James White - Star Surgeon

“This is getting dirtier by the minute,” said Stillman suddenly. “You know, I think we are going to be blamed for what happened around Lonvellin’s ship, for all the casualties in the area. Everything we have done here is going to be twisted so that we will be the villains. And I bet a lot of new diseases will be introduced immediately we leave, for which we will be blamed!”

Stillman swore, then went on, “You know how the people of the Empire think of this planet. Etla is their poor, weak, crippled sister, and we are going to be the dirty aliens who cold-bloodedly assaulted her …

As the Major had been talking Conway had begun to sweat again. His deductions regarding the Empire’s treatment of Etla had been from medical evidence, and it had been the medical aspect which had most concerned him, so that the larger implications of it all had not yet occurred to him. Suddenly he burst out, “But this could mean a war!”

“Yes indeed,” said Stillman savagely, “and that is probably just what the Imperial government wants. It has grown too big and fat and rotten at the core, judging by what has been happening here. Within a few decades it would probably fall apart of its own accord, and a good thing, too. But there is nothing like a good war, a Cause that everybody can feel strongly about, to pull a crumbling Empire together again. If they play it right this war could make it stand for another hundred years.”

Conway shook his head numbly. “I should have seen what was happening sooner,” he said. “If we’d had time to tell the Etlans the truth—”

“You saw it sooner than anyone else,” the Captain broke in sharply, “and telling the natives would not have helped them or us if the ordinary people of the Empire could not have been told also. You have no reason to blame yourself for—”

“Ordinance Officer,” said a voice from one of the twenty-odd speaker grills in the room. “We have a trace at Green Twelve Thirty-one which I’m putting on your repeater screen Five. Trace is putting out patterned interference against missile attack and considerable radar window, suggesting that it has a guilty conscience and is smaller than we are. Instructions, sir?”

Williamson glanced at the repeater screen. “Do nothing unless it does,” he said, then turned to Stillman and Conway again. When he spoke it was with the calming, confidence-inspiring tone of the senior officer who bears, and accepts, full responsibility, a tone which insisted that they were not to worry because he was there to do it for them.

He said, “Don’t look so distressed, gentlemen. This situation, this threat of interstellar war, was bound to come about sometime and plans have been devised for dealing with it. Luckily we have plenty of time to put these plans into effect.

“Spatially the Empire is a small, dense association of worlds,” he went on reassuringly, “otherwise we could not have made contact with them so soon. The Federation, however, is spread thinly across half the Galaxy. We had a star cluster to search where one sun in five possessed an inhabited planet. Their problem is nowhere near as simple. If they were very lucky they might find us in three years, but my own estimate is that it would be nearer twenty. So you can see that we have plenty of time.”

Conway did not feel reassured and he must have shown it, but the Captain was trying to meet his objections before he could make them.

“The agent who made the report may help them,” Williamson went on quickly. “Willingly, because he doesn’t know the truth about the Empire yet, he may give information regarding the Federation and the organization and strength of its Monitor Corps. But because he is a doctor this information is unlikely to be either complete or accurate, and would be useless anyway unless the Empire knows where we are. They won’t find that out unless they capture an astrogator or a ship with its charts intact, and that is a contingency which we will take very great precautions to guard against from this moment on.

“Agents are trained in linguistics, medicine or the social sciences,” Williamson ended confidently. “Their knowledge of interstellar navigation is nil. The scout ship which lands them returns to base immediately, this being standard precautionary procedure in operations of this sort. So you can see that we have a serious problem but that it is not an immediate one.

“Isn’t it?” said Conway.

He saw Williamson and Stillman looking at him — intently and cautiously as if he was some kind of bomb which, having exploded half an hour ago was about to do so again. In a way Conway was sorry that he had to explode on them again and make them share the fear and horrible, gnawing anxiety which up to now had been his alone. He wet his lips and tried to break it to them as gently as possible.

“Speaking personally,” he said quietly, “I don’t have the faintest idea of the coordinates of Traltha, or Illensa or Earth, or even the Earth-seeded planet where I was born. But there is one set of figures which I do know, and any other doctor on space service in this Sector is likely to know them also. They are the coordinates of Sector General.

“I don’t think we have any time at all.”

The only constructive thing which Conway did during the trip back to Sector General was to catch up on his sleep, but very often the sleep was made so hideous by nightmares of the coming war that it was more pleasant to stay awake, and his waking time he spent in discussions with Williamson, Stillman and the other senior officers on Vespasian. Since he had called the shots right during that last half hour on Etla Williamson seemed to value any ideas he might have, even though problems of espionage, logistics and fleet maneuvers were hardly within the specialty of a Senior Physician.

The discussions were interesting, informative and, like his dreams, anything but pleasant.

According to Colonel Williamson an interstellar war of conquest was logistically impossible, but a simple war of extermination could be fought by anyone with sufficient force and stomachs strong enough to withstand the thought of slaughtering other intelligent beings by the planet-load. The Empire had more than enough force, and the strength of its collective stomach was dependent on factors over which the Monitor Corps had no control, as yet.

Given enough time agents of the Corps could have infiltrated the Empire. They already knew the position of one of its inhabited worlds and, because there was traffic between it and the other planets of the Empire, they would soon know the positions of others. The first step then would be to gather intelligence and eventually … Well, the Corps were no mean propagandists themselves and in a situation like this where the enemy was basing their campaign on a series of Big Lies, some method of striking at this weak spot could be devised. The Corps was primarily a police organization, a force intended not so much to wage war as to maintain peace. And like any good police force its actions were constrained by the possible effects on innocent bystanders-in this case the citizens of the Empire as well as the people of the Federation.

That was why the plan for undermining the Empire would be set in motion, even though it could not possibly take effect before the first clash occurred. Williamson’s fondest hope-or prayer might be a more accurate word-was that the Corpsman who was now in Empire hands would not know, and so would not be able to tell, the coordinates of Sector General. The Colonel was realist enough to know that if the agent knew anything the enemy would get it out of him one way or another. But failing this ideal solution the hospital would be defended in such a way that it would be the only Federation position that the enemy would know-unless they diverted a large proportion of their force to the time wasting job of searching the main body of the Galaxy, which was just what the Corps wanted.