true hero category, and they won’t leave because of what they imagine their friends will think of them if they run away. So they’d sooner die than have their friends think they were cowards, and they stay.”

Conway felt his face getting warm, but he didn’t say anything.

Mannon grinned suddenly and went on, “But this is a form of heroism, too. A case of Death before Dishonor, you might say. And before you can turn around twice everybody is a hero of one kind or the other. And no doubt the e-ts …” He gave a sly glance at Prilicla. “… are staying for similar reasons. And also, I suspect, because they don’t want it thought that Earth-human DBDGs have a monopoly on heroism.”

“I see,” said Conway. He knew that his face was flaming red. It was now quite obvious that Mannon knew that the only reason he had stayed in the hospital was because Murchison, O’Mara and Mannon himself might have been disappointed in him if he’d left. And at the other side of the table Prilicla, the emotion sensitive, would be reading him like a book. Conway thought that he had never felt worse in his whole life.

“You are so right,” said Prilicla suddenly, deftly inserting its fork into the plate of spaghetti before it and using two mandibles to twist. “If it had not been for the heroic example of you DBDGs I would have been on the second ship out.”

“The second?” asked Mannon.

“I am not,” said Prilicla, waving spaghetti for emphasis, “completely without valor.”

Listening to the by-play Conway thought that the honest thing would have been for him to admit his cowardice to them, but he also knew that to do so would be to cause embarrassment all round. It was plain that they both knew him for the coward he was and were telling him in their separate fashions that it didn’t matter. And looking at it objectively it really did not matter, because there would be no more ships leaving Sector General and its remaining staff were going to be heroes whether they liked it or not. But Conway still did not think it right that he should be given credit for being a brave, selfless, dedicated man of medicine when he was nothing of the sort.

Before he could say anything, however, Mannon switched subjects abruptly. He wanted to know where Conway and Murchison had been during the fourth, fifth and sixth days of the evacuation. He said that it was highly suggestive that both of them were out of circulation at exactly the same time and he began to list some of the suggestions which occurred to him-which were colorful, startling and next to physically impossible. Soon Prilicla joined in, although the sexual mores of two Earth-human DBDGs could have at most only an academic interest to a sexless GLNO, and Conway was defending himself strenuously from both sides.

Both Prilicla and Mannon knew that Murchison and himself, along with about forty other members of the staff, had been keeping at peak operating efficiency by means of pep-shots for nearly sixty hours. Pep shots did not give something for nothing, and Conway and the others had been forced to adopt the horizontal position of the patient for three days while they recovered from an advanced state of exhaustion. Some of them had literally dropped in their tracks and been taken away hurriedly, so exhausted that the involuntary muscles of heart and lungs were threatening to give up with everything else. They had been taken to special wards where robot devices massaged their hearts, gave artificial respiration and fed them intraveneously.

Still, it did look bad that Conway and Murchison had not been seen around together, or separately, or at all for three whole days.

The alarm siren saved Conway just as the counsels for the prosecution were having it all their own way. He swung out of his seat and sprinted for the door with Mannon pounding along behind him and Prilicla, its not quite atrophied wings aided by its anti-gravity devices, whirring away in front.

Come Hell, high water or interstellar war, Conway thought warmly as he headed for his wards, while there was a reputation to blacken or a leg to pull, Mannon would be there with the latest scandal and prepared to exert traction on the limb in question until it threatened to come off at the acetabulum. In the circumstance all this scandal-mongering had irritated Conway at first, but then he had begun to realize that Mannon was making him see that the whole word hadn’t come to an end yet, that this was still Sector General-a frame of mind rather than a place-and that it would continue to be Sector General until the last one of its dedicated and often wacky staff had gone.

When he reached his ward the siren, a constant reminder of the probable manner of their going, had stopped.

Pressure tents hung slackly over all twenty-eight occupied beds, already sealed and with their self-contained air units operating against the possibility of the ward being opened suddenly to space. The nurses on duty, a Tralthan, a Nidian and four Earth-humans, were struggling into their suits. Conway did the same, sealing everything as the others had done with the exception of the faceplate. He made a quick around of his patients, expressed approval to the Tralthan Senior Nurse, then opened the switch which cut off the artificial gravity grids in the floor.

Irregularities in the power supply, and that was no rare occurrence when the hospital’s defensive screens were under attack or its weapons went into action, could cause the artificial gravity grid to vacillate between one half and two Gs, which was not a good thing when the patients were mainly fracture cases. It was better to have no gravity at all.

Once patients and staff were protected so far as was possible there was nothing to do but wait. To keep his mind off what was going on outside Conway insinuated himself into an argument between a Tralthan nurse and one of the red-furred Nidians about the modifications currently going on in the giant Translator computer. This vast electronic brain- the Translator packs which everyone wore were merely extensions of it, just sending and receiving units-which handled all the e-t translations in the hospital was, since the evacuation, operating at only a small fraction of its full potential. Hearing this Dermod, the fleet commander, had ordered the unused sections to be reprogrammed to deal with tactical and supply problems. But despite the Corps’ reassurances that they were allowing ample circuits for Translation the two nurses were not quite happy. Suppose, they said, there should be an occasion when all the e-ts were talking at once?

Conway wanted to tell them that in his opinion the e-ts, especially the nurses, were always talking period so that there was really no problem, but he couldn’t think of a tactful way of phrasing it.

An hour passed without anything happening so far as the hospital was concerned; no hits and no indication that its massive armament had been used. The nurses on duty were relieved by the next shift, three Tralthans and three Earth-humans this time, the senior nurse being Murchison. Conway was just settling down to a very pleasant chat when the siren sounded a steady, low-pitched, faintly derisive note. The attack was over.

Conway was helping Murchison out of her suit when the PA hummed into life.

“Attention, please,” it said urgently. “Will Doctor Conway go to Lock Five at once, please …

Probably a casualty, Conway thought, one they are not sure how to move … But then the PA shifted without a break into another message.

Will Doctor Mannon and Major O’Mara go to Lock Five immediately, please …

What, Conway wondered, could be at Lock Five which required the services of two Senior Physicians and the Chief Psychologist. He began to hurry.

O’Mara and Mannon had been closer to Five to begin with and so were there ahead of him by a few seconds. There was a third person in the lock antechamber, clad in a heavy-duty suit with its helmet thrown back. The newcomer was graying, had a thin, lined face and a mouth which was like a tired gray line, but the overall harshness was offset by a pair of the softest brown eyes Conway had ever seen in a man. The insignia on his collar was more ornate than Conway had ever seen before, the highest ranking Corps officer he’d had dealings with being a Colonel, but he knew instinctively that this was Dermod, the fleet commander.

O’Mara tore off a salute which was returned as punctiliously as it had been given, and Mannon and Conway received handshakes with apologies for the gauntlets being worn. Then Dermod got straight down to business.

“I am not a believer in secrecy when it serves no useful purpose,” he began crisply. “You people have elected to stay here to look after our casualties, so you have a right to know what is happening whether the news is good or bad. Being the senior Earth-human medical staff remaining in the hospital, and having an understanding of the probable behavior of your staff in various contingencies, I must leave it up to you whether this information should or should not be made public.”

He had been looking at O’Mara. His eyes moved quickly to Mannon, then Conway, then back to O’Mara again. He went on, “There has been an attack, a completely surprising attack in that it was totally abortive. We did not lose a single man and the enemy force was completely wiped out. They didn’t seem to know the first thing about deployment or … or anything. We were expecting the usual sort of attack, vicious, pressed home regardless of cost, that previously has taken everything we’ve got to counter. This was a massacre …

Dermod’s voice and the look in his eyes, Conway noted, did not reflect any joy at the victory.

… Because of this we were able to investigate the enemy wreckage quickly enough to have a chance of finding survivors. Usually we’re too busy licking our own wounds to have time for this. We didn’t find any survivors, but …

He broke off as two Corpsmen came through the inner seal carrying a covered stretcher. Dermod was looking straight at Conway when he went on.

He said, “You were on Etla, Doctor, and will see the implications behind this. And at the same time you might think about the fact that we are under attack by an enemy who refuses either to communicate or negotiate, fights as though driven by a fanatical hatred, and yet uses only limited warfare against us. But first you’d better take a look at this.”

When the cover was pulled off the stretcher nobody said anything for a long time. It was the tattered, grisly remnant of a once-living, thinking and feeling entity who was now too badly damaged even to classify with any degree of accuracy. But enough remained to show that it was not and never had been a human being.

The war, Conway thought sickly, was spreading.