Sector General Omnibus 2 - Alien Emergencies (4 page)

It was then that Brenner saw for the first time the contents of the pathologist’s spacesuit, and Prilicla began a slow tremble.

Unless covered by a heavy duty suit fitted with an opaque sun filter, Murchison displayed a combination of physiological features which made it impossible for any male Earth-human member of the staff to regard her with anything approaching clinical detachment. The Lieutenant finally managed to drag his eyes away from her and to notice Prilicla.

“Is something wrong, Doctor?” he asked, looking concerned.

“To the contrary, friend Brenner,” said the empath, still trembling slowly. “This type of involuntary physical activity is my species’ reaction to the close proximity of an intense but pleasurable source of emotional radiation of the kind usually associated with the biological urge to mate…”

The Cinrusskin broke off and stopped trembling because the Surgeon-Lieutenant’s suddenly red face was clashing discordantly against his green uniform, and Prilicla was feeling his embarrassment.

Murchison smiled sympathetically and said, “Perhaps I am the cause, Lieutenant Brenner—I have intense feelings of pleasure over the way in which your earlier tests and deductions have saved me nearly four hours work in a very irksome spacesuit. Isn’t that so, Prilicla?”

“Most certainly,” said the empath, to whom lying was second nature so long as it made someone, especially itself, happy. “Empathy is not nearly as accurate as telepathy, you know, and mistakes of this kind frequently occur.”

Conway cleared his throat and said, “I’ve arranged to see O’Mara just as soon as we have the patient accommodated which, initially, will be in an evacuated dock and storage chamber on Level 103. We will use the tender’s tractor beam to transfer the patient to the hospital, so if you are needed on board
Torrance
, Lieutenant…?”

Brenner shook his head. “The Captain would like to spend some time here, if possible, and so would I if I wouldn’t be in the way. It’s my first time to visit this place. Are there, ah, many other Earth-humans on the medical staff?”

If you mean like Murchison
, Conway thought smugly,
the answer is no
. Aloud, he said, “We would welcome your help, of course. But you do not know what you are letting yourself in for, Lieutenant, and you keep asking about the Earth-humans on the staff. Are you xenophobic, even slightly? Uncomfortable near extraterrestrials?”

“Certainly not,” said Brenner firmly, then added, “Of course, I wouldn’t want to marry one.”

Prilicla began the slow shakes again. The musical trills and clicks of its Cinrusskin speech formed a pleasant background to its translated voice as it said, “From the sudden flood of pleasant emotional
radiation, for which I can see no apparent reason in the current situation and recent dialogue, I assume that someone has made what Earth-humans call a joke.”

At Level 103 Prilicla left to check on its wards while the others supervised the transfer of the great, stiff-winged bird into the storage chamber. Looking at the swept-back, partially folded wings and stiffly extended neck, Conway was reminded of one of the old-time space shuttles. His mind began to slip off on an interesting but ridiculous, tangent and he had to remind himself that birds did
not
fly, in space.

With the patient immobilized under one full G of artificial gravity it still took another three hours before Murchison had everything she wanted in the way of specimens and x-rays. In part the delay was caused by them having to work in pressure suits because, as Murchison put it, there would be little risk in observing the patient for a few more hours in airless conditions until they had worked out its atmosphere requirements with exactness—otherwise they might simply end by observing its processes of decomposition.

But their information on the patient was growing with every minute that passed, and the results of their tests—transmitted direct from Pathology by the portable communicator beside them—were both interesting and utterly baffling. Conway lost all track of time until the communicator chimed for attention and the face of Major O’Mara glowered out at them.

“Conway, you arranged to see me here seven and one half minutes ago,” said the Chief Psychologist. “No doubt you were just leaving.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” said Conway, “the preliminary investigation is taking longer than I estimated, and I want to have something concrete to report before seeing you.”

There was a faint rustling sound as O’Mara breathed heavily through his nose. The Chief Psychologist’s face was about as readable as a piece of weathered basalt, which in some respects it resembled, but the eyes which studied Conway opened into a mind so keenly analytical that it gave the Major what amounted to a telepathic faculty.

As Chief Psychologist of a multi-environment hospital he was responsible for the mental well-being of a staff of several thousand
entities belonging to more than sixty different species. Even though his Monitor Corps rank of Major did not place him high in the chain of command, there was no clear limit to his authority. To O’Mara the medical staff were patients, too, and part of his job was to assign the right kind of doctor—whether Earth-human or e-t—to a given patient.

Given even the highest qualities of tolerance and mutual respect, potentially dangerous situations could still arise through ignorance or misunderstanding, or a being could develop xenophobia to a degree which threatened to affect its professional competence, mental stability, or both. An Earth-human doctor, for instance, who had a subconscious fear of spiders would not be able to bring to bear on a Cinrusskin patient the proper degree of clinical detachment necessary for its treatment. And if someone like Prilicla were to treat such an Earth-human patient…

A large part of O’Mara’s job was to detect and eradicate such trouble among the medical staff while other members of his department saw to it that the problem did not arise where the patients were concerned. According to O’Mara himself, however, the true reason for the high degree of mental stability among the variegated and often touchy medical staff was that they were all too frightened of him to risk going mad.

Caustically, he said, “Doctor Conway, I freely admit that this patient is unusual even by your standards, but you must have discovered a few simple facts about it and its condition. Is it alive? Is it diseased or injured? Does it possess intelligence? Are you wasting your time on an outsize, space-frozen turkey?”

Conway ignored the rhetoric and tried to answer the questions. He said. “The patient is alive, just barely, and the indications are that it is both diseased—the exact nature of the disease is not yet known—and suffering from gross physical injury, specifically a punctured wound made by a large, high-velocity projectile or a tightly focused heat beam which passed through the base of the neck and the upper chestal area. The wound entrance and exit is sealed by the black covering or growth—we still don’t know which—encasing the body. Regarding the possibility of intelligence, the cranial capacity is large enough not to rule this out, but again, the head is too deeply unconscious to radiate detectable emotion. The manip
ulatory appendages, whose degree of specialization or otherwise can give a strong indication of the presence or absence of intelligence, have been removed.

“Not by us,” Conway added.

O’Mara was silent for a moment, then he said, “I see. Another one of your deceptively simple cases. No doubt you will have deceptively simple special requirements. Accommodation? Physiology tapes? Information on planet of origin?”

Conway shook his head. “I don’t believe that you have a physiology tape that will cover this patient’s type—all the winged species we know are light-gravity beings, and this one has muscles for about four Gs. The present accommodation is fine, although we’ll have to be careful in case of contamination of or from the chlorine level above us—the seals to storage compartments like this are not designed for constant traffic, unlike the ward airlocks—”

“I didn’t know that, of course.”

“Sorry, sir,” said Conway. “I was thinking aloud, and partly for the benefit of Surgeon-Lieutenant Brenner, who is visiting this madhouse for the first time. Regarding information on its planet of origin, I would like you to approach Colonel Skempton to ask him if it would be possible for
Torrance
to return to that area to investigate the two nearer star systems, to look for beings with a similar physiological classification.”

“In other words,” said O’Mara dryly, “you have a difficult medical problem and think that the best solution is to find the patient’s own doctor.”

Conway smiled and said, “We don’t need full cultural contact—just a quick look, atmosphere samples and specimens of local plant and animal life, if
Torrance
wouldn’t mind soft-landing a probe—”

O’Mara broke the connection at that point with a sound which was untranslatable and Conway, now that they had gone as far as they could with the patient without the path reports, suddenly realized how hungry he was.

III

To reach the dining hall reserved for warm-bodied oxygen breathers they had to travel through two levels, none of which required protective suits, and a network of corridors crowded with entities which
flapped, crawled, undulated and occasionally walked past them. They were met at the entrance by Prilicla who was carrying a folder of green path reports.

As they entered the last Earth-human table was being taken by a bunch of crab-like Melfans and a Tralthan—Melfans could adapt themselves to the low stools and the Tralthans did everything including sleep on their six elephantine feet. Prilicla spotted an empty table in the Kelgian area and flew across to claim it before the party of Corps maintenancemen could get there. Luckily it was beyond the range of their emotional radiation.

Conway began eagerly leafing through the reports once he saw that the Lieutenant was being shown by Murchison how to balance on the edge of a Kelgian chair within reach of the food he had ordered. But for once Brenner’s attention was not on the shapely pathologist. He was staring at Prilicla, his eyebrows almost lost in his hairline.

“Cinrusskins prefer to eat while hovering—they say it aids the digestion,” explained Murchison, and added, “The slipstream helps cool the soup, too.”

Prilicla maintained a stable hover while they concentrated on refuelling, breaking off only to pass around the reports. Finally Conway, feeling pleasantly distended, turned to the Cinrusskin.

“I don’t know how you managed it,” he said warmly. “When
I
want a fast report from Thornnastor the most he will let me do is just two places in the queue.”

Prilicla trembled at the compliment as it replied “I insisted, quite truthfully, that our patient was at the point of death.”

“But not,” said Murchison dryly, “that it has been in that condition for a very long time.”

“You’re sure of that?” asked Conway.

“I am now,” she answered seriously, tapping one of the reports as she spoke. “The indications are that the large punctured wound was inflicted by a meteorite collision some time after the disease, that is the barnacles and coating material were in position. The coating which flowed into and across the wound, effectively sealed it.

“As well,” she continued, “these tests show that a very complex chemical form of suspended animation—not just hypothermia—
was used and that it was applied organ by organ, almost cell by cell, by micro-injections of the required specifics. In a way you could think of it as if the creature had been embalmed before it was quite dead in an effort to prolong its life.”

“What about the missing legs or claws?” said Conway, “
and
the evidence of charring under the coating in the areas behind the wings? And the pieces of what seems to be a different kind of barnacle in those areas?”

“It is possible,” Murchison replied, “that the disease initially affected the being’s legs or claws, perhaps during its equivalent of nesting. The removal of the limbs and the evidence of charring you mention might have been early and unsuccessful attempts at curing the patient’s condition. Remember that virtually all of the creature’s body wastes were eliminated before the coating was applied. That is standard procedure before hibernation, anesthesia or major surgery.”

The silence which followed was broken by the Lieutenant, who said, “Excuse me, I’m getting lost. This disease or growth, what exactly do we know about it?”

They knew that the outward symptoms of the disease were the barnacle-like growths, Murchison told him, which covered the patient’s tegument so completely that it could have been a suit of chain mail. It was still open to argument whether the barnacles were skin conditions which had sprouted rootlets or a subcutaneous condition with a barnacle-like eruption on the surface, but in either event they were held by a thick pencil of fine rootlets extending and subdividing to an unknown depth within the patient. They penetrated not only the subcutaneous tissue and underlying musculature, but practically all of the vital organs and central nervous systems. And the rootlets were hungry. There could be no doubt from the condition of the tissue underlying the barnacles that this was a severely wasting disease which was far advanced.

“It seems to me that you should have been called in earlier,” said Brenner, “and that the patient was sealed up just before it was due to die.”

Conway nodded and said, “But it isn’t hopeless. Some of our e-ts practice micro-surgery techniques which would enable them to excise the rootlets, even the ones which are tangled up in the nerve
bundles. It is a very slow procedure, however, and there is the danger that when we revive the patient the disease will also be revived and that it might progress faster than the micro-surgeon. I think the answer is to learn as much as we possibly can about the disease before we do anything else.”

When they returned to the patient there was a message waiting from O’Mara to say that
Torrance
had left with the promise of preliminary reports on the two solar systems nearest to the find within three days. During those three days Conway expected to devise procedures which would remove the coating and barnacles from the patient, arrest the disease and initiate curative surgery so that the scoutship’s reports would be needed only to prepare proper accommodation for the patient’s convalescence.