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Authors: James White

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BOOK: Sector General Omnibus 1 - Beginning Operations
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During the afternoon of the second day a row started between the two doctors. At least Conway considered it a row; what an entirely alien mind like Arretapec’s chose to think of it was anybody’s guess.
It started when the VUXG requested Conway to be quiet and still while it went into one of its silences. The being had gone back to the old position on Conway’s shoulder, explaining that it could concentrate more
effectively while at rest rather than with part of its mind engaged in levitating. Conway had done as he was told without comment though there were several things he would have liked to say: What was wrong with the patient? What was Arretapec doing about it? And
how
was it being done when neither of them so much as touched the creature? Conway was in the intensely frustrating position of a doctor confronted with a patient on whom he is not allowed to practice his craft: he was eaten up with curiosity and it was bothering him. Yet he did his best to stand still.
But the itching started inside his ear again, worse than ever before. He barely noticed the geysers of mud and water flung up by the dinosaur as it threshed its way out of the shallows and onto the bank. The gnawing, unlocalized itch built up remorselessly until with a sudden yell of fright he slapped at the side of his head and began poking frantically at his ear. The action brought immediate and blessed relief, but …
“I cannot work if you fidget,” said Arretapec, the rapidity of the words the only indication of their emotional content. “You will therefore leave me at once.”
“I wasn’t fidgeting,” Conway protested angrily. “My ear itched and I—”
“An itch, especially one capable of making you move as this one has done, is a symptom of a physical disorder which should be treated,” the VUXG interrupted. “Or it is caused by a parasitic or symbiotic life-form dwelling, perhaps unknown to you, on your body.
“Now, I expressly stated that my assistant should be in perfect physical health and not a member of a species who either consciously or unconsciously harbored parasites—a type, you must understand, which are particularly prone to fidget—so that you can understand my displeasure. Had it not been for your sudden movement I might have accomplished something, therefore go.”
“Why you supercilious—”
 
 
The dinosaur chose that moment to stagger into the shallow water again, lose its footing and come the great grand-daddy of all bellyflops. Falling mud and spray drenched Conway and a small tidal wave surged over his feet. The distraction was enough to make him pause, and the pause gave him time to realize that he had not been personally insulted. There were many intelligent species who harbored parasites—some of them actually
necessary to the health of the host body, so that in their case the slang expression being lousy also meant being in tiptop condition. Maybe Arretapec had meant to be insulting, but he could not be sure. And the VUXG was, after all, a very important person …
“What exactly might you have accomplished?” Conway asked sarcastically. He was still angry, but had decided to fight on the professional rather than the personal level. Besides, he knew that the Translator would take the insulting edge off his words. “What are you
trying
to accomplish, and how do you expect to do it merely by—from what I can see, anyway—just looking at the patient?”
“I cannot tell you,” Arretapec replied after a few seconds. “My purpose is … is vast. It is for the future. You would not understand.”
“How do you know? If you told me what you were doing maybe I could help.”
“You cannot help.”
“Look,” said Conway exasperated, “you haven’t even tried to use the full facilities of the hospital yet. No matter what you are trying to do for your patient, the first step should have been a thorough examination—immobilisation, followed by X rays, biopsies, the lot. This would have given you valuable physiological data upon which to work—”
“To state the matter simply,” Arretapec broke in, “you are saying that in order to understand a complicated organism or mechanism, one must first be broken down into its component parts that they might be understood individually. My race does not believe that an object must be destroyed—even in part—before it can be understood. Your crude methods of investigation are therefore worthless to me. I suggest that you leave.”
Seething, Conway left.
His first impulse was to storm into O‘Mara’s office and tell the Chief Psychologist to find somebody else to run errands for the VUXG. But O’Mara had told him that his present assignment was important, and O’Mara would have unkind things to say if he thought that Conway was throwing his hand in simply out of pique because his curiosity had not been satisfied or his pride hurt. There were lots of doctors—the assistants to Diagnosticians, particularly—who were not allowed to touch their superior’s patients, or was it just that Conway resented a being like Arretapec being his superior … ?
If Conway went to O‘Mara in his present frame of mind there was real danger of the psychologist deciding that he was temperamentally
unsuited for his position. Quite apart from the prestige attached to a post at Sector General, the work performed in it was both stimulating and very much worthwhile. Should O’Mara decide that he was unfit to remain here and pack him off to some planetary hospital, it would be the greatest tragedy of Conway’s life.
But if he could not go to O’Mara, where could he go? Ordered off one job and not having another, Conway was at loose ends. He stood at a corridor intersection for several minutes thinking, while beings representing a cross-section of all the intelligent races of the galaxy strode undulated or skittered past him, then suddenly he had it. There was something he could do, something which he would have done anyway if everything had not happened with such a rush.
The hospital library had several items on the prehistoric periods of Earth, both taped and in the old-fashioned and more cumbersome book form. Conway heaped them on a reading desk and prepared to make an attempt to satisfy his professional curiosity about the patient in this roundabout fashion.
The time passed very quickly.
 
 
Dinosaur, Conway discovered at once, was simply a general term applied to the giant reptiles. The patient, except for its larger size and bony enlargement of the tip of the tail, was identical in outward physical characteristics to the brontosaurus which lived among the swamps of the Jurassic Period. It also was herbiverous, but unlike their patient had no means of defense against the carnivorous reptiles of its time. There was a surprising amount of physiological data available as well, which Conway absorbed greedily.
The spinal column was composed of huge vertebrae, and with the exception of the caudal vertebrae all were hollow—this saving of osseous material making possible a relatively low body weight in comparison with its tremendous size. It was oviparous. The head was small, the brain case one of the smallest found among the vertebrates. But in addition to this brain there was a well-developed nerve center in the region of the sacral vertebrae which was several times as large as the brain proper. It was thought that the brontosaur grew slowly, their great size being explained by the fact that they could live two hundred or more years.
Their only defense against contemporary rivals was to take to and remain in the water—they could pasture under water and required only
brief mouthfuls of air, apparently. They became extinct when geologic changes caused their swampy habitats to dry up and leave them at the mercy of their natural enemies.
One authority stated that these saurians were nature’s biggest failure. Yet they had flourished, said another, through three geologic periods—the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous—which totalled 140 million years, a long time indeed for a “failure” to be around, considering the fact that Man had existed only for approximately half a million years … !
 
 
Conway left the library with the conviction that he had discovered something important, but what exactly it was he could not say; it was an intensely frustrated feeling. Over a hurried meal he decided that he badly needed more information and there was only one person who might be able to give it to him. He would see O’Mara again.
“Where is our small friend?” said the psychologist sharply when Conway entered his office a few minutes later. “Have you had a fight or something?”
Conway gulped and tried to keep his voice steady as he replied, “Dr. Arretapec wished to work with the patient alone for a while, and I’ve been doing some research on dinosaurs in the library. I wondered if you had anymore information for me?”
“A little,” O’Mara said. He looked steadily at Conway for several very uncomfortable seconds, then grunted, “Here it is …”
The Monitor Corps survey vessel which had discovered Arretapec’s home planet had, after realizing the high stage of civilization reached by the inhabitants, given them the hyper-drive. One of the first planets visited had been a raw, young world devoid of intelligent life, but one of its life-forms had interested them—the giant saurian. They had told the Galactic powers-that-be that given the proper assistance they might be able to do something which would benefit civilization as a whole, and as it was impossible for any telepathic race to tell a lie or even understand what a lie is, they were given the assistance asked for and Arretapec and his patient had come to Sector General. There was one other small item as well, O’Mara told Conway. Apparently the VUXG’s psi faculties included a sort of precognitive ability. This latter did not appear to be of much use because it did not work with individuals but only with populations, and then so far in the future and in such a haphazard manner that it was practically useless.
Conway left O’Mara feeling more confused than ever.
He was still trying to make the odd bits and pieces of information add up to something which made sense, but either he was too tired or too stupid. And definitely he was tired; these past two days his brain had been just so much thick, weary fog …
There must be an association between the two factors, Arretapec’s coming and this unaccountable weariness, Conway thought: he was in good physical condition and no amount of muscular or mental exertion had left him feeling this way before. And had not Arretapec said something about the itching sensations he had felt being symptomatic of a disorder?
All of a sudden his job with the VUXG doctor was no longer merely frustrating or annoying. Conway was beginning to feel anxiety for his own personal safety. Suppose the itching was due to some new type of bacteria which did not show up on his personal tell-tale? He had thought something like this when his fidgeting had caused Arretapec to send him away, but for the rest of the day he had been subconsciously trying to convince himself that it was nothing because the intensity of the sensations had diminished to practically zero. Now he knew that he should have had one of the senior physicians look into it. He should, in fact, do it now.
But Conway was very tired. He promised himself that he would get Dr. Mannon, his previous superior, to give him a going over in the morning. And in the morning he would have to get on the right side of Arretapec again. He was still worrying about the strange new disease he might have caught and the correct method of apologizing to a VUXG life-form when he fell asleep.
Next morning there was another two-inch hollow eaten in the top of his desk and Arretapec was nestling inside it. As soon as Conway demonstrated that he was awake by sitting up, the being spoke:
“It had occurred to me since yesterday,” the VUXG said, “that I have perhaps been expecting too much in the way of self-control, emotional stability, and the ability to endure or to discount minor physical irritants in a member of a species which is—relatively, you understand—of low mentality. I will therefore do my utmost to bear these points in mind during our future relations together.”
It took a few seconds for Conway to realize that Arretapec had apologized to him. When he did he thought that it was the most insulting apology he had ever had tendered to him, and that it spoke well for his self-control that he did not tell the other so. Instead he smiled and insisted that it was all his fault. They left to see their patient again.
The interior of the converted transport had changed out of all recognition. Instead of a hollow sphere covered with a muddy shambles of soil, water and foliage, three-quarters of the available surface was now a perfect representation of a Mesozoic landscape. Yet it was not exactly the same as the pictures Conway had studied yesterday, because they had been of a distant age of Earth and this flora had been transplanted from the patient’s own world, but the differences were surprisingly small. The greatest change was in the sky.
Where previously it had been possible to look up at the opposite side of the hollow sphere, now one looked up into a blue-white mist in which burned a very lifelike sun. The hollow center of the ship had been almost filled with this semi-opaque gas so that now it would take a keen eye and a mind armed with foreknowledge for a person to know that he was not standing on a real planet with a real sun in the foggy sky above him. The engineers had done a fine job.
“I had not thought such an elaborate and lifelike reconstruction possible here,” said Arretapec suddenly. “You are to be commended. This should have a very good effect on the patient.”
 
 
The life-form under discussion—for some peculiar reason the engineers insisted on calling it Emily—was contentedly shredding the fronds from the top of a thirty foot high palm-like growth. The fact of its being on dry land instead of pasturing under water was indicative of its state of mind, Conway knew, because the old-time brontosaur invariably took to the water when threatened by enemies, that being its only defense. Apparently this neo-brontosaurus hadn’t a care in the world.
“Essentially it is the same as fitting up a new ward for the treatment of any extra-terrestrial patient,” said Conway modestly, “the chief difference here being the scale of the work undertaken.”
“I am nevertheless impressed,” said Arretapec.
First apologies and now compliments, Conway thought wryly. As they moved closer and Arretapec once again warned him to keep quiet and still, Conway guessed that the VUXG’s change of manner was due to the
work of the engineers. With the patient now in ideal surroundings the treatment, whatever form it was taking, might have an increased chance of success …
Suddenly Conway began to itch again. It started in the usual place deep inside his right ear, but this time it spread and built up in intensity until his whole brain seemed to be crawling with viciously biting insects. He felt cold sweat break on him, and remembered his fears of the previous evening when he had resolved to go to Mannon. This wasn’t imagination, this was serious, perhaps deadly serious. His hands flew to his head with a panicky, involuntary motion, knocking the container holding Arretapec to the ground.
“You are fidgeting again …” began the VUXG.
“I … I’m sorry,” Conway stammered. He mumbled something incoherent about having to leave, that it was important and couldn’t wait, then fled in disorder.
 
 
Three hours later he was sitting in Dr. Mannon’s DBDG examination room while Mannon’s dog alternately growled fiercely at him or rolled on its back and looked appealing in vain attempts to entice him to play with it. But Conway had no inclination for the ritual pummeling and wrestling that the dog and himself enjoyed when he had the time for it. All his attention was focused on the bent head of his former superior and on the charts lying on Mannon’s desk. Suddenly the other looked up.
“There’s nothing wrong with you,” he said in the peremptory manner reserved for students and patients suspected of malingering. A few seconds later he added, “Oh, I’ve no doubt you’ve felt these sensations—tiredness, itching, and so on—but what sort of case are you working on at the moment?”
Conway told him. A few times during the narration Mannon grinned.
“I take it this is your first long-term—er—exposure to a telepathic life-form and that I am the first you’ve mentioned this trouble to?” Mannon’s tone was of one making a statement rather than of asking a question. “And, of course, although you feel this itching sensation intensely when close to the VUXG and the patient, it continues in a weaker form at other times.”
Conway nodded. “I felt it for a while just five minutes ago.”
“Naturally, there is attenuation with distance,” Mannon said. “But as
regards yourself, you have nothing to worry about. Arretapec is—all unknowingly, you understand—simply trying to make a telepath out of you. I’ll explain …”
Apparently prolonged contact with some telepathic life-forms stimulated a certain area in the human brain which was either the beginnings of a telepathic function that would evolve in the future, or the atrophied remnant of something possessed in the primitive past and since lost.
The result was troublesome but a quite harmless irritation. On very rare occasions however, Mannon added, this proximity produced in the human a sort of artificial telepathic faculty—that was, he could sometimes receive thoughts from the telepath to whom he had been exposed, but of no other being. The faculty was in all cases strictly temporary, and disappeared when the being responsible for bringing it about left the human.
“But these cases of induced telepathy are extremely rare,” Mannon concluded, “and obviously you are getting only the irritant by-product, otherwise you might know what Arretapec is playing at simply by reading his mind …”
 
 
While Dr. Mannon had been talking, and relieved of the worry that he had caught some strange new disease, Conway’s mind had been working furiously. Vaguely, as odd events with Arretapec and the brontosaurus returned to his mind and were added to scraps of the VUXG’s conversations and his own studying of the life—and extinction—of Earth’s long-gone race of giant reptiles, a picture was forming in his mind. It was a crazy—or at least cockeyed—picture, and it was still incomplete, but what else
could
a being like Arretapec be doing to a patient like the brontosaurus, a patient who had nothing at all wrong with it?
“Pardon?” Conway said. He had become aware that Mannon had said something which he had not caught.
“I said if you find out what Arretapec is doing, let me know,” Mannon repeated.
“Oh, I know what it’s doing,” said Conway. “At least I think I do—and I understand why Arretapec does not want to talk about it. The ridicule if it tried and failed, why even the idea of its trying is ridiculous. What I don’t know is
why
it is doing it …”
“Dr. Conway,” said Mannon in a deceptively mild voice, “if you don’t
tell me what you’re talking about I will, as our cruder-minded interns so succinctly put it, have your guts for garters.”
Conway stood up quickly. He had to get back to Arretapec without further delay. Now that he had a rough idea of what was going on there were things he must see to—urgent safety precautions that a being such as the VUXG might not think of. Absently, he said, “I’m sorry, sir, I can’t tell you. You see, from what you’ve told me there is a possibility that my knowledge derives directly from Arretapec’s mind, telepathically, and is therefore privileged information. I’ve got to rush now, but thanks very much.”
Once outside Conway practically ran to the nearest communicator and called Maintenance. The voice which answered he recognized as belonging to the engineer Colonel he had met earlier. He said quickly, “Is the hull of that converted transport strong enough to take the shock of a body of approximately eight thousand pounds moving at, uh, anything between twenty and one hundred miles an hour, and what safety measures can you take against such an occurrence?”
There was a long, loaded silence, then, “Are you kidding? It would go through the hull like so much plywood. But in the event of a major puncture like that the volume of air inside the ship is such that there would be plenty of time for the maintenance people to get into suits. Why do you ask?”
Conway thought quickly. He wanted a job done but did not want to tell why. He told the Colonel that he was worried about the gravity grids which maintained the artificial gravity inside the ship. There were so many of them that if one section should accidentally reverse its polarity and fling the brontosaurus away from it instead of holding it down …
Rather testily the Colonel agreed that the gravity grids could be switched to repulsion, also focused into pressor or attractor beams, but that the changeover did not occur simply because somebody breathed on them. There were safety devices incorporated which …
“All the same,” Conway broke in, “I would feel much safer about things if you could fix all the gravity grids so that at the approach of a heavy falling body they would automatically switch over to repulsion—just in case the worst happens. Is that possible?”
“Is this an order?” said the Colonel, “or are you just the worrying type?”
“It’s an order, I’m afraid,” said Conway.
“Then it’s possible.” A sharp click put a full stop to the conversation.
Conway set out to rejoin Arretapec again to become an ideal assistant to his chief in that he would have answers ready before the questions were asked. Also, he thought wryly, he would have to maneuver the VUXG into asking the proper questions so that he could answer them.
BOOK: Sector General Omnibus 1 - Beginning Operations
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