Sector General Omnibus 2 - Alien Emergencies (57 page)

Conway understood Dermod’s problem all too well and the strong but unspoken reason why the Fleet Commander wanted the
ambulance ship positioned in the target system. They both knew that the majority of single-ship accidents occurred because of a premature emergence into normal space when one of the unfortunate vessel’s matched set of hyperdrive generators was out of synchronization. A single generator pod emerging into normal space while the rest of the vessel was in the hyperdimension could tear the ship apart and leave wreckage strewn across millions of kilometers. Timing, therefore, was critical even on a single ship where only two or perhaps four generators had to be matched. The Fleet Commander’s problem was that
Vespasian, Claudius
, and
Descartes
together with the enormous coilship of the CRLTs were linked together by tractor and pressor beams into a single rigid structure.

The Emperor-class cruisers were the largest ships operated by the Monitor Corps, and each required six generators to move its tremendous mass into and out of hyperspace, while the survey and Cultural Contact vessel
Descartes
needed only four. This meant that sixteen generators in all would be required to perform a simultaneous Jump and subsequent emergence into normal space. And the problem was further complicated by the fact that all of the generators would be operating under controlled overload conditions because their combined hyperspace envelope had to be extended to enclose the coilship.

As
Rhabwar
made its Jump into hyperspace Conway was overcome by such an intense, gnawing anxiety that even Prilicla could not reassure him out of it. He had the awful feeling that they were about to witness the worst space disaster in Federation history.

The new home chosen for the CRLTs had been known to the Federation for nearly two centuries and was listed as a possible colony world for the Chalders. However, the denizens of Chalderescol Three—a water-breathing life-form resembling an outsize, tentacled crocodile which combined physical inaction with mental agility—were not very enthusiastic about it since they already possessed two colony worlds and their home planet was far from overcrowded. So when they learned of the plight of the CRLT colonists they willingly relinquished their claim to a planet which was of marginal interest to them anyway.

It was a warm, pleasant world with a continent, largely desert, encircling its equator like a wide, ragged belt and two relatively small bands of ocean separating the equatorial landmass from the two large continents centered at each pole; these were green, temperate, and free of icecaps.

Following exhaustive investigations of the cadavers available to them at Sector General both Murchison and Thornnastor were firmly of the opinion that this would be an ideal home for the CRLT life-form—moreover it was an environment which would not force them into periodic hibernation.

The landing area, a large clearing on the shore of a vast, inland sea, had already been marked with beacons. It awaited only the arrival of the CRLTs—as, with mounting anxiety, did the personnel on board
Rhabwar
. On the Casualty Deck Conway and the other members of the medical team each picked a direct visionport, hoping in some obscure fashion that by watching and worrying hard they might ensure the safe arrival of the coilship.

It was no surprise, considering the distances involved, that they learned of its emergence from the Control Room repeaters.

“Trace, sir!” Haslam’s voice sounded excitedly. “The bearing is—”

“Are you sure it’s them?”

“A single trace that size couldn’t be anything else, sir. And yes, the sensors confirm.”

“Very well,” the Captain’s voice replied, trying unsuccessfully to hide its relief. “Lock the scope on your radar bearing and give me full magnification. Dodds, contact astrogation on
Vespasian
and arrange a rendezvous. Power Room, stand by.”

The rest of the crewmen’s conversation was ignored as the medical team crowded around the Casualty Deck’s repeater screen. One look was enough to tell them that their preparations to receive large numbers of casualties from the expected emergence accident had been wasted effort, but they did not care because it was immediately obvious that the concerted Jump had been completely successful.

Centered on the repeater screen was a small, sharp image of the coilship with its three Monitor Corps vessels spaced along its axis, looking like an exercise in alien three-dimensional geometry.
Vespasian
, the stern component, was already applying thrust, and the three linked ships were beginning to turn around their longitudinal
axes in order to reproduce the original rate of rotation and centrifugal force conditions of the coilship before its accident. Gradually a voice from Control made itself heard above the sound of the medics’ human and extraterrestrial jubilation.

“…Rendezvous in four hours thirteen minutes,” Haslam was saying. “No preliminary orbital maneuvering, sir. They intend going straight in.”

Rhabwar
, in its hypersonic glider configuration, circled the descending coilship at a distance of three kilometers using its thrusters only when necessary to maintain the same rate of descent. Rotating slowly and illuminated to near-incandescent brightness by the system’s sun and noontime reflection from the planet’s cloud blanket, it seemed to Conway as if it were boring its way into the lower reaches of the atmosphere like some gigantic, alien drill. Inside the enormous, dazzling coil the three Federation ships in their drab service liveries were virtually invisible except for the flare of
Vespasian
’s thrusters, which were supporting the weight not only of the coilship but the two vessels stacked above it. The great alien and Monitor Corps composite continued its descent until, three kilometers from the surface, tangential thrust was applied to begin killing its spin.

Vespasian
’s flare lengthened suddenly and brightened, slowing the descent until the ship was hovering a meter above the ground. Then simultaneously the coilship’s rotation ceased,
Vespasian
’s stabilizers came to rest on the fused and blackened soil, and the sternmost segment of the coilship touched down.

For perhaps five seconds nothing happened, then, reacting to the cessation of spin and the presence of a suitable atmosphere, the sensor-actuators on every hibernation cylinder performed their function. The endplates which kept the individual CRLTs apart were ejected to fall like a shower of giant coins to the ground, and resuscitation of the group entity was initiated. Conway could imagine the individual CRLTs awakening, stretching, and linking up, the occupants of close on nine hundred hibernation compartments which had survived the eighty-seven years past collision. Then he began to worry in case some of them could not link up and there was an
organic log-jam somewhere inside the coil trapping CRLTs above it…

But within a surprisingly short time the great group entity was leaving its ship, the leading head segments walking carefully around the fused earth under
Vespasian
’s stern and toward the vegetation on the edge of the clearing. And, like an endless, leathery caterpillar the younger segments emerged carrying equipment and stores and following the tracks of their elders.

When at last the tail was clear of the coilship, the power to the supporting tractor and pressor beams was gradually reduced so that the towering, open spiral collapsed slowly onto itself to lie like a great, loose coil of metal rope on the ground. A few minutes later
Vespasian, Claudius
, and
Descartes
took off and separated, the two capital ships to go into orbit and
Descartes
to land again a few kilometers along the shoreline to await formal contact with the CRLT group entity. Contact would occur, they knew, because the individual CRLTs who had undergone surgery knew that the beings inside the Federation ships wished them well and, since the CRLT life-form had shared mentation, the whole group would be aware of these good intentions.

By this time
Rhabwar
’s lander had also touched down and its medics were on the surface standing as close as they possibly could to the being who was marching endlessly past them. Ostensibly they were there to furnish any medical assistance which might be required. Actually they were simply satisfying their curiosity regarding a being which must surely have been the strangest life-form yet encountered.

Conway, as was his wont, was indulging in a bout of postoperative worrying. He waved, indicating the endless line of dorsal appendages which were either gathering pieces of edible vegetation or waving back at him, and said, “I realize that one or more of the head segments must have tried the local vegetation with no ill effects, and now the whole group entity knows what is safe to eat, but the procedure seems a bit slapdash to me. And I haven’t been able to spot any of our surgical joins going past. There is bound to be a certain amount of muscular weakness in those areas, and perhaps an impairment in sensory communication and—What the blazes is
that
!”

That
was a low, moaning and caterwauling sound which ran up and down the length of the kilometers-long entity, rising in volume suddenly until it became deafening. It sounded as if each and every CRLT was suffering intense physical or mental anguish. But strangely the outpouring of emotional radiation which must have accompanied it was not bothering Prilicla.

“Do not feel concern,” the little empath said. “It is an expression of group pleasure, gratitude, and relief. They are cheering, friend Conway.”

Something struck Conway as odd about the latest bunch of trainees as he stood aside to allow them to precede him into the observation gallery of the Hudlar Children’s Ward. It was not that among the fourteen of them they comprised five widely different life-forms or that their treatment of him—he was, after all, a Senior Physician attached to the galaxy’s largest multienvironment hospital—was condescending to the point of rudeness.

To be accepted for advanced training at Sector Twelve General Hospital a candidate—in addition to possessing a high degree of medical and surgical ability—had to be able to adapt to and accept people and circumstances which, back in their home-planet hospitals, they could barely have imagined. At home an off-planet patient would be a rarity indeed, while at Sector General they would be treating nothing else. Furthermore, many of them would find it difficult to make the transition from highly respected member of the local medical fraternity to mere trainee at Sector General, but they would soon settle in.

His mind was playing tricks on him, Conway decided—probably because he had so much on it at the present time. A rumor was going around about changes in his ambulance ship setup, and he was scheduled for an hour early that afternoon with the Chief Psychologist, always an unsettling prospect.

Conway was also irritated because he seemed to be coming in for more than his fair share of short-term projects and medical odd jobs—such as giving the trainees their initial orientation tour. His
special ambulance-ship team had had very few calls in recent months.

“The patients in the ward below are infant Hudlars,” Conway explained when the trainees had formed an untidy crescent around and behind him. “They belong to an immensely strong species and, as adults, are extremely resistant to physical injury and disease. So much so that the concept of curative medical treatment has been foreign to them. No medical profession exists on Hudlar, and the high infant mortality rate of the recent past was simply accepted. Their young fall prey to a large number of indigenous pathogens from the moment they are born, and those which do not quickly develop or inherit resistance to them perish. The hospital is trying to develop a wide-spectrum immunization procedure to be carried out during the prenatal stage, but so far with limited success.”

He indicated a young Hudlar standing just below them, looking up. “You will already have deduced from this individual’s general stance and musculature that the species evolved on a world with very heavy gravity and proportionately high atmospheric pressure, both of which have been reproduced in the ward. You will also observe no beds or rest furniture; patients who can move simply roam about at will. This is because their body tegument is so tough that padded rest areas are unnecessary. Because of the difficulty other species have in telling Hudlars apart, patient ID and case history are impressed magnetically on the metal band attached to the left forelimb. The Hudlars’ six limbs can serve as either manipulatory or locomotor appendages.

“While gravity and atmospheric pressure have been duplicated here,” Conway went on, “the exact constituents of their atmosphere have not been reproduced. Their home world’s air is a thick, semi-liquid soup laden with tiny, airborne food particles which are absorbed and excreted by specialized areas of the skin. We find it more convenient to spray them periodically with a nutrient paint, as two of the armored medical attendants are doing now.

“With the facts now in your possession,” he said, turning to regard them, “would anyone like to classify this life-form?”

For a moment there was no verbal response. The Orligian DBDGs moved restively, but the expressions on their humanoid features were concealed by facial hair. The silvery fur of the cater
pillarlike Kelgian DBLFs was in constant motion, but the emotions which the movements expressed were readable only by a fellow member of the species or by a being carrying a Kelgian tape in its mind. As for the elephantine Tralthan FGLIs and the diminutive Dewatti EGCLs, their features were too decentralized to be visible in their entirety, while the hard, angular mandibles and deeply recessed eyes of the Melfan ELNTs were completely expressionless.

One of the four Melfan trainees first broke the silence. Its translator hummed briefly, “They belong to physiological classification FROB.”

It was difficult to tell Melfans apart at the best of times, since all adult ELNTs possessed similar body mass and the only visible differences were the subtle variations in marking on the upper carapace. To make identification even more difficult, two of the four Melfan trainees seemed to be identical twins. One of these had spoken.

“Correct,” Conway said approvingly. “Your name, Doctor?”

“Danalta, Senior Physician.”

Polite, too
, Conway thought. “Very well, Danalta. But you were slow in making the identification even though your colleagues were even slower. All of you must learn to quickly and accurately classify—”

“With respect, Senior Physician,” the Melfan broke in, “I did not wish to offer gratuitous display of my medical knowledge, woefully limited as it is at present, until my colleagues had a chance to respond. I have studied all that was available to me regarding your physiological classification system. But I come from a backward world where the level of technology is low and intercultural communication has been limited, particularly where medical data on this hospital was concerned.

“Besides,” it concluded, “the Hudlar life-form is distinctive, unique, and could only be FROB.”

Conway would not have described Melf as a backward world and neither would any other member of the Galactic Federation, so this Danalta must have come from one of the colonies recently seeded by Melf. To qualify for Sector General with a background like that required determination as well as professional competence. It did not matter that the Melfan was turning out to be an odd
combination of polite, self-effacing smart aleck—the operative word was “smart,” and the best assistants an overworked Senior could have were those who strived to render their superiors redundant. He decided that he would keep a close watch on Danalta’s progress, for purely selfish reasons.

“Since it is possible,” Conway said dryly, “that a number of your colleagues are less well-informed on this subject than you, I shall outline very briefly the system of life-form identification which we use here. Your various specialist tutors will take you through it in more detail.”

He looked for Danalta, but the trainees had changed their positions and Conway could no longer tell which of the two identical Melfans was which. He went on, “Unless you have already been attached to a multienvironment hospital, you will normally have encountered off-world patients one species at a time, probably on a short-term basis as the result of a ship accident or some emergency, and you would refer to them by their planets of origin. But here—where rapid and accurate identification of incoming patients is vital because all too often they are in no condition to furnish physiological data themselves—we have evolved a four-letter physiological classification system. It works like this.

“The first letter denotes the level of physical evolution reached by the species when it acquired intelligence,” he continued. “The second indicates the type and distribution of limbs, sense organs, and body orifices, and the remaining two letters refer to the combination of metabolism and food and air requirements associated with the home planet’s gravity and atmospheric pressure, which in turn gives an indication of the physical mass and protective tegument possessed by the being.”

Conway smiled, although he knew that a long time would elapse before any of the trainees would be able to recognize that peculiarly Earth-human facial grimace for what it was. “Usually I have to remind some of our extraterrestrial candidates at this point that the initial letter of their classification should not be allowed to give them feelings of inferiority, because the degree of physical evolution is controlled by environmental factors and bears little relation to the level of intelligence…”

Species with the prefix A, B, or C, he went on to explain, were
water-breathers. On most worlds life had originated in the sea, and these beings had developed intelligence without having to leave it. D through F were warm-blooded oxygen-breathers, into which group most of the intelligent races of the Federation fell, and the G and K types were also oxygen breathing, but insectile. The Ls and Ms were light-gravity, winged beings.

Chlorine-breathing life-forms were contained in the O and P groups, and after these came the more exotic, the more highly evolved physically and the downright weird types. Into these categories fell the radiation-eaters, the cold-blooded or crystalline beings, and entities capable of modifying their physical structures at will. However, those beings possessing extrasensory powers sufficiently well developed to make ambulatory or manipulatory appendages unnecessary were given the prefix V regardless of their size or shape.

“There are anomalies in the system,” Conway went on, “and these must be blamed on a lack of imagination and foresight by the originators. The AACP life-form, for instance, has a vegetable metabolism. Normally the A prefix denotes a water-breather, there being nothing lower on the evolutionary scale than the piscatorial life-forms, but the AACPs are intelligent vegetables and plant-life came before the fish.”

Conway pointed suddenly at a nurse who was spraying nutrient onto a young Hudlar at the other end of the ward, then turned toward Danalta. “Perhaps you would like to classify that life-form, Doctor.”

“I am not Danalta,” the Melfan Conway was addressing protested. Even though the process of translation tended to filter the emotional overtones from messages, the ELNT sounded displeased.

“My apologies,” Conway said, looking around for its twin, in vain. He decided that Danalta, for reasons known only to itself, had hidden behind the group of Tralthan trainees. Before he could redirect the question, one of the Tralthans answered it.

“The being you indicate is encased in a heavy-duty protective suit,” the big FGLI said, this deep modulated rumblings of its native speech reinforcing the ponderous and pedantic style of the translated words. “The only part of the being visible to me is the small area behind the visor, and this is indistinct because of reflections
from the ward lighting. Since the protective suit is self-propelled, there is no evidence available as to the number and type of the locomotor appendages. But the overall size and shape of the suit together with the positioning of the four mechanical manipulators spaced around the base of the conical head section—assuming that for ergonomic reasons these mechanical extensions approximate the positions of the underlying natural limbs—leads me to state with a fair degree of certainty that the entity in question is a Kelgian of physiological classification DBLF. Glimpses of a gray, furry tegument and what appears to be one of the Kelgian visual sensors revealed, however unclearly, through the small area of the visor, supports this identification.”

“Very
good
, Doctor!” But before Conway could ask the Tralthan its name, the entrance lock of the ward swung open and a large, spherical vehicle mounted on caterpillar treads rolled in. The sphere was encircled equatorially by a variety of remote handling and sensory devices, and prominently displayed on the forward upper surface was the insignia of a Diagnostician. Instead, Conway pointed to the vehicle and said, “Can you classify that one?”

This time one of the Kelgians spoke first.

“Only by inference and deduction, Senior Physician,” it said as slow, regular waves rippled along its fur from nose to tail. “Plainly the vehicle is a self-powered pressure vessel which, judging by the external bracing evident on the sphere, is designed to protect the ward patients and medical staff as well as the occupant. The walking limbs, if there are any, are concealed by the pressure envelope, and I would say that the number of external handling and sensory devices is so large that it is probable the being has only a small number of natural manipulators and sensors, and operates the external devices as required. The walls of the pressure vessel are of unknown thickness, so that there is no accurate data available to me regarding the size and physical configuration of the occupant.”

The Kelgian paused for a moment and sat back on its rearmost legs, looking like a fat, furry question mark. Silvery ripples continued to move slowly along its back and flanks, while the fur of its three fellow DBLFs twitched and tufted and flattened randomly as if there were a strong wind blowing in the observation gallery.

An air of restlessness, of low-key agitation, seemed to pervade
the other members of the group. The Tralthans were each raising and lowering their stumpy, elephantine feet in turn. The continuous clicking and scraping sound was the Melfans tapping their crablike legs against the floor, while the teeth of the Orligians showed whitely in their dark, furry faces. Conway hoped they were smiling.

“I am aware of two life-forms which use a pressure vessel of this kind,” the Kelgian went on. “They are utterly dissimilar in environmental requirements and physiology, and both would be considered by the more common oxygen- and chlorine-breathing species to be among the exotic categories. One is a frigid-blooded methane-breather who is most comfortable in an environment at a few degrees above absolute zero, and who evolved on the perpetually dark worlds which have been detached from their original solar systems and drift through the interstellar spaces.

“Physically they are quite small,” the Kelgian continued, “averaging one-third of the body mass of a being like myself. But during contact with other species, the highly refrigerated life-support and sensory translation systems which they are forced to wear are large and complex and require frequent power recharge…”

Three of them!
Conway thought. He looked around for the Tralthan who had correctly tagged the suited DBLF, and Danalta, the Melfan trainee who had identified the FROB, to observe their reactions to the very knowledgeable Kelgian—but the group was milling about so much that he could not tell who was who. Certainly he had sensed something unusual about this bunch shortly after taking charge of them at the hospital’s staff entry port.