"White, James - Sector General 06 - Star Healer.PDB" - читать интересную книгу автора (White James)

All four of the Tralthan’s eyes had turned to regard Conway, a rare occurrence and proof that Thornnastor’s vast mind was concentrating exclusively on his particular case. Conway laughed nervously.
“Then it is high time I visited O’Mara to take a few of those tapes,” he said, “so that I will have a better idea of what my problems will be. I think initially a Hudlar tape, then a Melf and a Kelgian. When I’m accustomed, if I ever become accustomed to them, I’ll request some of the more exotic...
“Some of the mental stratagems used by my colleagues,” Thornnastor continued ponderously, ignoring the interruption, “are such that they might conceivably tell their life-mates about them, but certainly no person with a lesser relationship. In spite of my overwhelming curiosity regarding these matters, they have not confided in me, and the Chief Psychologist will not open its files.”
Two of its eyes curved away to regard Murchison and it went on. “A few hours’ or even days’ delay in taking the tapes is not important. Pathologist Murchison is free to go, and I suggest that you take full advantage of each other while you are still able to do so without otherspecies psychological complications.”
As they were leaving, Thornnastor added, “It is the Earthhuman taped component of my mind which has suggested this..


CHAPTER 11


The theory is that if you are to accustom yourself to the confusion of alien thought patterns,” O’Mara growled at him as Conway was still rubbing the sleep out of his eyes, “it is better in the long run to confuse you a lot rather than a little at a time. You have been given the tapes during four hours of light sedation, during which you snored like a demented Hudlar, and you are now a fiveway rugged individualist.
“If you have problems,” the Chief Psychologist went on, “I don’t want to know about them until you’re absolutely sure they’re insoluble. Be careful how you go and don’t trip over your own feet. In spite of what your alter egos tell you to the contrary, you only have two of them.”
The corridor outside O’Mara’s office was one of the busiest in the hospital, with medical and maintenance staff belonging to a large variety of physiological classifications walking, crawling, wriggling, or driving past in both directions. Seeing his Diagnostician’s armband and realizing, rightly in his case, that a certain amount of mental confusion and physical uncoordination might be present, they gave him as wide a berth as possible. Even the TLTU inside a pressure sphere mounted on heavy caterpillar treads passed him with more than a meter to spare.
A few seconds later a Tralthan Senior he knew passed by, but the big FGLI was not known to Conway’s other selves, so his reaction time was slowed. When he swiveled his head to return the Tralthan’s greeting, he was overcome suddenly by vertigo, because the Hudlar and Melf components of his mind were of beings whose heads did not swivel. Instinctively he reached toward the corridor wall to steady himself. But instead of a hard, tapering Hudlar tentacle or a shiny black Melfan pincer, the member supporting him was a flaccid pink object with five lumpy digits. By the time he had steadied himself both physically and mentally, he had become aware of an Earth-human DBDG in Monitor green waiting patiently to be noticed.
“You were looking for me, Lieutenant?” Conway asked.
“For the past couple of hours, Doctor,” the officer replied. “But you were with the Chief Psychologist on a taping session and could not be disturbed.”
Conway nodded. “What’s the trouble?”
“Problems with the Protector,” the Lieutenant said, and went on quickly. “The Exercise Room-that’s what we’re calling it now even though it still looks like a torture chamber-is underpowered. Tapping into the main power line for the section would necessitate going through four levels, only one of which is inhabited by warmblooded oxygen-breathers. The structural alterations in the other three areas would be very time-consuming because of our having to guard against atmosphere contamination, especially where the Illensan chlorine-breathers are concerned. The answer would be a small power source sited within the Exercise Room. But if the Protector broke free, the shielding around the power unit might not survive, and if the shielding went, the radiation hazard would necessitate five levels’-above and below the area-being evacuated, and a lot more time would be wasted cleaning the-”
“The room is close to the outer hull,” Conway said, feeling that a lot of time was being wasted right now by asking a medical man’s advice on purely technical questions, and fairly simple ones at that. “Surely you can set up a small reactor on the outer hull, safe from the Protector, and run a line into-”
“That was the answer I came up with, too,” the Lieutenant broke in, “but it gave rise to other problems, administrative rather than technical. There are regulations regarding what structures can and cannot be placed on the outer hull, and a reactor there, where one had never been before, might necessitate alterations in the hospital’s external traffic flow patterns. In short, there is a major tangle of red tape which I can unravel given time, and if I asked all of the people concerned nicely and in triplicate. But you, Doctor, considering the urgency of your project, could tell them what you need.”
Conway was silent for a moment. He was remembering one of the Chief Psychologist’s remarks prior to the taping session and just before the sedation had taken effect. O’Mara had smiled sourly and said, “You have the rank now, Conway, even though it may turn out to be temporary. Go out and use it, or even abuse it. Just let me see you doing something with it.”
Striving to make his tone that of a Diagnostician to whom nobody in the hospital would say no, Conway said, “I understand, Lieutenant. I’m on my way to Hudlar Geriatric, but I’ll deal with it at the first communicator I pass. You have another problem?”
“Of course I have problems,” the Lieutenant replied. “Every time you bring a new patient to the hospital, the whole maintenance division grows ulcers! Levitating brontosaurs, Drambon rollers, and now a patient who hasn’t even been born yet inside a... a berserker!”
Conway looked at the other in surprise. Usually the Monitor Corps officers were faultless in matters of discipline and respect toward their superiors, whether military or medical. Dryly, he said, “We can treat ulcers.”
“My apologies, Doctor,” the other said stiffly. “I’ve been in charge of a squad of Kelgians for the past two years, and I’ve forgotten how to be polite.”
“I see.” Conway laughed. Since he was carrying a Kelgian tape himself right then, the Lieutenant had his sympathy. “That problem I cannot help you with. Are there others?”
“Oh, yes,” the other replied. “They are insoluble, but minor. The two Hudlars are still objecting to their continuous beating of the Protector. I asked O’Mara if he could find someone else for the job, someone who would suffer less mental distress while carrying it out. O’Mara told me that if such a person had escaped his screening and was currently working in the hospital, he would resign forthwith. So I’m stuck with the Hudlars, and their damn music, until the new accommodation is ready.
“They insist that it helps keep their minds off what they’re doing, but have you ever had to listen to Hudlar music, continuously, day after day?”
Conway admitted that he had not had that experience, that a few minutes of it had been more than enough for him.
They had arrived at the interlevel lock, and he began climbing into one of the lightweight suits for the journey through the foggy yellow levels of the Illensan chlorine-breathers and the water-filled wards of the aquatic denizens of Chalderescol which lay between him and the Hudlar wards. He double-checked all the fastenings and reread the checklist, even though he had donned such pieces of hospital equipment thousands of times and could do it with his eyes shut. But he was not entirely himself just then, and the regulations stated that all medical personnel carrying Educator tapes, and as a consequence laboring under a degree of mental confusion, must use the checklist with their eyes wide open.
The Lieutenant was still standing patiently beside him. Conway said, “There’s more?”
The officer nodded. “A fairly easy one, Doctor. Hardin, the Dietician-in-Chief, is asking about the consistency of the Protector’s food. He says he can reproduce a synthetic mush tailored to fit its dietary requirements in all respects, but that there is a psychological aspect to the ingestion of food which may be important to the overall well-being of this particular patient. You had a brief telepathic contact with one of them and so have firsthand information on the subject. He would like advice.”
“I’ll talk to him later,” Conway said, pausing before pulling the helmet over his head. “But in the meantime you can tell him that it rarely eats vegetation, and the food that it does eat is usually wrapped in a thick hide or exoskeleton and is fighting back. I suggest that he encases the food in long, hollow tubes with edible walls. The tubes can be incorporated into the exercise machinery and used to beat the patient in the interests of greater environmental realism. Its mandibles are capable of denting steel plating, and Hardin is right. It would not be happy eating the equivalent of thin, milky cereal.”
He laughed again and added, “We wouldn’t want to risk rotting its teeth.”
The Hudlar Geriatric Ward was a comparatively new addition to Sector General’s facilities, and it was the closest the hospital came to providing treatment for psychologically disturbed patients, and even then the treatment was available to only a statistically chosen few. This was because the solution to the problem, if one could be found, would have to be put into effect on a planet-wide scale on Hudlar itself.
The ward’s artificial gravity had been set at the Hudlar normal of nearly four Earth-Gs, and the atmospheric pressure was a compromise which caused the minimum of inconvenience to both patients and nursing staff. There were three Kelgian nurses on duty, their fur twitching restlessly under their lightweight suits and gravity neutralizer harnesses as they sprayed nutrient paint onto three of the five patients. Conway buckled on a C-neutralizer suited to his Earth-human mass, signaled that he did not require a nurse to attend him, and moved toward the nearest unoccupied patient.
Immediately the Hudlarian component of his mind came surging up, almost obliterating the Melfan, Tralthan, Kelgian, and Gogleskan material and threatening to engulf Conway’s own mind in a great wave of pity and helpless anger at the patient’s condition.
“How are you today?” Conway asked ritually.
“Fine, thank you, Doctor,” the patient replied, as he knew it would. Like the majority of other life-forms possessing immense strength, the Hudlarian FROBs were a gentle, inoffensive, and selfeffacing race, none of whom would dream of suggesting that his medical ability was somehow lacking by saying that it was not well.
It was immediately obvious that the aging Hudlar was not at all well. Its six great tentacles, which normally supported its heavy trunk in an upright position for the whole of its waking and sleeping life, and which served as both manipulatory and ambulatory appendages, hung limply over the sides of its supporting cradle. The hard patches of callus, the knuckles on which it walked while its digits were curled inward to protect them against contact with the ground, were discolored and cracking. The digits themselves, usually so strong, rock-steady, and precise in their movements, were twitching continually into spasm.
The Hudlars lived in a heavy-gravity, high-pressure environment whose superdense air teemed with so much airborne vegetable and microanimal life-forms that it resembled a thick soup, which the inhabitants absorbed directly through the tegument of the back and flanks. But the absorption mechanism of the patient had begun to fail, so large areas of the skin were caked with discolored nutrient paint which would have to be washed off before the next meal could be sprayed on. But the condition was worsening, the patient’s ability to absorb nourishment was diminishing, and that, in turn, was accelerating the deterioration in the skin condition.
Chemical changes caused by the incomplete absorption process caused the residual nutrient to smell. But even worse was the odor from the waste elimination area, no longer under voluntary control, whose discharge formed like milky perspiration on the patient’s underside before dripping into the cradle’s suction pan. Conway could not really smell anything at all, because his suit had its own air supply. But the FROB personality sharing his mind had experienced this situation many times in its life, and psychosomatic smells were, if anything, worse than the real kind.
The patient’s mind was still clear, however, and there would be no physical deterioration in the brain structure until a few minutes after its double heart stopped beating, and therein lay the real tragedy. Rare indeed was the Hudlar mind that could remain stable inside a great body which was disintegrating painfully all around it, especially when the mind was fully and intensely aware of the process.
Hopelessly he searched for an answer, going through the material on gereology available at the time his tapes were donated as well as the painful data associated with his own childhood memories and subsequent medical experience. But there was no answer to be found anywhere in his multiple mind, and the consensus of all of them was that he should increase the dosage of painkilling medication so as to make the patient as comfortable as possible.
While he made the addition to the treatment chart, the Hudlar’s speaking membrane vibrated stiffly, but that organ, too, was deteriorating, and this time the sounds it made were too distorted for his translator to make any sense of them. He murmured reassurances, which they both knew to be empty, and moved to the next cradle.
Its condition was fractionally better than the previous one, and its conversation with him was animated and covered every subject under the Hudlar sun except what ailed it. Conway was not fooled, much less his Hudlarian alter ego, and he knew that this particular FROB was enjoying-although that was scarcely the right word in these circumstances-its last few hours of sanity. The next two patients did not speak to him at all, and the last one was loudly articulate but no longer sane.
Its speaking membrane was vibrating continually inside the wide, cylindrical muffler which had been attached to reduce both the sound and the mental discomfort of those within earshot, but enough was escaping to make Conway feel very uncomfortable indeed. It was in poor physical shape as well. In addition to the breakdown of the absorption system over a large area of the body surface, the incontinence, and the marked deterioration evident in all of the limb extremities, two of the tentacles had lost mobility and resembled nothing so much as a couple of withered tree-trunks.
“Those limbs require urgent surgical attention, Doctor,” the nurse engaged in spraying the patient with nutrient said, having first turned off its translator. In the forthright manner of all Kelgians it added, “Amputation is indicated to prolong the patient’s life, if that is considered desirable.”
In ordinary circumstances the prolongation of the patient’s life was desirable and, in fact, was the prime consideration, and his mind was being flooded with information and suggestions for treating the equivalent condition in Melfans, Kelgians, Tralthans, and Earth-humans. But to the physiological classification FROB the very concept of curative medicine had been unknown until the discovery of Hudlar by the Federation, and to that species any major surgical intervention was hazardous in the extreme. On a heavy gravity, high-pressure world like Hudlar, the internal pressure and metabolic rate of its dominant life-form had to be correspondingly high.
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 Conways own experience of FROB surgery suggested caution, while the other mass of extraterrestrial experience advocated operating without delay. But a double amputation on a geriatric and dangerously weakened patient. . . Angrily he shook his head and turned away.