The COMPLEAT Collected SFF Works, page 131
IT WAS then that Gregory felt a series of tiny shocks being transmitted through the arm-rests of his chair. Almost querulously he asked, "Caulfield, what's happening now?"
"I'm moving the tongs ... further up ... to get more reach," the prisoner said between pauses for breath. "As things are I can't ... get into the pile."
Gregory began to sweat suddenly, because the other was quite definitely lying. Those tongs could not be moved as he had said, they weren't designed that way. But why was he lying? What was he doing down there?
A little earlier Gregory would have thought that he knew the answers to those questions. That was why he had insisted on radiation card checks and had stressed to the prisoner the undesirability of doing anything stupid. Because a man who had been responsible for creating a deadly menace to navigation which had already cost many lives and wrecked two ships might have feelings of guilt about the matter. He might feel that some atonement was due, and that taking chances with hard radiation might help to square accounts. For the prisoner was responsible all right, completely and damnably responsible.
For eleven years, Gregory now knew, he had been hiding his true identity. All that time the penalties for the crime he had committed had grown in severity and his fear of discovery must have mounted in proportion. And he had continued to hide his identity right up to the last moment, by refusing TR and giving false data on the second component of the swarm so that they would pass through it without finding the body. But the eleven years dead body had been found, and with it the dog-tag which identified it as James Andrew Caulfield.
Most definitely the prisoner must be feeling afraid and guilty and altogether pretty horrible. Because he wasn't Sunflower's ex-Engineer, he was her ex-Captain, Warren.
Quickly Gregory left the control-room, signalling for Nolan to be quiet. Still without speaking he tapped Hartman's helmet and motioned for him to follow. Together they descended to the well. They found it packed loosely with wreckage—which explained the vibrations Gregory had felt and which the prisoner had ascribed to moving the tongs—so that while they couldn't pass along it they could see its entire length quite clearly. The prisoner was not to be seen, which meant he had to be in the reactor room.
"He's jammed that stuff into the well by hand," Gregory said urgently. "We can move it the same way. Hurry, we're running out of time!"
"Stay away from me!" Caulfield-Warren said sharply. It was followed by the voice of Nolan asking plaintively, "What are you all talking about? What's happening ...?"
But there was no time to explain. Gregory seized a piece of loose plating and began working it free, his desperation sending a flood of mad, inconsequential thoughts roaring through his mind. There was that genii in the Arabian Nights story, the one locked up in a bottle, who promised himself during his first thousand years of captivity that he would reward his deliverer with all the riches of the world, and during the next thousand years that he would kill him ...
WARREN had been a Captain well-liked by his men, and headed for trial, disgrace and possibly prison. Then his face and hands had been burned in a fuel line explosion, obliterating features and fingerprints alike, and the dying ship's Engineer had jumped into space. So Warren had taken Caulfield's identity and the crew had gone along with it. And in the Earth hospital Mrs. Warren had discovered that she wasn't a widow after all and had re-married her supposedly dead husband.
And Gregory had been thinking in terms of a murky private life!
"Sir!" Nolan's voice burst on them. "He's over-riding my controls! Withdrawing those four working damper rods by manual! What ....!"
"I'm trying out something," the prisoner said impatiently, "Shut up and let me think."
"But with all the dampers out again ... meltdown ... she could blow in ten minutes ...!" Nolan protested, nearly incoherent. "Run them in again ..."
"Caulfield, stop that!" Gregory called sharply, the name slipping out by force of habit. "Do as he says. And come out of there at once!"
There was no reply.
The second thousand years ...
Captain Warren had been an intelligent, sensitive, professionally competent man. During those years of hiding he must have constantly watched for news of shipping losses caused by the swarm he had created. That would have made him feel bad, and his promise to his wife to stay out of space would have hurt him, too. And the steadily increasing feeling against spacemen with dirty habits—especially Captains with dirty habits—which amounted almost to blind, killing hatred. Fear and frustration and guilt, mounting and growing for eleven long years.
Too much pressure could break a mind as well as bend it, Gregory knew, and guilty fear could change to a sudden blind, unreasoning hatred of its persecutors. The finding of the real Caulfield's body must have been the factor which knocked Warren over the hump, and the ex-Captain's persecutors were the crew of Descartes ...
GREGORY pulled and tore at the wreckage, frantically unaware of the danger he ran of a suit puncture. There was a madman in the reactor room. Their lives depended on getting him out and undoing the damage he might have done, quick.
Seven minutes later the prisoner appeared at the other end of the well. He said, "It's all right, gentlemen, I'll come quietly ..."
"The pile's been deactivated, sir," Nolan's voice broke in exultantly. "We're safe!"
And so they were, thought Gregory soberly, but not all of them. The prisoner was still twenty feet from Hartman and himself, and Gregory's radiation counter was already having hysterics.
Working at top speed they set up a temporary lock outside one of the undamaged compartments and peeled him out of his suit; he had taken enough radiation already without re-radiation from his 'hot' suit adding to it. In the process they discovered that he must have been entering the pile room from the very start, because the 'radiation card' he wore was nothing but a piece of red cardboard cut from the back of a notebook ...
"So that was your lucky charm," Gregory muttered, and left shortly afterwards to find out if Nolan had jury-rigged a transmitter yet. He had, and Gregory's instructions to Keatly were urgent and brief.
Vixen would rendezvous with them as soon as possible, take their prisoner aboard and proceed to the hospital on Titan at maximum speed and without regard to fuel economy considerations. Descartes' reactor was badly damaged but there was no immediate danger, and Vixen could leave them some of her remote-handling equipment which would aid in the repairs. They would be able to make it home under their own power, but slowly, which was why Gregory was transferring the prisoner to Vixen.
Then he went to see Warren again.
"For a while back there I thought you were intending to blow us all up," Gregory began awkwardly as he opened his faceplate. "I mean, pulling out all the damper rods ..."
"I needed room to clear the blockage inside," said the prisoner shortly, and turned his face away.
There were words which Gregory wanted to say, words which were difficult for one of his character and background, and the other was not making it any easier for him. He tried again:
"The hospital on Titan is good—they specialise in this sort of thing, you know. You weren't in there for more than twenty minutes. Provided we get you to them quickly, and we will, you stand a very good chance. You'll see, in a few months time I'll be out to badger you into a TR session—"
"How very like you," said Warren tiredly. Physically there was no change in him yet, but that was because his injuries were in the blood-producing marrow of his bones and other non-obvious places. Already he must feel—psychosomatically as yet—the developing lassitude of advanced leukemia. Dully, he went on, "I honestly believe the data comes first with you, and the kudos you'll get for tracking down the supposedly dead Captain of Sunflower—"
"Listen, Caulfield!" Gregory began angrily, then stopped.
He was thinking that the subconscious mind was a funny thing. When the real Caulfield's body had been taken aboard he had continued to call the prisoner Caulfield, and later when there had been time to tell Nolan and Hartman about it he had continued to hold off—when ordinarily he should have been bursting to tell them of his discovery. He also thought about the circumstances of the Sunflower accident and of how Warren must have suffered because of it in the eleven years which followed. Finally he remembered the business with Descartes' reactor and thought that his own subconscious was a bit of a softie, and decided that actions always did speak louder than words.
Quickly he fastened the ID taken from Caulfield's body around the prisoner's neck. "Good luck, Mr. Caulfield," he said stiffly, then left.
That dog-tag had been the proof that the prisoner was not Caulfield but Warren. If Gregory had held onto it he might have weakened sometime at the thought of the glory which would accrue from turning in a Captain, and decided to tell all. So the only thing to do had been to give it to the man calling himself Caulfield. Either that or throw it away.
Gregory might be guilty of turning a blind eye and of committing various other sins of omission, but throwing things away into space was one of the things which were just not done.
The End
Out-Patient
New Worlds – June 1960
Dr. Conway, now promoted to the post of a Senior Physician on Sector Twelve General Hospital out in space, calls in his old friend Dr. Prilicla (whom we met in "Trouble With Emily" in No. 77) to help solve the problem of a dying alien who didn't want to be cured.
Chapter One
THE MONITOR Corps cruiser Sheldon flicked into normal space some five hundred miles from Sector Twelve General Hospital, the wreck which was its reason for coming held gently against the hull within the field of its hyperdrive generators. At this distance the vast, brilliantly lit structure which floated in interstellar space at the galactic rim was only a dim blur of light, but that was because the Monitor Captain had had a close decision to make. Buried somewhere inside the wreck which he had brought in was a survivor urgently in need of medical attention. But like any good policeman his actions were constrained by possible effects on innocent bystanders—in this case the Staff and patients of the Galaxy's largest multi-environment hospital.
Hurriedly contacting Reception he explained the situation, and received their reassurances that the matter would be taken care of at once. Now that the welfare of the survivor was in competent hands, the Captain decided that he could return with a clear conscience to his examination of the wreck, the wreck which just might blow up in his face at any moment.
IN THE office of the hospital's Chief Psychologist, Dr. Conway sat uneasily on a very easy chair and watched the square, craggy features of O'Mara across an expanse of cluttered desk. Conway had been in Major O'Mara's office many times, for reassignment or to take Educator tapes mostly, but a peremptory summons over the PA could mean anything ...
"Relax, Doctor," O'Mara said suddenly, obviously reading his thoughts. "If you were here for a carpeting I'd have given you a harder chair. On the contrary, I've been instructed to administer a hefty pat on the back. You've been up-graded, Doctor. Congratulations. You are now, Heaven help us all, a Senior Physician."
Before Conway could react to the news, the psychologist held up a large, square hand.
"In my own opinion a ghastly mistake has been made," he went on. "But seemingly your success with that dissolving SRTT and your part in the levitating dinosaur business has impressed the people upstairs—they think it was due to ability instead of sheer luck.
"As for me," he ended, grinning," I wouldn't trust you with my appendix."
"You're too kind, sir," said Conway drily.
O'Mara smiled again. "What do you expect, praise or something? My job is to shrink heads, not swell 'em—you forget that. And now I suppose I'll have to give you a minute to adjust to the thought of your new glory ..."
Conway was not slow in appreciating what this advance in status was going to mean to him. It pleased him, definitely—he had expected to do another two years before making Senior Physician. But he was a little frightened, too.
Henceforth he would wear an arm-band trimmed with red, have the right-of-way in corridors and dining halls over everyone other than fellow Seniors and Diagnosticians, and all the equipment or assistance he might need would be his for the asking. He would bear full responsibility for any patient left in his charge, with no possibility of ducking it or passing the buck up. His personal freedom, on the other hand, would be more constrained. He would have to lecture nurses, train junior interns, and almost certainly take part in one of the long-term research programmes. These duties would necessitate him being in permanent possession of at least one physiology tape, more probably two.
That side of it, he knew, was not going to be pleasant.
NO SINGLE being could hope to hold in his brain all the physiological data necessary for the treatment of patients in a multi-environment hospital. Sector General comprised three hundred and eighty-four levels in which were accurately reproduced the environments of the sixty-eight different forms of intelligent life currently known to the Galactic Federation. There were high and low temperature life-forms, water-, chlorine- or oxygen-breathers, those who existed by the direct conversion of hard radiation, and practically every conceivable combination in between. The incredible mass of knowledge needed to take care of them had to be furnished by means of Educator tapes, which were simply the brain records of the great medical specialists of the various species concerned. If an Earth-human doctor had to treat a Kelgian patient, he took one of the DBLF physiology tapes until treatment was completed, after which it was erased.
Senior Physicians with permanent teaching duties, however, were called on to retain one or two of these tapes continuously. That, Conway had heard, was no fun at all. The only thing which could be said for it was that he would be better off than a Diagnostician.
They were the hospital's elite. A Diagnostician was one of the rare beings whose mind was considered stable enough to retain permanently six, seven or even ten Educator tapes simultaneously. To their data-crammed minds were given the job of original research in xenological medicine, and the diagnosis and treatment of new diseases in the hitherto unknown life-forms.
There was a well-known saying in the hospital, reputed to have originated with the Chief Psychologist himself, that anyone sane enough to want to be a Diagnostician was mad.
For it was not only physiological data which the Educator tapes imparted, but the complete memory and personality of the entity who had possessed that knowledge was impressed on their brains as well. In effect a Diagnostician subjected himself or itself voluntarily to the most drastic form of multiple schizophrenia ...
Suddenly O'Mara's voice broke in on his thoughts. "... And now that you feel three feet taller and are no doubt rarin' to go," the psychologist said in a business-like tone, "I have a job for you. A wreck has been brought in which contains a survivor, and apparently the usual procedures for extricating it cannot be used. Physiological classification unknown—we haven't been able to identify the ship so have no idea what it eats, breathes or looks like. I want you to go over there and sort things out, with a view to transferring the being here as quickly as possible for treatment.
"We're told that its movements inside the wreckage are growing weaker," he ended briskly, "so treat the matter as urgent."
"Yes, sir," said Conway, rising quickly. At the door he paused. Later he was to wonder at his temerity in saying what he did to the Chief Psychologist, and decided that promotion must have gone to his head. As a parting shot he said exhultantly, "I've got your lousy appendix. Kellerman took it out three years ago. He pickled it and put it up as a chess trophy. It's on my bookcase ..."
O'Mara's only reaction was to incline his head, as if receiving a compliment.
Outside in the corridor Conway went to the nearest communicator and called Transport. He said, "This is Dr. Conway. I have an urgent out-patient case and need a tender. Also a nurse able to use an analyser and with experience of fishing people out of wrecks, if possible. I'll be at Admission Lock Eight in a few minutes ..."
Conway made good time to the lock, all things considered. Once he had to flatten himself against a corridor wall as a Tralthan Diagnostician lumbered absently past on its six, elephantine feet, the diminutive and nearly mindless OTSB life-form which lived in symbiosis with it clinging to its leathery back. Conway didn't mind giving way to a Diagnostician, and as well the Tralthan FGLI-OTSB combination were the finest surgeons in the Galaxy. Generally, however, the people he encountered—nurses of the DBLF classification mostly, and a few of the low-gravity, bird-like LSVO's—made way for him. Which showed what a very efficient grape-vine the hospital possessed, because he was still wearing his old arm-band.
HIS SWELLING head was rapidly shrunk back to size by the entity waiting for him at Lock Eight. It was another of the furry, multi-pedal DBLF nurses, and it began hooting and whining immediately he came into sight. The DBLF's own language was unintelligible, but Conway's Translator pack converted the sounds which it made—as it did all the other grunts, chirps and gobblings heard in the hospital—into English.
"I have been awaiting you for over seven minutes," it said. "They told me this was an emergency, yet I find you ambling along as if you had all the time in the world ..."
