James White: Final Diagnosis

The large, six-legged elephantine being with the four tentacles and immobile dome of a head was a Tralthan; a large, low-slung crustacean with the beautifully marked carapace that clicked past on thin, bony multijointed legs was, he recalled, a Melfan; and the small biped who looked like a half-size Earth-human covered in tightly curled red fur came from the planet Nidia.

The Nidian bumped gently against the side of the litter as it went past. It barked something at his nurse, possibly a reproof for bad driving, which was ignored. Like the cacophony of hooting, chirping, barking, or gobbling conversations going on all around him, it was just so much irritating, organic noise. This meant that the litter’s translation device must have been programmed only for the languages of the nurse and himself.

Hewlitt disliked being kept in ignorance of anything that was being said around him. He wondered if he would be allowed a personal multitranslator during his stay in hospital. Probably not. If the medics here were anything like some of the ones he had met on Earth, they would not want their patient to know what was going on.

Especially if they were not sure themselves.

His unpleasant memories of many unsuccessful treatments on his home world were driven from his mind by the sight of a great, hissing metal juggernaut that was heading rapidly toward them on a collision course. He pointed and yelled, “Nurse, look out! Slow down, dammit, and move aside.”

The nurse did none of those things, and the metal monster veered aside at the last moment and passed with a few inches to spare. Through the partly open canopy came the hot, odorless smell of escaping steam.

“That was the environmental protection vehicle of an SNLU,” said the nurse. “It belongs to a heavy-gravity life-form that evolved in an atmosphere of high-pressure superheated steam. We were in no danger from it.”

The nurse removed one of its tentacles from the litter controls to point along the corridor before going on. “You will already have noticed that the beings you can see fall into two distinct types: those who avoid others, and those who are avoided by others. This is due to differences in medical rank, the insignia of which is displayed on a band worn around a limb or some other prominent bodily extremity. I am giving you this information now because it will also serve as a guide to establishing the relative seniority of the various doctors and nursing staff you will meet during treatment. You will soon be able to tell the difference between the band markings that I wear, which are those of a nurse-in-training, and a charge nurse, an intern, a member of the Psychology Department, a senior physician, or one of the diagnosticians.

“Theoretically,” it went on, “the staff member possessing the greater medical seniority has right of way. But there are many who believe that it is stupid to suffer contusions or some lesser bodily discomfort by holding too strictly to this rule and, if the other being is more massive and well muscled than they are, simply get out of its way regardless of differences in rank. That is why nearly everyone gets out of my way. But in the case of a patient like yourself who is presumably in urgent need of treatment, the litter bearing you has priority of passage regardless of the low rank, very low in my case, of the nurse guiding it.”

Feeling reassured, Hewlitt looked more closely at the beings around him instead of cowering and closing his eyes at their approach. A person can get used to anything, he was thinking, but a few minutes later he was not so sure.

“What… what was that disgusting, horrible thing that just went past?”

The nurse did not reply until they had turned in to an intersection and the creature was out of sight. Then it said, “That is a physiological classification PVSJ, an Illensan chlorine-breather, wearing the protective envelope necessary in an oxygen-rich environment. They have very sensitive hearing. You would do well to remember that.”

Hewlitt could not remember seeing anything that looked like an ear, or an eye or a nose or mouth for that matter; just a spiny, membranous body that looked like a haphazard collection of oily, rotting vegetation writhing within the yellow fog inside the loose, transparent body cover.

“Nurse,” he said with great vehemence, “no matter what my future treatment is to be, I do not want a thing like that anywhere near me!”

The nurse’s speaking membrane vibrated, but no speech came through its translator. Then it said, “We will arrive in Ward Seven within a few minutes. I expect to be allowed to assist with your nursing care, Patient Hewlitt, and if there is any other way that I can help with nonmedical advice or information you have only to—”

“Aren’t there any human doctors and nurses in this place?” he broke in sharply. “I want to be treated by people of my own species.”

“There are many Earth-human DBDGs on the medical staff,” the nurse replied, “but they might not want to treat you.

For a moment surprise and disbelief rendered him speechless, and not until his litter swung into a narrower and less populated corridor did the nurse answer the question that he had been too angry to ask.

“You are forgetting that this is a multispecies hospital,” it said, “and recognized throughout the Galactic Federation to be the biggest and best of its kind. The people who are accepted for positions or advanced training here are selected from the best that their home planets’ medical establishments can provide, and their purpose in coming here is to practice other-species medicine and surgery. So you will understand that one of them would not take your case unless specifically ordered to do so for a particular clinical reason. A DBDG Earth-human doctor would not feel that it had come all the way to Sector General just to treat another Earthhuman when there are countless millions of those on Earth and the Earth-seeded worlds.

“Your Earth-human doctors and nurses want to work on the juicy ET cases,” it went on. “You will come to understand that this is a very good thing, because much more care and attention, as well as a higher degree of personal and professional interest, is given to other-species patients. ‘When a same-species doctor is treating its patient, certain clinical shortcuts may sometimes be taken, or incorrect assumptions made, or important symptoms cloaked by overfamiliarity with the patient’s physiology. The occasions when mistakes like this occur are rare. But when an other-species medic is in charge of treatment, it takes nothing about its patient for granted. It is forced by the physiological differences to be very careful indeed, so that the incidence of clinical error is even rarer. Please believe me: you will be in very good hands, or whatever other appendages are appropriate.

“And remember, Patient Hewlitt,” it added as the litter made another sudden change in direction, into a wide doorway, “to me, you are an ET case — with all that that implies. We’ve arrived.”

Ward Seven was a large, brightly lit room about five times longer than it was wide, Hewlitt saw, with a clear area of floor running between two facing rows of beds. He felt pretty sure that they were beds because, in spite of their weird shapes and sizes and the strange equipment hanging above some of them, there was one at the other end of the room that was suitable for the use of an Earthhuman. Just inside the entrance on his left there was a nurses’ station and food-service facility enclosed by transparent walls, but the litter moved past it too quickly for him to see who or what was working there.

The space taken up by the combined station and kitchen allowed only eight bed spaces on that side, while there were twelve along the opposite wall. A few of them were enclosed by screens, and the quiet gobbling and barking of alien voices was coming from one of them, but without a translator he could not tell whether it was a medical consultation, friendly gossip, or the sound of an other-species patient in pain. Before he could ask, the litter stopped and he was lifted smoothly and deposited in a sitting position on the chair by his bedside.