Sector General Omnibus 2 - Alien Emergencies (67 page)

The control of bleeding, both during a procedure and postoperatively, was difficult. And the internal decompression which was an unavoidable side effect of an operation could cause deformation and serious damage to major organs adjacent to the operative field. As a result the Hudlar information in his mind together with Conway’s own experience of FROB surgery suggested caution, while the other mass of extraterrestrial experience advocated operating with
out delay. But a double amputation on a geriatric and dangerously weakened patient… Angrily he shook his head and turned away.

The Kelgian nurse was watching him closely. It said, “Does that movement of the cranium indicate a yes or a no answer to my question, Doctor?”

“It means that I haven’t yet made up my mind,” Conway said as he turned and escaped thankfully into the infants’ ward.

While it was true that for the greater proportion of their lifetimes the Hudlars were impervious to disease and all but the most severe injuries—which was the primary reason why medicine had been an unknown science on their world—this did not hold during the first and final few years of life. His recent harrowing experience had shown all too clearly the ills to which aged Hudlars were prone, and now he was seeing the other and much less distressing end of the clinical spectrum.

Infant FROBs seemed to catch every Hudlarian pathogen present in their atmospheric soup until, if they were able to survive the first few encounters with them, their bodies built up the natural resistance which lasted for the greater part of their very long lives. Fortunately, the majority of the diseases were spectacular in their symptomology but individually nonfatal. Federation medical science had been able to provide cures for several of them and was working on the others. Unfortunately, while no single disease could be considered fatal in itself, all were potentially lethal because the ailments which the infants contracted were cumulatively weakening, and it was the order in which they were contracted and the number of diseases present at a given time which determined the lethality. A complete solution was not possible until specifics against all of the diseases were produced.

As Conway entered and looked around the furiously busy ward, the Hudlar material in his mind suggested that mass immunization was not the proper solution. There was a strong feeling that protecting the FROB children in that way would ultimately lead to a weakening of the species as a whole. But the Hudlar who had donated his tape had not been a member of the medical profession, there being no such profession on Hudlar, and had instead been a strange combination of philosopher, psychiatrist, and teacher. Even so, the feeling bothered Conway until a six-legged, half-ton infant
came charging down on him shouting that it wanted to play, and drove everything from his mind but the need to take urgent evasive action.

He set his gravity controls to one-quarter G and jumped straight upward to the rail of the observation catwalk, barely two seconds before the young Hudlar hit the wall with a crash which must have severely tested both the ward’s soundproofing and its structure. From his elevated viewpoint Conway could see that there were fewer than twenty patients in the ward, and in spite of the four Gs at floor level, they were all moving so fast that there seemed to be at least three times that number. When they occasionally stopped to change direction, he could see that the majority of them were displaying a variety of horrifying skin conditions.

An adult Hudlar with nutrient tanks strapped to its back finished spraying an infant it had cornered and immobilized at the far end of the ward, then turned and moved ponderously toward him.

It bore the insignia of a nurse-in-training, and it was, on this duty at least, little more than a baby-minder. But Conway knew that it was one of three FROBs undergoing medical training at Sector General, and the first members of that species chosen to introduce to their world the concepts of preventive and curative medicine. It was in female mode a remarkably handsome specimen and, unlike the Kelgian nurse in the geriatrics section, very polite and respectful.

“May I help you, Doctor?” it said, looking up at him. A sudden rush of memories from his alter ego’s life on Hudlar invaded his mind so that he could not speak.

“Patient Seven, young Metiglesh, the one who wanted to play with you,” it went on, “is responding well to the new treatment devised by Diagnostician Thornnastor. I can quite easily immobilize it for you if you wish to make a scanner examination.”

It would be easy, Conway thought wryly, for a Hudlar nurse. That was the reason why an FROB trainee was in charge there—it knew exactly how much force to use on the little terrors, while equally or higher-qualified nurses of other species would be afraid to use the amount of force required in case they might injure the patients.

Young Hudlars were incredibly tough, and some of the adults were unbelievably beautiful.

“I’m just passing through, Nurse,” he managed to say finally.
“You seem to have everything under control here.”

As Conway stared down at the being, his own knowledge of the FROB classification was being augmented by data on what it actually felt like to be a Hudlar in the male mode, as the donor had been at the time of making its tape, and he had memories only slightly less intense of being a female. He could remember the arrival of a recent offspring and how the birth process had drastically altered the hormone balance so that he became a male again. On Hudlar they were uniquely fortunate in that both life-mates were enabled to have their children in turn.

“Many life-forms carrying the Hudlar physiology tape visit here from the geriatric section,” the nurse went on, unaware of the mental havoc it was causing him. His Hudlar alter ego was bringing up data, memories, experiences, wish-fulfillment fantasies of courtship, love-play, and of gargantuan couplings which made his Earth-human mind recoil in horror. But it was not Conway’s mind that had control just then.

He tried desperately to regain possession, to fight against the overwhelming waves of raw instinct which were making it impossible for him to think. He tried to look only at his thinly gloved, non-Hudlar digits as they gripped the guardrail while the nurse went on. “It is distressing for a Hudlar, or for an entity bearing the Hudlar tape, to visit the geriatric section. I myself would not enter unless requested to do so, and I have the greatest respect and admiration for those of you who do so purely out of a sense of professional duty. Coming in here, it is said, frequently helps the overly distressed mind to think of something more pleasant.

“You are, of course, at liberty to remain as long as you deem necessary, Doctor. For whatever reason,” it added sympathetically. “And if there is anything I can do to help you, you have only to ask.”

His Hudlar component was doing its equivalent of baying at the moon. Conway croaked something which his translator was probably unable to handle and began moving along the catwalk toward the exit at a near run.

For Heaven’s sake get control of yourself
, he raged silently at himself.
It’s six times bigger than you are!…

The Menelden system was no stranger to catastrophe. It had been discovered some sixty years earlier by a Monitor Corps scoutship whose Captain had exercised the traditional right to name it because there were no indications that the system harbored indigenous intelligent life with its own name for the world. If such life had been present in the distant past, then all traces of it had been obliterated when a large, planet-size chunk of metal ore entered the system, colliding with the largest outer planet and causing havoc and ultimately further collision with the others, all in tight orbits around their primary.

When the system eventually restabilized itself, Menelde was an aging yellow sun tightly surrounded by a rapidly spinning cloud of asteroids, a large proportion of which were solid metal. Immediately following its discovery, life came to the Menelden system in the shape of mining and metal processing complexes and their operating crews from all over the Federation, and in that cosmic illustration of the Brownian movement of gases, accidents occurred.

The details of one did not become known until many weeks later, nor was the final responsibility for it ever determined.

An enormous multispecies accommodation module for housing mining and metal-processing workers was being moved by tugs from an exhausted area to a fresh one, and was ponderously following a path between the slowly moving or relatively motionless asteroids and the other mining traffic which was engaged in similar delicate exercises in three-dimensional navigation.

One of the vessels, whose course would take it safely but uncomfortably close to the accommodation module and its tugs, was a carrier fully loaded with finished metal girders and sheets. Between the thrusters aft and the tiny control module forward the structure of the carrier was completely open to facilitate the loading and unloading of its cargo. This meant that the clearly visible mass of metal held, apparently none too securely, to its lashing points was exerting undue psychological pressure on the senior tug Captain, who told the carrier Captain to sheer off.

The carrier Captain demurred, insisting that they would pass in perfect safety, while his ship and the vast accommodation module crept ponderously toward each other. The senior tug Captain, who was charged with the safety of a structure incapable of independent maneuver and containing more than one thousand people, as opposed to the carrier with its three-man crew, had the last word.

Very slowly, because of the tremendous weight and inertia of its cargo, the carrier began to swing broadside-on to the module, intending to use its main thrusters to drive it clear long before their paths could intersect. The two vessels were closing, but slowly. There was plenty of time.

It was at that point that the accommodation module’s supervisor, although not really worried, decided that it would be a very good time to hold an emergency drill.

The urgent flashing of hazard lights and the braying of alarm sirens, heard in the background while he was in communication with the module, must have had an unsettling effect on the senior tug Captain. He decided that the carrier was turning too slowly and despatched two of his tugs to assist the process with their pressor beams. In spite of the caustic reassurances from the carrier Captain that there was ample time for the maneuver and that everything was under control, the carrier was quickly pushed broadside-on to the approaching module—the position from which a brief burn on its thrusters would take it clear within a few seconds.

The thrusters did not fire.

Whether the failure was due to the effect of the hastily focused pressor beams on the carrier’s uncovered control linkages which ran between the crew pod and the thrusters astern—they may well have been warped into immobility—or Fate had decreed that the system
would malfunction at precisely that moment would never be known. But there were still a few minutes remaining before the collision would occur.

Ignoring the orderly confusion on board the module, where the supervisor was trying desperately to make his people realize that the practice emergency drill had suddenly become a real one, the carrier used its attitude control jets at maximum overload in an attempt to return the vessel to its original and safe heading. But the tremendous weight of a ship fully laden with a cargo of dense metal was too much for them, and slowly, almost gently, the stern of the carrier made contact with the forward section of the accommodation module.

The carrier, whose structure had been designed to withstand loadings only in the vertical plane, broke up when subjected to the sudden, lateral shock. Gigantic lengths of metal tore free from their lashing points, the metal retaining bands snapping like so much thread, and the long, open racks which held the sheet metal disintegrated with the collapse of the ship’s main structure, sending their contents spinning toward the accommodation module’s side like a slow-moving flight of throwing-knives. And mixed with the spinning metal plates and beams and pieces of the carrier’s structure was the radioactive material of its power pile.

Many of the plates struck the module edge-on, inflicting long, deep incisions several hundred meters long in the hull before bouncing away again. The metal beams smashed against the already weakened hull, opening dozens of compartments to space, or drove deep into the module’s interior like enormous javelins. The collision abruptly checked the structure’s forward motion and left it a slowly spinning half-wreck, which presented in turn a flank which was unmarked and another which showed a scene of utter devastation.

One of the tugs took off after the expanding cloud of metal which had been the carrier and its cargo, to chart its course for later retrieval and to search for possible survivors among its crew. The remaining tugs checked the spin on the accommodation module, then gave what help they could until the emergency teams from nearby mining installations, and ultimately
Rhabwar
, arrived.

Except for a few Hudlars who were not inconvenienced by vacuum conditions, and a number of Tralthans who could also survive
airlessness for short periods by going into hibernation mode and sealing all their body orifices, nobody along the stricken side of the module had survived. Even the immensely strong and tough-skinned Hudlars and Tralthans could not live in zero pressure when their bodies had been traumatically opened to space, and massive explosive decompression was not a condition which could be cured, even in Sector General.

The Hudlar and Tralthan quarters had suffered worst in the collision. Elsewhere the structure had retained its air even though the emergency drill condition meant that the occupants were in spacesuits anyway, so a pressure drop would not have been a problem. But in these areas it was the sudden deceleration and spin following the collision which had caused the casualties—hundreds of them which, because of the protection given by the suits, were serious rather than critical. When the module’s artificial gravity was restored, the majority of these were treated by the Menelden complex’s same-species medics and held in makeshift wards to await transfer to their home planets for further treatment or recuperation.

Only the really serious cases were sent to Sector General.

News of the Menelden accident had reached the hospital just in time to allow Conway to avoid having to face another serious problem, although regarding a major accident as a handy excuse for postponing a particularly worrying meeting was, he thought, neither admirable nor unselfish.

His Educator tapes were becoming so well established that it was difficult to tell when a set of feelings and reactions were his own or those of one or all of the Others. So much so that the next meeting with Murchison, when they would be together in their quarters in circumstances which would inevitably lead to physical intimacy, was something he had been dreading with increasing intensity as their next off-duty period drew closer. He just did not know how he would react to her, how much if any control he would have of the situation, and, most important of all, how she would react to his reactions.

Then suddenly
Rhabwar
was despatched to the Menelden system to coordinate the rescue operation and bring back the more serious casualties, and Murchison, a key member of its medical team, was on board.

Conway was greatly relieved, at first. But as the ship’s former medical team leader he was aware of the danger she was in, from the kind of accident which could so easily occur during a large-scale rescue mission, and he began to worry. Instead of being glad that he would not have to see her for a day or so, he found himself heading for the casualty reception lock just before the ambulance ship was due to dock after its first return trip.

He spotted Naydrad and Danalta standing by the transfer lock and keeping well clear of the casualty reception team, who needed no help at all in doing their job.

“Where is Pathologist Murchison?” Conway asked as a litter containing what looked like a Tralthan multiple traumatic amputation went past. The FGLI tape material in his mind was pushing to the fore, urgently suggesting methods of treatment for this patient. Conway shook his head in an instinctive attempt to clear it, and said more firmly, “I want to see Murchison.”

Beside the uncharacteristically silent Naydrad, Danalta began to assume the bodily contours of an Earth-human female similar in shape and size to that of the pathologist. Then, sensing Conway’s disapproval, it slumped back into shapelessness.

“Is she on board?” Conway asked sharply.

The nurse’s fur was rippling and pulling itself into irregular patterns of tufting in a manner which, to his Kelgian alter ego, indicated an extreme reluctance to answer combined with the expectation of unpleasantness.

“I have a Kelgian tape,” he said quietly, pointing at the other’s telltale fur. “What’s bothering you, Nurse?”

“Pathologist Murchison chose to remain at the disaster site,” Naydrad replied finally, “to assist Doctor Prilicla with the triage.”

“The
triage
!” Conway burst out. “Prilicla shouldn’t be subjecting itself to… Dammit, I’d better go out there and help. There are more than enough doctors here to treat the casualties and if… You have an objection?”

Naydrad’s fur was tufting and undulating in a new and more urgent sequence.

“Doctor Prilicla is the leader of the medical team,” the Kelgian said. “Its proper place is at the disaster site, coordinating the rescue operation and disposition of casualties, regardless of the physical
or mental trauma which might result. The presence of a former team leader could be considered as an implied criticism of its professional handling of the situation, which up until now has been exemplary.”

Watching the movements of that expressive Kelgian fur, Conway was not really surprised at the strength of feeling that was being shown toward a superior who had been in the job for only a few days. By the nature of things, superiors were respected, sometimes feared, and usually obeyed with reluctance by their subordinates. But Prilicla had proved that it was possible to lead and instill absolute loyalty by making subordinates obey through another kind of fear, that of hurting the boss’s feelings.

When Conway did not reply, Naydrad went on. “Your offer of assistance was foreseen, which is the reason why Pathologist Murchison remained to help Prilicla. The Cinrusskin’s empathic faculty does not, as you well know, require that it work in close proximity to the injured, so it can remain in comparative safety while Murchison moves among the casualties as you would have done if you’d gone out there.”

“Doctor,” Danalta said, breaking its long silence, “Pathologist Murchison is in turn being assisted by several large, heavily muscled entities of its own and other species who are trained in heavy rescue techniques. These entities are charged with the responsibility for removing casualties from the wreckage at the Pathologist’s direction, and for seeing that the same wreckage does not endanger Murchison.

“I mention this, Doctor,” Danalta added, “so as to reassure you regarding the safety of your life-mate.”

The polite and respectful tone of Danalta sounded almost obsequious after that of the more blunt-spoken Naydrad. But the TOBS, too, had developed a measure of empathy as a necessary adjunct to their species’ faculty for defensive and offensive protective mimicry, and respectfulness made a nice change whether it was real or simulated.

“Thank you, Danalta. That is considerate of you,” Conway said, but then turned to Naydrad. “But Prilicla, on triage!…”

The thought of it was enough to make Conway, and anyone else who knew the little empath, cringe.

The range and sensitivity of the Cinrusskin’s empathic faculty
had been invaluable when the empath had been a member of
Rhabwar
’s medical team, and now that Prilicla was heading that team the same circumstances would apply. The empath could feel among the casualties of a wrecked ship, especially those who were physically motionless, grievously injured and apparently lifeless, and state with absolute accuracy which protective suits held cadavers and which still-living survivors. It did so by attuning itself to the residual emotional radiation of the casualty’s often deeply unconscious brain, and by feeling what the survivor’s unconscious mind felt and analyzing the results, it could decide whether there was any hope of reviving the spark of life which remained. Space accidents had to be dealt with quickly if there was to be anyone left alive to rescue, and on countless occasions Prilicla’s empathic faculty had saved vital time and a great many lives.

A high price had to be paid for this ability, because Prilicla had in many cases to suffer with each of the casualties, for a short or a lengthy period, before such diagnoses or assessments could be made. But triaging the Menelden accident would mean encountering emotional distress of a whole new order of magnitude, so far as Prilicla was concerned. Fortunately, Murchison’s feelings toward the little empath could only be described as fanatically maternal, and she would ensure that the storm of emotional radiation—the pain and panic and grief of the injured and their bereaved friends—which raged within that devastated accommodation module was experienced by the empath at the longest possible range, and for the shortest possible duration.