The Aliens Among Us
(1969)*
James White
Contents
Countercharm
To Kill or Cure
Red Alert
Tableau
The Conspirators
The Scavengers
Occupation: Warrior
Far out on the galactic Rim, where star-systems were sparse and the darkness almost absolute, the vast, angular structure of Sector Twelve General Hospital hung in space. In its three hundred and eighty-four levels were reproduced the environments of the sixty-nine different forms of intelligent life known to the Galactic Federation, a biological spectrum ranging from the ultra-frigid methane life-forms through the more normal oxygen- chorine- and water-breathing types up to the beings who existed by the conversion of hard radiation. And in a small ward on the two hundred and third level Senior Physician Conway was lecturing to three visiting specialists of physiological classification ELNT, and feeling confused and miserable because he was suffering from a severe dose of unrequited love.
The object of his affection was one of the three ELNTs— six-legged, exo-skeletal and vaguely crab-like beings from Melf Four—and as the lecture proceeded his gaze was drawn to this entity more and more frequently, and became almost lascivious in its intensity. One half of Conway's mind—the sane, human half—kept insisting that getting all hot and bothered about an outsize crab was ridiculous, while the other half thought lovingly of that gorgeously marked carapace and generally felt like baying at the moon.
He had a problem, Conway thought unhappily; and like so many others in the past, this one had begun with a visit to the office of the Chief Psychologist, O'Mara...
-
Major O'Mara had opened the interview with flattery of the type which, if Conway had not known the Chief Psychologist of old, would have been indistinguishable from insults. Hitherto, O'Mara had said, Dr. Conway had been pretty much a free agent in the hospital, and with the happy faculty of picking nice, juicy, dramatic cases to work on—levitating dinosaurs, SRTTs with water on the brain, and the like ...
"... But this dashing, melodramatic stuff is not typical of a doctor's existence," O'Mara had gone on, "and now that they've made you a Senior Physician it is time you realised that
"Not that you'll stop curing people, far from it," he continued, "but now you will be responsible for upwards of fifty patients at a time instead of devoting all your energies to just one. And if some of those cases are straight-forward you won't even look at them, but will delegate treatment to a subordinate. Eventually you will be expected to join in one of the hospital's long-term research projects, a routine business with no glory attached to it at all, and a greater proportion of your time will be spent in teaching duties.
"This will mean taking one or more Educator tapes," O'Mara had ended grimly, "and retaining them for extended periods. You know what that means?"
Conway had nodded, thinking that he did.
Without the Educator tape system a multi-environment hospital such as Sector General could not have existed. No single brain, human or otherwise, could hold the enormous quantity of physiological knowledge required to successfully treat the variety of patients they received. But complete physiological data on any patient's species was available by means of Educator tapes, which were simply the brain record of some great medical mind belonging to the same or a similar species as the patient to be treated.
A doctor taking such a tape had, literally, to share his mind with a completely alien personality. That was how it felt. Because all the memories and experience of the being who had donated the tape were impressed on the receiving mind, and not just selected pieces of medical data. Educator tapes could not be edited.
"... Hitherto," O'Mara had gone on seriously, "you've experienced tapes for short periods only, during operations or for purposes of diagnosis, after which they have been erased. Even then the mental confusion can be considerable and I've had to give you hypno treatments at times to remind you which of the two occupants of your mind was boss. From now on, however, you will have no help at all."
"Not at all?" Conway had repeated, aghast. He had been expecting to get used to this thing in easy stages.
"Senior Physicians are supposed to be big boys," O'Mara replied, smiling in the lopsided fashion which indicated that his amusement was tinged with sympathy, "and capable of fighting their own mental battles. So there will be no drugs or hypno-conditioning, all I may give you is advice which you probably won't consider helpful. But don't worry, your first assignment is comparatively easy ..."
A new operative technique had been developed recently for the ELNT life-form, O'Mara had explained, and Conway was to have the job of teaching it to a group of visiting doctors of that species, who would then bring the technique back to their home world. The operation was similar to the work Conway had been doing recently, which was one of the reasons for him being chosen. Models, technical assistance and the finer details of procedure would be furnished by the Director's office. It was also in the nature of a test for Conway.
"... Some odd things have been known to happen to doctors who are taking a long-term Educator treatment," O'Mara had gone on while Conway arranged himself comfortably on the couch and the psychologist fitted the helmet into position. O'Mara's hands, like the rest of him, were blunt, strong and competent "Some people, ideal in every other way, are psychologically incapable of keeping a tape for more than a day. Pains, skin conditions, perhaps organic malfunctionings develop. All have a psychosomatic basis, of course, but we both know that to the person concerned they hurt just as much as the real thing. At the same time these disturbances can be controlled, even negated completely, by a strong mind. Yet a mind which has strength only will break under them in time.
"Flexibility allied with strength is required," he had concluded, "and it is my job to see if that irresponsible lump of porridge you use for a brain possesses those qualities."
O'Mara had then instructed him to keep his mind as blank as possible during the transfer, and a few minutes later removed the helmet and nodded dismissal. With the first evidence of double-mindedness already becoming apparent, Conway had left for the Director's office to receive the details of his assignment.
And that had been only six hours ago.
Conway brought his wandering mind back to the present to find that the other half of it had been carrying on without him. He shook his head irritably in an attempt to fuse the two personalities together, and began to wind up the lecture.
He said: "... In the initial talk of the series I have dealt with the almost insoluble problem of treating the diabetic condition in the ELNT species. To summarise, this condition, or its near equivalent is known to practically all of the warm-blooded oxygen-breathing life-forms. Ideally it can be cured by the restimulation of the faulty or inactive pancreas. Among certain species, which includes the ELNTs, this treatment is impossible due to its disruption of the endocrine balance generally, which is nearly always fatal and invariably destroys the mental processes.
"Earlier and less efficient methods," Conway went on, "which control rather than cure the condition, are also unsuitable for your race. Administering insulin by subcutaneous injection presupposes a thin, flexible tegument underlaid by muscles, adipose and served by a capillary system which will wash the material slowly and evenly into the bloodstream. The ELNT is exo-skeletal, and it is impossible to inject through five inches of bone. The idea of drilling a fine hole and implanting a needle permanently is unsuccessful for various physiological reasons. And taking insulin orally, which relies on a certain proportion being lost as waste and the rest absorbed through the walls of the stomach, is unsuitable for ELNTs because of your digestive tract, whose efficiency varies markedly with the emotional state.
"All of which means," Conway ended simply, "that you Melfans are the only species remaining in which the diabetic condition is fatal."
The three ELNTs made short, complimentary speeches in turn, thanking him for an extremely useful first lecture. Senreth, the being who Conway wanted to think of as it but which one half of his mind demanded that he call she, was most flattering. Which did not help Conway's peace of mind one little bit.
Ordinarily he would have dismissed the class at this point and used the next twenty minutes or so in pulling himself together, Conway thought wryly; but not this time. These ELNTs were important people on the home world, so he was expected to act as host as well as instructor.
Sitting cross-legged at the two-foot high table in the Dining Hall involved no great discomfort, but shifting the mass of sea-food—both plant and animal—set before him was a problem. Conway was ravenously hungry, he knew that the Catering Supervisor would not have sent him out anything which was likely to disagree with his Earth-human metabolism, and by ELNT standards the stuff was delicious—the Melfan part of his mind insisted that it was. But to the Earth-human eye and nose of Conway it was a disgusting mess which stank like over-ripe fish.
He could always order some decent, Earth-human food, of course. But doing so would have been a breach of good manners, because he knew from the ELNT tape in his mind that the sight of steak and potatoes would have done worse things to his Melfan guests than their miniature fish and seaweed was doing to him. It wasn't until he began to relax and let his human identity slip into the background that he was able to eat at all, and then he found himself snapping at the food on his plate with both hands, using his index finger and thumb in imitation of the pincers of his guests. His nosefilters helped a lot, too.
After lunch he showed them around those sections of the hospital which did not require them to don protective suits. Quite a number of races were warm-blooded oxygen-breathers with one-G gravity and pressure, so that the tour lasted over four hours. They talked shop most of the time and Conway tried to keep at least one of the ELNTs between Senreth and himself. He was getting an overwhelming urge to bang his head against its/her carapace just between the neck and left fore-pincer.
Melfans ate every ten hours and took a four-hour sleep between meals, so on his next visit to the Dining Hall Conway could have ordered what he liked. But now the ELNT tape had gained such a strong hold that both Melfan and Earthly wishes were distasteful to him. Yet he was hungry. In desperation he ran his eye down the menu, mentally visualising the items and then hastily putting them out of his mind as the Melfan half registered revulsion or nausea. He had to fall back on sandwiches finally, the standby of all Tape-ridden Diagnosticians and Senior Physicians.
Half his mind insisted that they tasted like cork and the other half thought they were just barely better than nothing. Fuel, he thought disgustedly, just fuel. For Conway all pleasure in eating had gone.
The following three hours Conway spent in his room working on the lectures he would be delivering during the next week. With the enormous mass of ELNT-oriented data and experience on tap, widening his association centres and doubling his brain power, he simply ran through the theoretical aspect of the work. He felt rather awed by himself, even though he realised that this near-genius quality of thinking was normal to one in these circumstances. This was the Ideal—a working synthesis between the knowledge and experience of an entity long dead and the live, original thinking of a practising physician.
Conway prepared material for the next three days. He could not go much further ahead until he had an idea how fast the visitors would absorb the stuff. He was feeling tired by then and decided to try to sleep as quickly as possible, because the ELNT sharing his mind had begun acting up once Conway had stopped concentrating on purely medical subjects. The sooner he could render himself naturally unconscious the better for both of them.
But with that idea he got nowhere at all.
Tossing and turning in his bed, Conway told himself again and again that the entity sharing his mind was just a recording, the memories of a being long past caring about things physical. He, Conway, was the boss and he must put his mental foot down. This Melfan in his mind had no objective reality and its needs therefore were only the barest shadows of desires.
The trouble was, Conway told himself wretchedly, that they did not feel the slightest bit shadowy. Because the ELNT who had made the tape had done so at the height of his professional career, when he was still a comparatively young member of the species, so that all of Conway's objective knowledge that it was dead and gone to the contrary, the personality sharing his mind was as alive and rarin' to go as the day on which the tape had been made. And the Melfans were warm-blooded with a metabolism not too dissimilar to his own. Perhaps hot-blooded would describe them more aptly, because they were an intensely emotional and passionate race. Conway knew. And the being who had made the tape, even for one of his hot-blooded species, had been a hellion where the females were concerned.
Conway drifted off to sleep finally, his mind seething with the hot, vivid imagery more normal to an adolescent seriously disturbed for the first time by a member of the opposite sex. Only on this occasion the girl of Conway's dreams was a six-legged, intelligent crab called Senreth ...
He awoke with a yell of sheer panic. A few minutes later, when his pulse-rate had dropped back to normal, Conway tried to analyse the nightmare which had awakened him. There had been a great and basic fear, vertigo, and the impression of being utterly defenceless. He lay back, closed his eyes ... and five minutes later sat up, sweating.
Normally Conway did not dream, much less have nightmares. The sense of fear which had awakened him could not, he knew, apply to himself, so there must be something in the room or in the situation as a whole which was affecting the Melfan half of his mind. He lay back for the third time and began searching through the ELNT memories for some reason for his panic. It took a long time, because it was such a simple, basic thing that the ELNTs themselves did not think of it consciously. Conway rolled over on to his stomach, and his last thought before going peacefully to sleep was that of course any being with a heavy carapace would feel helpless and afraid if it was forced to sleep on its back.
He awoke with long, rumbling explosions and alarm sirens ringing in his ears. Conway was a very heavy sleeper and had found this to be the combination which wakened him fastest. Some of his colleagues awakened themselves with gentle music, but this Conway considered sissy. The act of groping for the cut-off switch brought him fully awake, and he decided that he would like to crawl around the bottom of his private lake for half an hour before breakfast. If he was feeling particularly devilish he might even dine off a couple of ornamental fish, which were becoming fat and lazy these days. He was on his hands and knees trying to push open the sliding door with his head when the realisation came of what was happening. The ELNT had sneaked up on him while his resistance had been low just after sleep.
He remembered to dress. The Melfans did not use clothing.
Like his last meal, breakfast was a compromise. There was another Earth-human doctor at the same table who was also working on an odd selection of dishes with a similar lack of enthusiasm. They exchanged sickly grins and presently Conway left for the two hundred and third level.
That day was bad, and the one that followed it even worse. The lectures had now progressed to the stage of four-way discussions—which was what Conway had hoped for—and occupied him for three hours each morning and afternoon. Inevitably they overflowed into his lunch period and he had to talk shop while dining with the ELNTs. The food did not bother him so much as the fact that he was having to take Melfan company for nearly eight hours at a stretch every day. It was bothering him, badly. He was being thrown up against Senreth too much.
In one of the busier corridors he had stepped aside to avoid being trampled by an elephantine FGLI. He had stumbled against Senreth and grabbed her mid-left leg to steady himself. The touch thrilled him to the core of his being, even though one half of his mind told him that it felt like a warm, slightly damp log. He drew back hurriedly, his face burning.
"My apologies," said Senreth, in Translated and therefore necessarily emotionless tones. "Ours is an unusually clumsy race."
"My fault entirely," Conway stammered, then added with a rush, "On the contrary, you are both dexterous and physically beautiful ..." He stopped himself in time before the Melfans could realise that he was being personally complimentary to Senreth rather than being polite towards their race as a whole. This had been the first time Conway had engaged in anything other than strictly professional conversation with the Melfan female. His hands were shaking badly.
It was then that Conway decided that he would have to see O'Mara. The ELNTs and himself would start working with models tomorrow, and even for that Conway could not afford to have shaky hands.
...
Nashea2