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Authors: James White

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BOOK: Sector General Omnibus 1 - Beginning Operations
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At the conclusion of the next feeding O‘Mara carefully sprayed the blue patches clean, but still the young FROB kept slapping furiously at itself and quivering ponderously. Like a kneeling elephant with six angrily waving trunks, he thought. O’Mara had another look at the book, but it still maintained that under ordinary conditions the disease was mild and short-lived, and that the only palliative treatment possible was rest and seeing that the affected areas were kept clean.
Kids, thought O’Mara distractedly,
were a blasted worrisome thing … !
All that quivering and slapping looked wrong, common sense told
him, and should be stopped. Maybe the infant was scratching through sheer force of habit, though the violence of the process made this seem doubtful, and a distraction of some kind would make it stop. Quickly O’Mara chose a fifty-pound weight and used his lifting tackle to swing it to the ceiling. He began raising and dropping it rhythmically over the spot which he had discovered gave the infant the most pleasure—an area two feet back of the hard, transparent membrane which protected its eyes. Fifty pounds dropping from a height of eight feet was a nice gentle pat to a Hudlarian.
Under the patting the FROB grew less violent in its movements. But as soon as O‘Mara stopped it began lashing at itself worse than ever, and even running full tilt into walls and what was left of the furniture. During one frenzied charge it nearly escaped into the living room, and the only thing which stopped it was the fact that it was too big to go through the door. Up to that moment O’Mara did not realize how much weight the FROB had put on in five weeks.
Finally sheer fatigue made him give up. He left the FROB threshing and blundering about in the bedroom and threw himself onto the couch outside to try to think.
According to the book it was now time for the blue patches to begin to fade. But they weren’t fading—they had reached the maximum number of twelve and instead of being eighteen or less inches across they were nearly double that size. They were so large that at the next feeding the absorption area of the infant would have shrunk by a half, which meant that it would be further weakened by not getting enough food. And everyone knew that itchy spots should not be scratched if the condition was not to spread and become more serious …
A raucous foghorn note interrupted his thoughts. O’Mara had experience enough to know by the sound that the infant was badly frightened, and by the relative decrease in volume that it was growing weak as well.
 
 
He needed help badly, but O‘Mara doubted very much if there was anyone available who could furnish it. Telling Caxton about it would be useless—the section chief would only call in Pelling and Pelling was much less informed on the subject of Hudlarian children than was O’Mara, who had been specializing in the subject for the past five weeks. That course would only waste time and not help the kid at all, and there was
a strong possibility that—despite the presence of a Monitor investigator—Caxton would see to it that something pretty violent happened to O’Mara for allowing the infant to take sick, for that was the way the section chief would look at it.
Caxton didn’t like O‘Mara. Nobody liked O’Mara.
If he had been well-liked on the project nobody would have thought of blaming him for the infant’s sickness, or immediately and unanimously assuming that he was the one responsible for the death of its parents. But he had made the decision to appear a pretty lousy character, and he had been too damned successful.
Maybe he really was a despicable person and that was why the role had come so easy to him. Perhaps the constant frustration of never having the chance to really use the brain which was buried in his ugly, muscle-bound body had gradually soured him, and the part he thought he was playing was the real O’Mara.
If only he had stayed clear of the Waring business. That was what had them really mad at him.
But this sort of thinking was getting him nowhere. The solution of his own problems lay—in part, at least—in showing that he was responsible, patient, kind and possessed the various other attributes which his fellow men looked on with respect. To do that he must first show that he could be trusted with the care of a baby.
He wondered suddenly if the Monitor could help. Not personally; a Corps psychologist officer could hardly be expected to know about obscure diseases of Hudlar children, but through his organization. As the Galaxy’s police, maid-of-all-work and supreme authority generally, the Monitor Corps would be able to find at short notice a being who would know the necessary answers. But again, that being would almost certainly be found on Hudlar itself, and the authorities there already knew of the orphaned infant’s position and help had probably been on the way for weeks. It would certainly arrive sooner than the Monitor could bring it. Help might arrive in time to save the infant. But again maybe it might not.
The problem was still O’Mara’s.
About as serious as a dose of measles.
But measles, in a human baby, could be very serious if the patient was kept in a cold room or in some other environment which, although not deadly in itself, could become lethal to an organism whose resistance was lowered by disease or lack of food. The handbook had prescribed
rest, cleansing and nothing else. Or had it? There might be a large and well hidden assumption there. The kicker was that the patient under discussion was residing on its home world at the time of the illness. Under ordinary conditions like that the disease probably was mild and short-lived.
But O’Mara’s bedroom was not, for a Hudlarian baby with the disease, anything like normal conditions.
With that thought came the answer, if only he wasn’t too late to apply it. Abruptly O’Mara pushed himself out of the couch and hurried to the spacesuit locker. He was climbing into the heavy duty model when the communicator beeped at him.
“O’Mara,” Caxton’s voice brayed at him when he had acknowledged, “the Monitor wants to talk to you. It wasn’t supposed to be until tomorrow but—”
“Thank you, Mr. Caxton,” broke in a quiet, firmer voice. There was a pause, then, “My name is Craythorne, Mr. O’Mara. I had planned to see you tomorrow as you know, but I managed to clear up some other work which left me time for a preliminary chat …”
 
 
What,
thought O’Mara fulminatingly,
a damned awkward time you had
to pick! He finished putting on the suit but left the gauntlets and helmet off. He began tearing into the panel which covered the air-supply controls.
“ … To tell you the truth,” the quiet voice of the Monitor went on, “your case is incidental to my main work here. My job is to arrange accommodation and so on for the various life-forms who will shortly be arriving to staff this hospital, and to do everything possible to avoid friction developing between them when they do come. There are a lot of finicky details to attend to, but at the moment I’m free. And I’m curious about you, O’Mara. I’d like to ask some questions.”
This is one smooth operator!
thought one half of O’Mara’s mind. The other half noted that the air-supply controls were set to suit the conditions he had in mind. He left the panel hanging loose and began pulling up a floor section to get at the artificial gravity grid underneath. A little absently he said, “You’ll have to excuse me if I work while we talk. Caxton will explain—”
“I’ve told him about the kid,” Caxton broke in, “and if you think you’re fooling him by pretending to be the harassed mother type … !”
“I understand,” said the Monitor. “I’d also like to say that forcing you to live with an FROB infant when such a course was unnecessary comes under the heading of cruel and unusual punishment, and that about ten years should be knocked off your sentence for what you’ve taken this past five weeks—that is, of course, if you’re found guilty. And now, I always think it’s better to see who one is talking to. Can we have vision, please?”
The suddenness with which the artificial gravity grids switched from one to two Gs caught O’Mara by surprise. His arms folded under him and his chest thumped the floor. A frightened bawl from his patient in the next room must have disguised the noise he made from his listeners because they didn’t mention it. He did the great-grand-daddy of all pressups and heaved himself to his knees.
He fought to keep from gasping. “Sorry, my vision transmitter is on the blink.”
The Monitor was silent just long enough to let O‘Mara know that he knew he was lying, and that he would disregard the lie for the moment. He said finally, “Well, at least you can see me,” and O’Mara’s vision plate lit up.
It showed a youngish man with close-cropped hair whose eyes seemed twenty years older than the rest of his features. The shoulder tabs of a Major were visible on the trim, dark-green tunic and the collar bone bore a caduceus. O’Mara thought that in different circumstances he would have liked this man.
“I’ve something to do in the next room,” O’Mara lied again. “Be with you in a minute.”
 
 
He began the job of setting the anti-gravity belt on his suit to two Gs repulsion, which would exactly counteract the floor’s present attraction and allow him to increase the pull to four Gs without too much discomfort to himself. He would then reset the belt for three Gs, and that would give him back a normal gravity apparent of one G.
At least that was what should have happened.
Instead the G-belt or the floor grids or both started producing half-G fluctuations, and the room went mad. It was like being in an express elevator which was constantly being started and stopped. The frequency of the surges built up rapidly until O‘Mara was being shaken up and down so hard his teeth rattled. Before he could react to this a new and
more devastating complication occurred. As well as variations in strength the floor grids were no longer acting at right angles to their surface, but yawed erratically from ten to thirty degrees from the vertical. No storm-tossed ship had ever pitched and rolled as viciously as this. O’Mara staggered, grabbed frantically for the couch, missed and was flung heavily against the wall. The next surge sent him skidding against the opposite wall before he was able to switch off the G-belt.
The room settled down to a steady gravity-pull of two Gs again.
“Will this take long?” asked the Monitor suddenly.
O’Mara had almost forgotten the Major during the past hectic seconds. He did his best to make his voice sound both natural and as if it was coming from the next room as he replied, “It might. Could you call back later?”
“I’ll wait,” said the Monitor.
For the next few minutes O’Mara tried to forget the bruising he had received despite the protection given him by the heavy spacesuit, and concentrate on thinking his way out of this latest mess. He was beginning to see what must have happened.
When two anti-gravity generators of the same power and frequency were used close together, a pattern of interference was set up which affected the stability of both. The grids in O‘Mara’s quarters were merely a temporary job and powered by a generator similar to the one used in his suit, though normally a difference in frequency was built in against the chance of such instability occurring. But O’Mara had been fiddling with the grid settings constantly for the past five weeks—every time the infant had a bath, to be exact—so that he must have unknowingly altered the frequency.
He didn’t know what he had done wrong and there wasn’t enough time to try fixing it if he had known. Gingerly, O’Mara switched on his G-belt again and slowly began increasing power. It registered over three-quarters of a G before the first signs of instability appeared.
Four Gs less three-quarters made a little over three Gs. It looked, O’Mara thought grimly, like he was going to have to do this the hard way …
O’Mara closed his helmet quickly, then strung a cable from his suit mike to the communicator so that he would be able to talk without Caxton or
the Monitor realizing that he was sealed inside his suit. If he was to have time to complete the treatment they must not suspect that there was anything out of the ordinary going on here. Next came the final adjustments to the air-pressure regulator and gravity grids.
Inside two minutes the atmosphere pressure in the two rooms had multiplied six times and the gravity apparent was four Gs—the nearest, in fact, that O’Mara could get to “ordinary conditions” for a Hudlarian. With shoulder muscles straining and cracking with the effort—for his under-powered G-belt took only three-quarters of a gravity off the four-G pull in the room—he withdrew the incredibly awkward and ponderous thing which his arm had become from the grid servicing space and rolled heavily onto his back.
He felt as if his baby was sitting on his chest, and large, black blotches hung throbbing before his eyes. Through them he could see a section of ceiling and, at a crazy angle, the vision panel. The face in it was becoming impatient.
“I’m back, Major,” gasped O’Mara. He fought to control his breathing so that the words would not be squeezed out too fast. “I suppose you want to hear my side of the accident?”
“No,” said the Monitor. “I’ve heard the tape Caxton made. What I’m curious about is your background prior to coming here. I’ve checked up and there is something which doesn’t quite fit …”
A thunderous eruption of noise blasted into the conversation. Despite the deeper note caused by the increased air pressure O’Mara recognized the signal for what it was; the FROB was angry and hungry.
With a mighty effort O’Mara rolled onto his side, then propped himself up on his elbows. He stayed that way for a while gathering strength to roll over onto his hands and knees. But when he finally accomplished this he found that his arms and legs were swelling and felt as if they would burst from the pressure of blood piling up in them. Gasping, he eased himself down flat onto his chest. Immediately the blood rushed to the front of his body and his vision began to red out.
He couldn’t crawl on hands and knees nor wriggle on his stomach. Most certainly, under three Gs, he could not stand up and walk. What else was there?
O’Mara struggled onto his side again and rolled back, but this time with his elbows propping him up. The neck-rest of his suit supported his head, but the insides of the sleeves were very lightly padded and his elbows hurt. And the strain of holding up even part of his three times
heavier than normal body made his heart pound. Worst of all, he was beginning to black out again.
Surely there must be some way to equalize, or at least distribute, the pressures in his body so that he could stay conscious and move. O’Mara tried to visualize the layout of the acceleration chairs which had been used in ships before artificial gravity came along. It had been a not-quite-prone position, he remembered suddenly, with the knees drawn up …
Inching along on his elbows, bottom and feet, O‘Mara progressed snail-like toward the bedroom. His embarrassment of riches where muscles were concerned was certainly of use now—in these conditions any ordinary man would have been plastered helplessly against the floor. Even so it took him fifteen minutes to reach the food sprayer in the bedroom, and during practically every second of the way the baby kept up its ear-splitting racket. With the increased pressure the noise was so tremendously loud and deep that every bone in O’Mara’s body seemed to vibrate to it.
“I’m trying to talk to you!” the Monitor yelled during a lull. “Can’t you keep that blasted kid shut up!”
“It’s hungry,” said O’Mara. “It’ll quiet down when it’s fed …”
The food sprayer was mounted on a trolley and O’Mara had fitted a pedal control so as to leave both hands free for aiming. Now that his patient was immobilized by four gravities he didn’t have to use his hands. Instead he was able to nudge the trolley into position with his shoulders and depress the pedal with his elbow. The high-pressure jet tended to bend floorward owing to the extra gravity but he did finally manage to cover the infant with food. But cleaning the affected areas of food compound was another matter. The water jet, which handled very awkwardly from floor level, had no accuracy at all. The best he could manage was to wash down the wide, vivid blue patch—formed from three separate patches which had grown together—which covered nearly one quarter of its total skin area.
 
 
After that O’Mara straightened out his legs and lowered his back gently to the floor. Despite the three Gs acting on him, the strain of maintaining that half-sitting position for the last half hour made him feel almost comfortable.
The baby had stopped crying.
“What I was about to say,” said the Monitor heavily when the silence
looked like lasting for a few minutes, “was that your record on previous jobs does not fit what I find here. Previously you were, as you are now, a restless, discontented type, but you were invariably popular with your colleagues and only a little less so with your superiors—this last being because your superiors were sometimes wrong and you never were …”
“I was every bit as smart as they were,” said O’Mara tiredly, “and proved it often. But I didn’t
look
intelligent, I had mucker written all over me!”
It was strange, O’Mara thought, but he felt almost disinterested in his own personal trouble now. He couldn’t take his eyes off the angry blue patch on the infant’s side. The color had deepened and also the center of the patch seemed to have swelled. It was as if the super-hard tegument had softened and the FROB’s enormous internal pressure had produced a swelling. Increasing the gravity and pressure to the Hudlarian normal should, he hoped, halt that particular development—if it wasn’t a symptom of something else entirely.
O’Mara had thought of carrying his idea a step further and spraying the air around the patient with food compound. On Hudlar the natives’ food was comprised of tiny organisms floating in their super-thick atmosphere, but then again the handbook expressly stated that food particles must be kept away from the affected areas of tegument, so that the extra gravity and pressure should be enough …
“ … Nevertheless,” the Monitor was saying, “if a similar accident had happened on one of your previous jobs, your story would have been believed. Even if it had been your fault they would have rallied around to defend you from outsiders like myself.
“What caused you to change from a friendly, likeable type of personality to
this …
?”
“I was bored,” said O’Mara shortly.
There had been no sound from the infant yet, but he had seen the characteristic movements of the FROB’s appendages which foretold of an outburst shortly to come. And it came. For the next ten minutes speech was, of course, impossible.
O‘Mara heaved himself onto his side and rolled back onto his now raw and bleeding elbows. He knew what was wrong; the infant had missed its usual after-feed nursing. O’Mara humped his way slowly across to the two counterweight ropes of the gadget he had devised for petting the infant and prepared to remedy this omission. But the ends of the ropes hung four feet above the floor.
 
 
Lying propped by one elbow and straining to raise the dead weight of his other arm, O’Mara thought that the rope could just as easily have been four miles away. Sweat poured off his face and body with the intensity of the effort and slowly, trembling and wobbling so much that his gauntleted hand went past it first time, he reached up and grabbed hold. Still gripping it tightly he lowered himself gently back bringing the rope with him.
The gadget operated on a system of counterweights, so that there was no extra pull needed on the controlling ropes. A heavy weight dropped neatly onto the infant’s back, administering a reassuring pat. O’Mara rested for a few minutes, then struggled up to repeat the process with the other rope, the pull on which would also wind up the first weight ready for use again.
After about the eighth pat he found that he couldn’t see the end of the rope he was reaching for, though he managed to find it all the same. His head was being kept too high above the level of the rest of his body for too long a time and he was constantly on the point of blacking out. The diminished flow of blood to his brain was having other effects, too …
“ … There, there,” O’Mara heard himself saying in a definitely maudlin voice. “You’re all right now, pappy will take care of you. There now, shush …”
The funny thing about it was that he really did feel a responsibility and a sort of angry concern for the infant. He had saved it once only to let
this
happen! Maybe the three Gs which jammed him against the floor, making every breath a day’s work and the smallest movement an operation which called for all the reserves of strength he possessed, was bringing back the memory of another kind of pressure—the slow, inexorable movement together of two large, inanimate and uncaring masses of metal.
The accident.
As fitter-in-charge of that particular shift O‘Mara had just switched on the warning lights when he had seen the two adult Hudlarians chasing after their offspring on one of the faces being joined. He had called them through his translator, urging them to get to safety and leave him to chase the youngster clear—being much smaller than its parents the slowly closing faces would take longer to reach it, and during those extra few minutes O’Mara would have been able to herd it out of danger. But either their translators were switched off or they were reluctant to trust the safety
of their child to a diminutive human being. Whatever the reason, they remained between the faces until it was too late. O’Mara had to watch helplessly as they were trapped and crushed by the joining structures.
The sight of the young one, still unharmed because of its smaller girth, floundering about between the bodies of its late parents sent O‘Mara into belated action. He was able to chase it out of danger before the sections came close enough to trap it, and had just barely made it himself. For a few heart-stopping seconds back there O’Mara had thought he would have to leave a leg behind.
 
 
This was no place for kids anyway, he told himself angrily as he looked at the quivering, twitching body with the patches of vivid, scabrous blue. People shouldn’t be allowed to bring kids out here, even tough people like the Hudlarians.
But Major Craythorne was speaking again.
“ … Judging by what I hear going on over there,” said the Monitor acidly, “you’re taking very good care of your charge. Keeping the youngster happy and healthy will definitely be a point in your favor …”
Happy and healthy, thought O’Mara as he reached toward the rope yet again.
Healthy … !
“ … But there are other considerations,” the quiet voice went on. “Were you guilty of negligence in not switching on the warning lights until after the accident occurred, which is what you are alleged to have done? And your previous record notwithstanding, here you have been a surly, quarrelsome bully and your behavior toward Waring especially … !”
The Monitor broke off, looked faintly disapproving, then went on, “A few minutes ago you said that you did all these things because you were bored. Explain that.”
“Wait a minute, Major,” Caxton broke in, his face appearing suddenly behind Craythorne’s on the screen. “He’s stalling for some reason, I’m sure of it. All those interruptions, this gasping voice he’s using and this shush-a-bye-baby stuff is just an act to show what a great little nursemaid he is. I think I’ll go over and bring him back here to answer you face to face—”
“That won’t be necessary,” said O’Mara quickly. “I’ll answer any questions you want, right now.”
He had a horrible picture of Caxton’s reaction if the other saw the
infant in its present state; the sight of it made O’Mara feel queasy and he was used to it now. Caxton wouldn’t stop to think, or wait for explanations, or ask himself if it was fair to place an e-t in charge of a human who was completely ignorant of its physiology or weaknesses. He would just react. Violently.
And as for the Monitor …
O‘Mara thought that he might get out of the accident part, but if the kid died as well he hadn’t a hope. The infant had had a mild though uncommon disease which should have responded to treatment days ago, and instead had become progressively worse, so it would die anyway if O’Mara’s last desperate try at reproducing its home planet’s conditions did not come off. What he needed now was time. According to the book, about four to six hours of it.
Suddenly the futility of it all hit him. The infant’s condition had not improved—it heaved and twitched and generally looked to be the most desperately ill and pitiable creature that had ever been born. O’Mara swore helplessly. What he was trying to do now should have been tried days ago, his baby was as good as dead, and continuing this treatment for another five or six hours would probably kill or cripple him for life. And it would serve him right!
BOOK: Sector General Omnibus 1 - Beginning Operations
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