"White, James - Sector General 03 - Major Operation.PDB" - читать интересную книгу автора (White James)

Descartes came down about two miles off a peaceful stretch of coast in the center of an area marked with brightly colored floats, completely hidden in the cloud of steam produced by its tail flare. As the stern slipped below the surface, thrust was reduced and it came to rest gently on the sandy sea bottom. The great mass of boiled water produced by the flare drifted slowly away on the tide and the people began to roll up.
Literally, thought Conway.
Like great soggy doughnuts they rolled out of the green liquid fog and up to the base of the ship, then around and around it. When outcroppings of rock or a spiky sea growth got in the way they wobbled ponderously around it, sometimes laying themselves almost flat for an instant if forced to reverse direction, but always maintaining their constant rate of rotation and the maximum possible distance from each other.
Conway waited for a decent interval to allow Surreshun to descend the ramp and be properly welcomed by its non-friends. He was wearing a lightweight suit identical to the type used in the water breather's section of the hospital, both for comfort and to show as much as possible of his oddly shaped body to the natives. He stepped off the side of the ramp and fell slowly toward the sea bottom, listening to the translated voices of Surreshun, the VIPs and the louder members of the circling crowd.
When he touched bottom he thought he was being attacked at first. Every being in the vicinity of the ship tried to score the nearest possible miss on him and each one said something as it passed. The suit mike picked up the sound as a burbling grunt but the translator, because it was a simple message within the capabilities of the ship's computer, relayed it as "Welcome stranger."
There could be no doubt about their sincerity-on this cockeyed world the warmth of a welcome was directly proportional to the degree of strangeness. And they did not mind answering questions one little bit. From here on in, Conway was sure his job would be easy.
Almost the first thing he discovered was that they had no real need of his professional services.
It was a society whose members never stopped moving through and around "towns" which were simply facilities for manufacture, learning or research rather than large groupings of living quarters-on Meatball there were no living quarters. After a period of work on a mechanically rotated frame the doughnut slipped out of its retaining harness and rolled away to seek food, exercise, excitement or strange company somewhere across the sea bed.
There was no sleep, no physical contact other than for reproduction, no tall buildings, no burial places.
When one of the rollers stopped due to age, accident or a run-in with one of the predators or a poison-spined plant it was ignored. The generation of internal gases which took place shortly after death caused the body to float to the surface where the birds and fish disposed of it.
Conway spoke to several beings who were too old to roll and who were being kept alive by artificial feeding while they were rotated in their individual ferris wheels. He was never quite sure whether they were kept alive because of their value to the community or simply the subject of experimentation. He knew that he was seeing geriatrics being practiced, but other than a similar form of assistance with difficult births this was the only form of medicine he encountered.


Meanwhile the survey teams were mapping the planet and bringing in specimens by the boatload. Most of this material was sent to Sector General for processing and very soon detailed analysis suggestions for treatment began coming from Thornnastor. According to the Diagnostician-Pathologist Meatball had a medical problem of the utmost urgency. Conway and Edwards, who had had a preliminary look at the data and a number of low-level flights over the planetary surface, could not have agreed more.
"We can begin a preliminary diagnosis of the planet's troubles," said Conway angrily, "which are caused by the rollers being too damned free with the use of nuclear weapons! But we still badly need a local appreciation of the medical situation and that we are not getting. The big question is-"
"Is there a doctor in the house?" said Edwards, grinning. "And if so, where?"
"Exactly," said Conway. He did not laugh.
Outside the direct vision port the slow, turgid waves reflected the moonlight through a curtain of surface mist. The moon, which was approaching Roche's Limit and disintegration, would pose the inhabitants of Meatball yet another major problem-but not for another million years or so. At the moment it was a great jagged crescent illuminating the sea, the two hundred feet of Descartes which projected above the surface and the strangely peaceful shoreline.
Peaceful because it was dead and the predators refused to eat carrion.
"If I built a rotating framework for myself would O'Mara.. . ?" began Conway.
Edwards shook his head. "Surreshun's tape is more dangerous than you think-you were very lucky not to have lost all of your marbles, permanently. Besides, O'Mara has already thought of that idea and discarded it. Rotating yourself while under the influence of the tape, either in a swivel chair or in a gadget built by our machine shop, will fool your mind for only a few minutes, he says. But I'll ask him again, if you like?"
"I'll take your word for it," said Conway. Thoughtfully, he went on, "The question I keep asking myself is where on this planet is a doctor most likely to be found. Suppose the answer is where the greatest number of casualties occur, that is, along the coastlines-"
"Not necessarily," Edwards objected. "One doesn't normally find a doctor in a slaughterhouse. And don't forget that there is another intelligent race on this planet, the makers of those thought-controlled tools. Isn't it possible that your doctors belong to this race and your answer lies outside the roller culture entirely?"
"True," said Conway. "But here we have the willing cooperation of the natives and we should make all possible use of it. I shall ask permission, I think, to follow one of our far-traveling doughnuts next time it sets off on a trip. It may be like having a third party along on a honeymoon and I may be told politely where to go with my request, but it is obvious that there are no doctors in the towns or settled areas and it is only the travelers who have a chance of meeting one. Meanwhile," he ended, "let's try to find that other intelligent species."
Two days later Conway made contact with a non-relative of Surreshun who worked in the nearby power station, a nuclear reactor in which he felt almost at home because it had four solid walls and a roof. The roller was planning a trip along an unsettled stretch of coast at the end of its current work period which, Conway estimated, would last two or three days. The being's name was Camsaug and it did not mind Conway coming along provided he did not stay too close if certain circumstances arose. It described the circumstances in detail and without apparent shame.
Camsaug had heard about the "protectors," but only at second or third hand. They did not cut people and sew them up again as Conway's doctors did-it did not know what they did exactly, only that they often killed the people they were supposed to protect. They were stupid, slow moving beings who for some odd reason stayed close to the most active and dangerous stretches of shore.
"Not a slaughterhouse, Major, a battlefield," said Conway smugly. "You expect to find doctors on a battlefield. .
But they could not wait for Camsaug to start its vacation-Thornnastor's reports, the samples brought in by the scout ships and their own unaided eyes left no doubt about the urgency of the situation.
Meatball was a very sick planet. Surreshun's people had been much too free in the use of their newly discovered atomic energy. Their reason for this was that they were an expanding culture which could not afford to be hampered by the constant threat of the massive land beasts. By detonating a series of nuclear devices a few miles inland, taking good care that the wind would not blow the fallout onto their own living area, of course, they had killed large areas of the land beast. They were now able to establish bases on the dead land to further their scientific investigation in many fields.
They did not care that they spread blight and cancer over vast areas far inland-the great carpets were their natural enemy. Hundreds of their people were stopped and eaten by the land beasts every year and now they were simply getting their own back.
"Are these carpets alive and intelligent?" asked Conway angrily as their scout ship made a low-level run over an area which seemed to be afflicted with advanced gangrene. "Or are there small, intelligent organisms living in or under it? No matter which, Surreshun's people will have to stop chucking their filthy bombs about!"
"I agree," said Edwards. "But we'll have to tell them tactfully. We are their guests, you know."
"You shouldn't have to tell a man tactfully to stop killing himself!"
"You must have had unusually intelligent patients, Doctor," said Edwards dryly. He went on, "If the carpets are intelligent and not just stomachs with the attachments for keeping them filled they should have eyes, ears and some kind of nervous system capable of reacting to outside stimuli-"
"When Descartes landed first there was quite a reaction," said Harrison from the pilot's position. "The beastie tried to swallow us! We'll be passing close to the original landing site in a few minutes. Do you want to look at it?"
"Yes, please," said Conway. Thoughtfully, he added, "Opening a mouth could be an instinctive reaction from a hungry and unintelligent beast. But intelligence of some kind was present because those thought controlled tools came aboard."
They cleared the diseased area and began to chase their shadow across large patches of vivid green vegetation. Unlike the types which recycled air and wastes these were tiny plants which served no apparent purpose. The specimens which Conway had examined in Descartes' lab had had very long, thin roots and four wide leaves which rolled up tight to display their yellow undersides when they were shaded from the light. Their scout ship trailed a line of rolled-up leaves in the wake of its shadow as if the surface was a bright green oscilloscope screen and the ship's shadow a high-persistency spot.
Somewhere in the back of Conway's mind an idea began to take shape, but it dissolved again as they reached the original landing site and began to circle.
It was just a shallow crater with a lumpy bottom, Conway thought, and not at all like a mouth. Harrison asked if they wanted to land, in a tone which left no doubt that he expected the answer to be "No."
"Yes," said Conway.
They landed in the center of the crater. The doctors put on heavy duty suits as protection against the plants which, both on land and under sea, defended themselves by lashing out with poison-thorn branches or shooting lethal quills at anything that came too close. The ground gave no indication of opening up and swallowing them so they went outside, leaving Harrison ready to take off in a hurry should it decide to change its mind.
Nothing happened while they explored the crater and immediate surroundings, so they set up the portable drilling rig to take back some local samples of skin and underlying tissue. All scout ships carried these rigs and specimens had been taken from hundreds of areas all over the planet. But here the specimen was far from typical-they had to drill through nearly fifty feet of dry, fibrous skin before they came to the pink, spongy, underlying tissue. They transferred the rig to a position outside the crater and tried again. Here the skin was only twenty feet thick, the planetary average.
"This bothers me," said Conway suddenly. "There was no oral cavity, no evidence of operating musculature, no sign of any kind of opening. It can't be a mouth!"
"It wasn't an eye it opened," said Harrison on the suit frequency. "I was there.., here, I mean."
"It looks just like scar tissue," said Conway. "But it's too deep to have been formed only as a result of burning by Descartes' tail flare. And why did it just happen to have a mouth here anyway, just where the ship decided to land? The chances against that happening are millions to one. And why haven't other mouths been discovered inland? We've surveyed every square mile of the land mass, but the only surface mouth to appear was a few minutes after Descartes landed. Why?"
"It saw us coming and.. ." began Harrison.
"What with?" said Edwards.
..... Or fit us land, then, and decided to form a mouth..
"A mouth," said Conway, "with muscles to open and close it, with teeth, predigestive juices and an alimentary canal joining it to a stomach which, unless it decided to form that as well, could be many miles away- all within a few minutes of the ship landing? From what we know of carpet metabolism I can't see all that happening so quickly, can you?"
Edwards and Harrison were silent.