be on the same ship out …
A few seconds later he was dismissed very quietly.
Mannon himself had accused Conway of misguided loyalty and now O’Mara had suggested that his present stand was the result of not wanting to admit to a mistake. He had been given an out, which he had refused to take, and now the thought of service in the smaller multienvironment hospital, or even a planet-side establishment where the arrival of an e-t patient would be considered a major event, was beginning to come home to him. It gave him an unpleasantly gone feeling in the abdominal area. Maybe he was basing his theory on too little evidence and refusing to admit it. Maybe the odd errors were part of an entirely different puzzle, with no connection whatever with Mannon’s trouble. As he strode along the corridors, taking evading action or being evaded every few yards, the impulse grew in him to rush back to O’Mara, say yes to everything, apologize abjectly and promise to be a good boy. But by the time he was ready to give into it he was outside Colonel Skempton’s door.
Sector General was supplied and to a large extent maintained by the Monitor Corps, which was the Federation’s executive and law enforcement arm. As the senior Corps officer in the hospital, Colonel Skempton handled traffic to and from the hospital in addition to a horde of other administrative details. It was said that the top of his desk had never been visible since the day it arrived. When Conway was shown in he looked up, said “Good morning,” looked down at his desk and said, “Ten minutes …”
It took much longer than ten minutes. Conway was interested in traffic from odd points of origin, or ships which had called at such places. He wanted data on the level of technology, medical science and physiological classification of their inhabitants-especially if the psychological sciences or psionics were well-developed or if the incidence of mental illness was unusually high. Skempton began excavating among the papers on his desk.
But the supply ship, ambulances and ships pressed into emergency service as ambulances which had arrived during the past few weeks had originated from Federation worlds which were well known and medically innocuous. All except one, that was-the Cultural Contact and Survey vessel Descartes. It had landed, very briefly, on a most unusual planet. She was on the ground, if it could be called that, for only a few minutes. None of the crew had left the ship, the air-locks had remained sealed and the samples of air, water and surface material were drawn in, analyzed and declared interesting but harmless. The pathology department of the hospital had made a more thorough analysis and had had the same thing to say. Descartes had called briefly to leave the samples and a patient …
“A patient!” Conway almost shouted when the Colonel reached that point in his report. Skempton would not need an empathic faculty to know what he was thinking.
“Yes, Doctor, but don’t get your hopes up,” said the Colonel. “He had nothing more exotic than a broken leg. And despite the fact e-t bugs find it impossible to live on beings of another species, a fact which simplifies the practice of extraterrestrial medicine no end, ship medics are constantly on the lookout for the exception which is supposed to prove the rule. In short, he was suffering only from a broken leg.”
“I’d like to see him anyway,” said Conway.
“Level Two-eighty-three, Ward Four, name of Lieutenant Harrison,” said Skempton. “Don’t slam the door.”
But the meeting with Lieutenant Harrison had to wait until late that evening, because Prilicla’s schedule needed time to rearrange and Conway himself had duties other than the search for hypothetical disembodied intelligences. The delay, however, was fortunate because much more information was made available to him, gathered during rounds and at mealtimes, even though the data was such that he did not quite know what to do with it.
The number of boobs, errors and mistakes was surprising, he suspected, only because he had not interested himself in such things before now. Even so, the silly, stupid mistakes he encountered, especially among the highly trained and responsible OR staff, were definitely uncharacteristic, he thought. And they did not form the sort of pattern he had expected. A plot of times and places should have shown an early focal point of this hypothetical mental contagion becoming more widespread as the disease progressed. Instead the pattern indicated a single focus moving within a certain circumscribed area-the Hudlar theater and its immediate surroundings. Whatever the thing was, if there was anything there at all, it was behaving like a single entity rather than a disease.
… Which is ridiculous!” Conway protested. “Even I didn’t seriously believe in a disembodied intelligence-it was a working hypothesis only. I’m not that stupid!”
He had been filling Prilicla in on the latest developments while they were on the way to see the Lieutenant. The empath kept pace with him along the ceiling for a few minutes in silence, then said inevitably, “I agree.”
Conway would have preferred some constructive objections for a change, so he did not speak again until they had reached 283-Four. This was a small private ward off a larger e-t compartment and the Lieutenant seemed glad to see them. He looked, and Prilicla said that he felt, bored.
“Apart from some temporary structural damage you are in very good shape, Lieutenant,” Conway began, just in case Harrison was worried by the presence of two Senior Physicians at his bed. “What we would like to talk about is the events leading up to your accident. If you wouldn’t mind, that is.”
“Not at all,” said the Lieutenant. “Where do you want me to start? With the landing, or before that?”
“If you were to tell us a little about the planet itself first,” suggested Conway.
The Lieutenant nodded and moved his headrest to a more comfortable angle for conversation, then began, “It was a weirdie. We had been observing it for a long time from orbit …
Christened Meatball because Captain Williamson of the cultural contact and survey vessel Descartes had declined, very forcibly, to have such an odd and distasteful planet named after him, it had to be seen to be believed-and even then it had been difficult for its discoverers to believe what they were seeing.
Its oceans were a thick, living soup and its land masses were almost completely covered by slow-moving carpets of animal life. In many areas there were mineral outcroppings and soil which supported vegetable life, and other forms of vegetation grew in the water, on the sea bed, or rooted itself on the organic land surface. But the greater part of the land surface was covered by a layer of animal life which in some places was half a mile thick.
This vast organic carpet was subdivided into strata which crawled and slipped and fought their way through each other to gain access to necessary top surface vegetation or subsurface minerals or simply to choke off and cannibalize each other. During the course of this slow, gargantuan struggle these living strata heaved themselves into hills and valleys, altering the shapes of lakes and coastlines and changing the whole topography of their world from month to month.
It had been generally agreed by the specialists on Descartes that if the planet possessed intelligent life it should take one of two forms, and both were a possibility. The first type would be large — one of the tremendous, living carpets which might be capable of anchoring itself to the underlying rock while pushing extensions toward the surface for the purpose of breathing, ingestion, and the elimination of wastes. It should also possess a means of defense around its far-flung perimeter to keep less intelligent strata creatures from insinuating themselves between it and the ground below or from slipping over it and cutting off light, food, and air as well as discouraging sea predators large and small who seemed to nibble at it around the clock.
The second possibility might be a fairly small life-form, smooth skinned, flexible, and fast enough to allow them to live inside or between the strata creatures and avoid the ingestive processes of the strata beasts whose movements and metabolism were slow. Their homes, which would have to be safe enough to protect their young and develop their culture and science, would probably be in caves or tunnel systems in the underlying rock.
If either life-form existed on the planet it was unlikely that they would possess an advanced technology. Certainly the larger, complex type of industrial machinery was impossible on this heaving world. Tools, if they developed them at all, would be small, handy and unspecialized, but the chances were that it would be a very primitive society with no roots.
“They might be strong in the philosophical sciences,” Conway broke in at that point. Prilicla moved closer, trembling with Conway’s excitement as well as its own.
Harrison shrugged. “We had a Cinrusskin with us,” he said, looking at Prilicla. “It reported no indication of the more subtle type of emoting usually radiated by intelligent life, but the aura of hunger and raw, animal ferocity emanating from the whole planet was such that the empath had to be kept under sedation most of the time. This
