James White - Star Surgeon

“And thank you,” he added awkwardly, not wanting to say too much because the Corpsman was still at his elbow. If he had tried to say the things he wanted to say to Murchison with eighteen urgent cases lying around their feet the officer would have been scandalized, and Conway would not have blamed him. But dammit the Corpsman hadn’t been working beside Murchison for the last three hours, with a pep-shot heightening all his senses …

“If it would help you,” said Murchison suddenly, “I could take a pep shot, too.”

Gratefully, Conway said, “You’re a very silly girl, but I was hoping you would say that …

By the eighth day all the extra-terrestrial patients had been evacuated and with them had gone nearly four-fifths of the hospital’s staff. On the levels which maintained extremes of temperature, pressure or gravity the power was withdrawn causing the ultra-frigid solids to melt and gasify and the dense or superheated atmospheres to condense into a sludgy liquid mess on the floors. Then as the days passed more and more Corpsmen of the Engineering Division arrived, converting the one-time wards into barracks and tearing out large sections of the outer hull so that they could erect projector bases and launching platforms. Dermod’s idea now was that Sector General should defend itself instead of relying completely on the fleet, which had already shown that it wasn’t capable of stopping everything. By the twenty-fifth day Sector General had made the transition from being a defenseless hospital into what amounted to a heavily armed military base.

Because of its tremendous size and vast reserves of power-several times greater than that of the mobile forces defending it — the weapons were many and truly formidable. Which was as well because on the twenty-ninth day they were tested to the utmost in the first major attack by the enemy.

It lasted for three days.

Conway knew that there were sound, logical reasons for the Corps fortifying the hospital as they had done, but he didn’t like it. Even after that fantastic, three-day long attack when the hospital had been hit four times-again with chemical warheads, luckily he still felt wrong about it: Every time he thought of the tremendous structure which had been dedicated to the highest ideals of humanity and medicine being made into an engine of destruction, geared to a hellish and unnatural ecology wherein it produced its own casualties, Conway felt angry and sad and not a little sickened by the whole ghastly mess. Sometimes he was apt to give vent to his opinions …

It was five weeks after the beginning of the evacuation and he was lunching with Mannon and Prilicla. The main dining hall was no longer crowded at mealtimes and green uniformed Corpsmen heavily outnumbered the e-ts at the tables, but there were still upward of two hundred extra-terrestrials in the place and this was what Conway was currently objecting to.

I still say it’s a waste,” he said angrily, “a waste of lives, of medical talent, everything! All the cases are, and will continue to be, Monitor casualties. Every one an Earth-human. So there are no juicy e-t cases for them to work on. The e-t staff should be sent home!

“Present company included,” he ended, with a glare at Prilicla before he turned to face Mannon.

Dr. Mannon made an incision in his steak and hefted a generous forkful mouth ward. Since the disappearance of all his light-gravity patients he had had his LSVO and MSVK tapes erased and so had no mental restrictions placed on his diet. In the five weeks since the evacuation he had noticeably put on weight.

“To an e-t,” he said reasonably, “we are juicy e-ts.”

“You’re quibbling,” said Conway. “What I’m objecting to is senseless heroics.”

Mannon raised his eyebrows. “But heroics are nearly always senseless,” he said dryly, “and highly contagious as well. In this case I’d say the Corps started it by wanting to defend this place, and because of that we felt obliged to stay also to look after the wounded. At least a few of us feel like that, or we think a few of us feel like that.

“The sane, logical thing to do would have been to get while the going was good,” Mannon continued, not quite looking at Conway, “and not a word would have been said to those who got. But then these sane, logical people have colleagues or, uh, friends who they suspect might be in the true hero category, and they won’t leave because of what they imagine their friends will think of them if they run away. So they’d sooner die than have their friends think they were cowards, and they stay.”

Conway felt his face getting warm, but he didn’t say anything.

Mannon grinned suddenly and went on, “But this is a form of heroism, too. A case of Death before Dishonor, you might say. And before you can turn around twice everybody is a hero of one kind or the other. And no doubt the e-ts …” He gave a sly glance at Prilicla. “… are staying for similar reasons. And also, I suspect, because they don’t want it thought that Earth-human DBDGs have a monopoly on heroism.”

“I see,” said Conway. He knew that his face was flaming red. It was now quite obvious that Mannon knew that the only reason he had stayed in the hospital was because Murchison, O’Mara and Mannon himself might have been disappointed in him if he’d left. And at the other side of the table Prilicla, the emotion sensitive, would be reading him like a book. Conway thought that he had never felt worse in his whole life.

“You are so right,” said Prilicla suddenly, deftly inserting its fork into the plate of spaghetti before it and using two mandibles to twist. “If it had not been for the heroic example of you DBDGs I would have been on the second ship out.”

“The second?” asked Mannon.

“I am not,” said Prilicla, waving spaghetti for emphasis, “completely without valor.”

Listening to the by-play Conway thought that the honest thing would have been for him to admit his cowardice to them, but he also knew that to do so would be to cause embarrassment all round. It was plain that they both knew him for the coward he was and were telling him in their separate fashions that it didn’t matter. And looking at it objectively it really did not matter, because there would be no more ships leaving Sector General and its remaining staff were going to be heroes whether they liked it or not. But Conway still did not think it right that he should be given credit for being a brave, selfless, dedicated man of medicine when he was nothing of the sort.

Before he could say anything, however, Mannon switched subjects abruptly. He wanted to know where Conway and Murchison had been during the fourth, fifth and sixth days of the evacuation. He said that it was highly suggestive that both of them were out of circulation at exactly the same time and he began to list some of the suggestions which occurred to him-which were colorful, startling and next to physically impossible. Soon Prilicla joined in, although the sexual mores of two Earth-human DBDGs could have at most only an academic interest to a sexless GLNO, and Conway was defending himself strenuously from both sides.

Both Prilicla and Mannon knew that Murchison and himself, along with about forty other members of the staff, had been keeping at peak operating efficiency by means of pep-shots for nearly sixty hours. Pep shots did not give something for nothing, and Conway and the others had been forced to adopt the horizontal position of the patient for three days while they recovered from an advanced state of exhaustion. Some of them had literally dropped in their tracks and been taken away hurriedly, so exhausted that the involuntary muscles of heart and lungs were threatening to give up with everything else. They had been taken to special wards where robot devices massaged their hearts, gave artificial respiration and fed them intraveneously.