“Oh, that,” Timmins said. “Purely for administrative convenience. The supply and maintenance of Sector General is our responsibility, and anyone who is not a patient or on the medical staff is automatically a member of the Monitor Corps. The personnel computer has to know your name, rank, and number so as to be able to pay your salary and so we can tell you what to do.
“Theoretically,” it added.
“I have never disobeyed the lawful order of a superior…” Cha Thrat began, when it held up its hand again.
“A Corps joke, don’t worry about it,” Timmins said. “The point I’m trying to make is that our Chief Psychologist bears the administrative rank of major, but it is difficult to define the limits of his authority in this place … because he orders full Colonels and Diagnosticiansaround, and not always politely. Your own rank of junior technician, Environmental Maintenance, Grade Two, which became effective as soon as we received O’Mara’s instructions, will not give you as much leeway.”
“Please,” she said urgently, “this is a serious matter. It is my understanding that the Monitor Corps is an organization of warriors. It has been many generations on Sommaradva since our warrior-level citizens fought together in battle. Peace and present-day technology offer danger enough. As a warrior-surgeon I am required to heal wounds, not inflict them.”
“Seriously,” the Earth-human said, “I think your information on the Corps came chiefly from the entertainment channels. Space battles and hand-to-hand combat are an extremely rare occurrence, and the library tapes will give you a much truer, and more boring, description of what we do and why we do it. Study the material. You’ll find that there will be no conflict of loyalty between your duties to the Corps, your home world, or your ethical standards.
“We’ve arrived,” it added briskly, pointing at the sign on the heavy door before them. “From here on we’ll need heavy radiation armor. Oh, you’ve another question?”
“It’s about my salary,'she said hesitantly.
Timmins laughed and said, “I do so hate these altruistic types who consider money unimportant. The pay at your present rank isn’t large. Personnel will be able to tell you the equivalent in Sommaradvan currency, but then there isn’t much to spend it on here. You can always save it and your leave allowance and travel. Perhaps visit your AUGL friend on Chalderescol sometime, or go to—”
“There would be enough money for an interstellar trip like that?” she broke in.
The Earth-human went into a paroxym of coughing, recovered, then said, “There would not be enough money to pay for an interstellar trip. However, because of the isolated position of Sector General, free Corps transport is available for physiologically suitable hospital personnel to travel to their home planets or, with a bit of fiddling, to the planet of your choice. The money could be spent there, enjoying yourself. Now will you please get into that armor?”
Cha Thrat did not move and the Earth-human watched her without speaking.
Finally she said, “I am being given special treatment, shown areas where I am not qualified to work and mechanisms that I can’t hope to use for a very long time. No doubt this is being done as an incentive, to show me what is possible for me to achieve in the future. I understand and appreciate the thinking behind this, but I would much prefer to stop sightseeing and do some simple, and useful, work.”
“Well, good for you!” Timmins said, showing its teeth approvingly. “We can’t look directly at the Telfi anyway, so we aren’t missing much. Suppose you begin by learning to drive a delivery sled. A small one, at first, so that an accident will damage you more than the hospital structure. And you’ll have to really master your internal geography, and be able to navigate accurately and at speed through the service tunnel network. It seems to be a law of nature that when a ward or diet kitchen has to be resupplied, the requisition is always urgent and usually arrives late.
“We’ll head for the internal transport hangar now,” it ended, “unless you have another question?”
She had, but thought it better to wait until they were moving again before asking it.
“What about the damage to the AUGL ward for whichI was indirectly responsible?” she said. “Will the cost be deducted from my salary?”
Timmins showed its teeth again and said, “I’d say that it would take about three years to pay for the damage caused by your AUGL friend. But when the damage was done you were one of the medical trainee crazies, not a serious and responsible member of the Maintenance Department, so don’t worry about it.”
She did not worry about it because, for the rest of the day, there were far more important things to worry about — principally the control and guidance of the uncontrollable and misguided, multiply accursed heap of machinery called an antigravity sled.
In operation the vehicle rode a repulsion cushion so that there was no contact with the deck, and changes in direction were effected by lowering friction pads, angling the thrusters, or, for fine control, leaning sideways. If emergency braking was necessary, the power was switched off. This caused the vehicle to drop to the deck and grind noisily to a halt. But this maneuver was discouraged because it made the driver very unpopular with the service crew who had to realign the repulsor grids.
By the end of the day her vehicle had slipped and spun all over the transport hangar floor, hit every collapsible marker that she was supposed to steer around, and generally displayed a high level of noncooperation. Timmins gave her a packet of study tapes, told her to look over them before next morning, and said that her driving was pretty good for a beginner.
Three days later she began to believe it.
“I drove a sled with a trailer attached, both fully loaded, from Level Eighteen to Thirty-three,” she told Tarsedth, when her one-time classmate visited her for the customary evening gossip. “I did it Using only theservice tunnels, and without hitting anything or anybody.”
“Should I be impressed?” the Kelgian asked.
“A little,” Cha Thrat said, feeling more than a little deflated. “What’s been happening to you?”
“Cresk-Sar transferred to me LSVO Surgical,” Tar-sedth said, its fur rippling in an unreadable mixture of emotions. “It said I was ready to broaden my other-species nursing experience, and working with a light-gravity life-form would improve my delicacy of touch. And anyway, it said, Charge Nurse Lentilatsar, the rotten, chlorine- breathing slimy slob, was not entirely happy with the way I exercised my initiative. What tape is that? It looks massively uninteresting.”
“To the contrary,” Cha Thrat said, touching the pause stud. The screen showed a picture of a group of Monitor Corps officers meeting the great Earth-human MacEwan and the equally legendary Orligian Grawlya-Ki, the true founders, it was said, of Sector General hospital. “It’s the history, organization, and present activities of the Monitor Corps. I find it very interesting, but ethically confusing. For example, why must a peace-keeping force be so heavily armed?”
“Because, stupid, it couldn’t if it wasn’t,” Tarsedth said. It went on quickly. “But on the subject of the Monitor Corps I’m an expert. A lot of Kelgians join these days, and I was going to try for a position as Surgeon-Lieutenant, a ship’s medic, that is, and might still do it if I don’t qualify here.
“Of course,” it went on enthusiastically, “there are other, nonmilitary, openings …”
As the Galactic Federation’s executive and law-enforcement arm, the Monitor Corps was essentially a police force on an interstellar scale, but during the first century since it had come into existence it had becomemuch more. Originally, when the Federation naa comprised a rather unstable alliance of only four inhabited systems — Nidia, Orligia, Traltha, and Earth — its personnel had been exclusively Earth-human. But those Earth-humans were responsible for discovering other inhabited systems, and more and more intelligent life-forms, and for establishing friendly contact with them.
The result was that the Federation now numbered among its citizens close on seventy different species— the figure was constantly being revised upward — and the peace-keeping function had taken second place to that of the Survey, Exploration, and Other-species Communications activities. The people with the heavy weaponry did not mind because a police force, unlike an army, feels at its most effective when there is nothing for it to do but keep in training by carving up the odd mineral-rich asteroid for the mining people, or clearing and leveling large tracts of virgin land on a newly discovered world in preparation for the landing of colonists.
The last time a Monitor Corps police action had been indistinguishable from an act of war had been nearly two decades ago, when they had defended Sector General itself from the badly misguided Etlans, who had since become law-abiding citizens of the Federation. A few of them had even joined the Corps.
