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Authors: James White

Sector General Omnibus 1 - Beginning Operations (9 page)

BOOK: Sector General Omnibus 1 - Beginning Operations
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Conway was about to call through for assistance when a chunk of ragged-edged metal spun past his helmet. He swung around just in time to duck another piece of wreckage which was sailing toward him. Only then did he see the outlines of a nonhuman, spacesuited figure which was partially hidden in a tangle of metal about ten yards away. The being was throwing things at him!
The bombardment stopped as soon as the other saw that Conway had noticed it. With visions of having found the unknown survivor whose blundering about was playing hob with the hospital’s artificial gravity system he hurried across to it. But he saw immediately that the being was incapable of doing any moving about at all, it was pinned down, but miraculously unhurt, by a couple of heavy structural members. It was also making vain attempts to reach around to the back of its suit with its only free appendage. Conway was puzzled for a moment, then he saw the radio pack which was strapped to the being’s back, and the lead dangling loose from it. Using surgical tape he repaired the break and immediately the flat, Translated tones of the being filled his ear-phones.
It was the PVSJ who had left before them to search the wrecked area for survivors. Caught by the same trap which had snagged the unfortunate Monitor, it had been able to use its gravity pack to check its sudden fall. Overcompensating, it had crashed into its present position. The crash had been relatively gentle, but it had caused some loose wreckage to subside, trapping the being and damaging its radio.
The PVSJ—a chlorine-breathing Illensan—was solidly planted in the wreckage: Conway’s attempts to free it were useless. While trying, however, he got a look at the professional insignia painted on the other’s suit. The Tralthan and Illensan symbols meant nothing to Conway, but the third one—which was the nearest expression of the being’s function in Earth-human terms—was a crucifix. The being was a padre. Conway might have expected that.
But now Conway had two immobilized cases instead of one. He thumbed the transmit switch of his radio and cleared his throat. Before
he could speak the harsh, urgent voice of Dr. Mannon was dinning in his ears.
“Dr. Conway! Corpsman Williamson! One of you, report quickly, please!”
Conway said, “I was just going to,” and gave an account of his troubles to date and requested aid for the Monitor and the PVSJ padre. Mannon cut him off.
“I’m sorry,” he said hurriedly, “but we can’t help you. The gravity fluctuations have been getting worse here, they must have caused a subsidence in your tunnel, because it’s solidly plugged with wreckage all the way above you. Maintenance men have tried to cut a way through but—”
“Let me talk to him,” broke in another voice, and there were the magnified, fumbling noises of a mike being snatched out of someone’s hand. “Dr. Conway, this is Dr. Lister speaking,” it went on. “I’m afraid that I must tell you that the well-being of your two accident cases is of secondary importance. Your job is to contact that being in the gravity control compartment and stop him. Hit him on the head if necessary, but stop him—he’s wrecking the hospital!”
Conway swallowed. He said, “Yes, sir,” and began looking for a way to penetrate further into the tangle of metal surrounding him. It looked hopeless.
 
 
Suddenly he felt himself being pulled sideways. He grabbed for the nearest solid looking projection and hung on for dear life. Transmitted through the fabric of his suit he heard the grinding, tearing jangle of moving metal. The wreckage was shifting again. Then the force pulling him disappeared as suddenly as it had come and simultaneously there came a peculiar, barking cry from the PVSJ. Conway twisted around to see that where the Illensan had been a large hole led downward into nothingness.
He had to force himself to let go of his handhold. The attraction which had seized him had been due, Conway knew, to the momentary activating of an artificial gravity grid somewhere below. If it returned while he was floating unsupported … Conway did not want to think about that.
The shift had not affected Williamson’s position—he still lay as Conway had left him—but the PVSJ must have fallen through.
“Are you all right?” Conway called anxiously.
“I think so,” came the reply. “I am still somewhat numb.”
Cautiously, Conway drifted across to the newly-created opening and looked down. Below him was a very large compartment, well-lit from a source somewhere off to one side. Only the floor was visible about forty feet below, the walls being beyond his angle of vision and this was thickly carpeted by a dark blue, tubular growth with bulbous leaves. The purpose of this compartment baffled Conway until he realized that he was looking at the AUGL tank minus its water. The thick, flaccid growth covering its floor served both as food and interior decoration for the AUGL patients. The PVSJ had been very lucky to have such a springy surface to land on.
The PVSJ was no longer pinned down by wreckage and it stated that it felt fit enough to help Conway with the being in the gravity control department. As they were about to resume the descent Conway glanced toward the source of light he had half-noticed earlier, and caught his breath.
One wall of the AUGL tank was transparent and looked out on a section corridor which had been converted into a temporary ward. DBLF caterpillars lay in the beds which lined one side, and they were by turns crushed savagely into the plastifoam and bounced upward into the air by it as violent and random fluctuations rippled along the gravity grids in the floor. Netting had been hastily tied around the patients to keep them in the beds, but despite the beating they were taking they were the lucky ones.
 
 
A ward was being evacuated somewhere and through his stretch of corridor there crawled, wriggled and hopped a procession of beings resembling the contents of some cosmic Ark. All the oxygen-breathing life-forms were represented together with many who were not, and human nursing orderlies and Monitors shepherded them along. Experience must have taught the orderlies that to stand or walk upright was asking for broken bones and cracked skulls, because they were crawling along on their hands and knees. When a sudden surge of three or four Gs caught them they had a shorter distance to fall that way. Most of them were wearing gravity packs, Conway saw, but had given them up as useless in conditions where the gravity constant was a wild variable.
He saw PVSJs in balloon-like chlorine envelopes being pinned against the floor, flattened like specimens pressed under glass, then bounced into the air again. And Tralthan patients in their massive, unwieldy harness—Tralthans were prone to injury internally despite their great strength—
being dragged along. There were DBDGs, DBLFs and CLSRs, also unidentifiable somethings in spherical, wheeled containers that radiated cold almost visibly. Strung out in a line, being pushed, dragged or manfully inching along on their own, the beings crept past, bowing and straightening up again like wheat in a strong wind as the gravity grids pulled at them.
Conway could almost imagine he felt those fluctuations where he stood, but knew that the crashing ship must have destroyed the grid circuits in its path. He dragged his eyes away from that grim procession and headed downward again.
“Conway!” Mannon’s voice barked at him a few minutes later. “That survivor down there is responsible for as many casualties now as the crashed ship! A ward of convalescent LSVOs are dead due to a three-second surge from one-eighth to four gravities. What’s happening now?”
The tunnel of wreckage was steadily narrowing, Conway reported, the hull and lighter machinery of the ship having been peeled away by the time it had reached their present level. All that could remain ahead was the massive stuff like hyperdrive generators and so on. He thought he must be very near the end of the line now, and the being who was the unknowing cause of the devastation around them.
“Good,” said Mannon, “but hurry it up!”
“But can’t the Engineers get through? Surely—”
“They can’t,” broke in Dr. Lister’s voice. “In the area surrounding the gravity grid controls there are fluctuations of up to ten Gs. It’s impossible. And joining up with your route from inside the hospital is out, too. It would mean evacuating corridors in the neighboring area, and the corridors are all filled with patients …” The voice dropped in volume as Dr. Lister apparently turned away from the mike, and Conway overhead him saying, “Surely an intelligent being could not be so panic-stricken that it … it … Oh, when I get my hands on it—”
“It may not be intelligent,” put in another voice. “Maybe it’s a cub, from the FGLI maternity unit …”
“If it is I’ll tan its little—”
A sharp click ended the conversation at that point as the transmitter was switched off. Conway, suddenly realizing what a very important man he had become, tried to hurry it up as best he could.
They dropped another level into a ward in which four MSVKs—fragile, tri-pedal storklike beings—drifted lifeless among loose items of ward equipment. Movements of the bodies and objects in the room seemed a little unnatural, as if they had been recently disturbed. It was the first sign of the enigmatic survivor they were seeking. Then they were in a great, metal-walled compartment surrounded by a maze of plumbing and unshielded machinery. On the floor in a bulge it had created for itself, the ship’s massive hyper-drive generator lay with some shreds of control room equipment strewn around it. Underneath was the remains of a life-form that was now unclassifiable. Beside the generator another hole had been torn in the severely weakened floor by some other piece of the ship’s heavy equipment.
Conway hurried over to it, looked down, then called excitedly, “There it is!”
They were looking into a vast room which could only be the grid control center. Rank upon rank of squat, metal cabinets covered the floor, walls and ceiling—this compartment was always kept airless and at zero gravity—with barely room for even Earth-human Engineers to move between them. But Engineers were seldom needed here because the devices in this all-important compartment were self-repairing. At the moment this ability was being put to a severe test.
A being which Conway classified tentatively as AACL sprawled across three of the delicate control cabinets. Nine other cabinets, all winking with red distress signals, were within range of its six, python-like tentacles which poked through seals in the cloudy plastic of its suit. The tentacles were at least twenty feet long and tipped with a horny substance which must have been steel-hard considering the damage the being had caused.
Conway had been prepared to feel pity for this hapless survivor, he had expected to find an entity injured, panic-stricken and crazed with pain. Instead there was a being who appeared unhurt and who was viciously smashing up gravity-grid controls as fast as the built-in self-repairing robots tried to fix them.
Conway swore and began hunting for the frequency of the other’s suit radio. Suddenly there was a harsh, high-pitched cheeping sound in his ear-phones. “Got you!” Conway said grimly.
The cheeping sounds ceased abruptly as the other heard his voice and so did all movement of those highly destructive tentacles. Conway
noted the wavelength, then switched back to the band used by the PVSJ and himself.
“It seems to me,” said the chlorine-breather when he had told it what he had heard, “that the being is deeply afraid, and the noises it made were of fear—otherwise your Translator would have made you receive them as words in your own language. The fact that these noises and its destructive activity stopped when it heard your voice is promising, but I think that we should approach slowly and reassure it constantly that we are bringing help. Its activity down there gives me the impression that it has been hitting out at anything which moves, so a certain amount of caution is indicated, I think.”
“Yes, Padre,” said Conway with great feeling.
“We do not know in what direction the being’s visual organs are directed,” the PVSJ went on, “so I suggest we approach from opposite sides.”
Conway nodded. They set their radios to the new band and climbed carefully down onto the ceiling of the compartment below. With just enough power in their gravity neutralizers to keep them pressing gently against the metal surface they moved away from each other onto opposite walls, down them, then onto the floor. With the being between them now, they moved slowly toward it.
 
 
The robot repair devices were busy making good the damage wrecked by those six anacondas it used for limbs but the being continued to lie quiescent. Neither did it speak. Conway kept thinking of the havoc this entity had caused with its senseless threshing about. The things he felt like saying to it were anything but reassuring, so he let the PSVJ padre do the talking.
“Do not be afraid,” the other was saying for the twentieth time. “If you are injured, tell us. We are here to help you …”
But there was neither movement nor reply from the being.
On a sudden impulse Conway switched to Dr. Mannon’s band. He said quickly, “The survivor seems to be an AACL. Can you tell me what it’s here for, or any reason why it should refuse or be unable to talk to us?”
“I’ll check with Reception,” said Mannon after a short pause. “But are you sure of that classification? I can’t remember seeing an AACL here, sure it isn’t a Creppelian—”
“It isn’t a Creppelian octopoid,” Conway cut in. “There are six main appendages, and it is just lying here doing nothing …”
Conway stopped suddenly, shocked into silence, because it was no longer true that the being under discussion was doing nothing. It had launched itself toward the ceiling, moving so fast that it seemed to land in the same instant that it had taken off. Above him now, Conway saw another control unit pulverized as the being struck and others torn from their mounts as its tentacles sought anchorage. In his phones Mannon was shouting about gravity fluctuations in a hitherto stable section of the hospital, and mounting casualty figures, but Conway was unable to reply.
He was watching helplessly as the AACL prepared to launch itself again.
“ … We are here to help you,” the PVSJ was saying as the being landed with a soundless crash four yards from the padre. Five great tentacles anchored themselves firmly, and a sixth lashed out in a great, curving blur of motion that caught the PVSJ and smashed it against the wall. Life-giving chlorine spurted from the PVSJ’s suit, momentarily hiding in mist the shapeless, pathetic thing which rebounded slowly into the middle of the room. The AACL began making cheeping noises again.
Conway heard himself babbling out a report to Mannon, then Mannon shouting for Lister. Finally the Director’s voice came in to him. It said thickly, “You’ve got to kill it, Conway.”
You’ve got to kill it, Conway!
It was those words which shocked Conway back to a state of normality as nothing else could have done. How very like a Monitor, he thought bitterly, to solve a problem with a murder. And to ask a doctor, a person dedicated to the preserving of life, to do the killing. It did not matter that the being was insane with fear, it had caused a lot of trouble in the hospital, so kill it.
Conway had been afraid, he still was. In his recent state of mind he might have been panicked into using this kill-or-be-killed law of the jungle. Not now, though. No matter what happened to him or the hospital he would not kill an intelligent fellow being, and Lister could shout himself blue in the face …
It was with a start of surprise that Conway realized that both Lister and Mannon were shouting at him, and trying to counter his arguments. He must have been doing his thinking aloud without knowing it. Angrily he tuned them out.
But there was still another voice gibbering at him, a slow, whispering,
unutterably weary voice that frequently broke off to gasp in pain. For a wild moment Conway thought that the ghost of the dead PVSJ was continuing Lister’s arguments, then he caught sight of movement above him.
Drifting gently through the hole in the ceiling was the spacesuited figure of Williamson. How the badly injured Monitor had got there at all was beyond Conway’s understanding—his broken arms made control of his gravity pack impossible, so that he must have come all the way by kicking with his feet and trusting that a still-active gravity grid would not pull him in a second time. At the thought of how many times those multiple fractured members must have collided with obstacles on the way down, Conway cringed. And yet all the Monitor was concerned with was trying to coax Conway into killing the AACL below him.
Close below him, with the distance lessening every second …
Conway felt the cold sweat break out on his back. Helpless to stop himself, the injured Monitor had cleared the rent in the ceiling and was drifting slowly floorward,
directly on top of the crouching AACL!
As Conway stared fascinated one of the steel-hard tentacles began to uncurl preparatory to making a death-dealing swipe.
Instinctively Conway launched himself in the direction of the floating Monitor, there was no time for him to feel consciously brave—or stupid—about the action. He connected with a muffled crash and hung on, wrapping his legs around Williamson’s waist to leave his hands free for the gravity pack controls. They spun furiously around their common center of gravity, walls, ceilings and floor with its deadly occupant whirling around so fast that Conway could barely focus his eyes on the controls. It seemed years before he finally had the spin checked and he had them headed for the hole in the ceiling and safety. They had almost reached it when Conway saw the hawser-like tentacle come sweeping up at him …
BOOK: Sector General Omnibus 1 - Beginning Operations
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