“Ah … er, Williamson,” Conway began hesitantly, then finished with a rush, “have you ever killed anybody?”
The Monitor straightened suddenly, his lips a thin, bloodless line. He said tonelessly, “You should know better than to ask a Monitor that question, Doctor. Or should you?” He hesitated, his curiosity keeping check on the anger growing in him because of the tangle of emotion which must have been mirrored on Conway’s face, then said heavily, “What’s eating you, Doc?”
Conway wished fervently that he had never asked the question, but it was too late to back out now. Stammering at first, he began to tell of his ideals of service and of his alarm and confusion on discovering that Sector General — an establishment which he had thought embodied all his high ideals-employed a Monitor as its Chief Psychologist, and probably other members of the Corps in positions of responsibility. Conway knew now that the Corps was not all bad, that they had rushed units of their Medical Division here to aid them during the present emergency. But even so, Monitors …!
“I’ll give you another shock,” Williamson said dryly, “by telling you something that is so widely known that nobody thinks to mention it. Dr. Lister, the Director, also belongs to the Monitor Corps.
“He doesn’t wear uniform, of course,” the Monitor added quickly, “because Diagnosticians grow forgetful and are careless about small things. The Corps frowns on untidiness, even in a Lieutenant-General.”
Lister, a Monitor! “But, why?” Conway burst out in spite of himself. “Everybody knows what you are. How did you gain power here in the first place …
“Everybody does not know, obviously,” Williamson cut in, “because you don’t, for one.
VI
The Monitor was no longer angry, Conway saw as they finished with their current patient and moved onto the next. Instead there was an expression on the other’s face oddly reminiscent of a parent about to lecture an offspring on some of the unpleasant facts of life.
“Basically,” said Williamson as he gently peeled back a field dressing of a wounded DBLF, “your trouble is that you, and your whole social group, are a protected species.”
Conway said, “What?”
“A protected species,” he repeated. “Shielded from the crudities of present-day life. From your social strata-on all the worlds of the Union, not only on Earth — come practically all the great artists, musicians and professional men. Most of you live out your lives in ignorance of the fact that you are protected, that you are insulated from childhood against the grosser realities of our interstellar so-called civilization, and that your ideas of pacifism and ethical behavior are a luxury which a great many of us simply cannot afford. You are allowed this luxury in the hope that from it may come a philosophy which may one day make every being in the Galaxy truly civilized, truly good.”
“I didn’t know,” Conway stammered. “And… and you make us — me, I mean — look so useless …”
“Of course you didn’t know,” said Williamson gently. Conway wondered why it was that such a young man could talk down to him without giving offense; he seemed to possess authority somehow. Continuing, he said, “You were probably reserved, untalkative and all wrapped up in your high ideals. Not that there’s anything wrong with them, understand, it’s just that you have to allow for a little gray with the black and white. Our present culture,” he went on, returning to the main line of discussion,
“is based on maximum freedom for the individual. An entity may do anything he likes provided it is not injurious to others. Only Monitors forgo this freedom.”
“What about the 'Normals’ reservations?” Conway broke in. At last the Monitor had made a statement which he could definitely contradict. “Being policed by Monitors and confined to certain areas of country is not what I’d call freedom.”
“If you think back carefully,” Williamson replied, “I think you will find that the Normals — that is, the group on nearly every planet which thinks that, unlike the brutish Monitors and the spineless aesthetes of your own strata, it is truly representative of its species — are not confined. Instead they have naturally drawn together into communities, and it is in these communities of self-styled Normals that the Monitors have to be most active. The Normals possess all the freedom including the right to kill each other if that is what they desire, the Monitors being present only to see that any Normal not sharing this desire will not suffer in the process.
“We also, when a sufficiently high pitch of mass insanity overtakes one or more of these worlds, allow a war to be fought on a planet set aside for that purpose, generally arranging things so that the war is neither long nor too bloody.” Williamson sighed. In tones of bitter self-accusation he concluded, “We underestimated them. This one was both.”
Conway’s mind was still balking at this radically new slant on things. Before coming to the hospital he’d had no direct contact with Monitors, why should he? And the Normals of Earth he had found to be rather romantic figures, inclined to strut and swagger a bit, that was all. Of course, most of the bad things he had heard about Monitors had come from them. Maybe the Normals had not been as truthful or objective as they could have been …
“This is all too hard to believe,” Conway protested. “You’re suggesting that the Monitor Corps is greater in the scheme of things than either the Normals or ourselves, the professional class!” He shook his head angrily. “And anyway, this is a fine time for a philosophical discussion!”
“You,” said the Monitor, “started it.”
There was no answer to that.
It must have been hours later that Conway felt a touch on his shoulder and straightened to find a DBLF nurse behind him. The being was holding a hypodermic. It said, “Pep-shot, Doctor?”
All at once Conway realized how wobbly his legs had become and how hard it was to focus his eyes. And he must have been noticeably slowing down for the nurse to approach him in the first place. He nodded and rolled up his sleeve with fingers which felt like thick, tired sausages.
“Yipe!” he cried in sudden anguish. “What are you using, a six-inch nail?”
“I am sorry,” said the DBLF, “but I have injected two doctors of my own species before coming to you, and as you know our tegument is thicker and more closely grained than yours is. The needle has therefore become blunted.”
Conway’s fatigue dropped away in seconds. Except for a slight tingling in hands and feet and a grayish blotching which only others could see in his face he felt as clear-eyed, alert and physically refreshed as if he had just come out of a shower after ten hours sleep. He took a quick look around before finishing his current examination and saw that here at least the number of patients awaiting attention had shrunk to a mere handful, and the number of Monitors in the room was less than half what it had been at the start. The patients were being taken care of, and the Monitors had become patients.
He had seen it happening all around him. Monitors who had had little or no sleep on the transport coming here, forcing themselves to carry on helping the overworked medics of the hospital with repeated pep-shots and sheer, dogged courage. One by one they had literally dropped in their tracks and been taken hurriedly away, so exhausted that the involuntary muscles of heart and lungs had given up with everything else. They lay in special wards with robot devices massaging their hearts, giving artificial respiration and feeding them through a vein in the leg. Conway had heard that only one of them had died.
Taking advantage of the lull, Conway and Williamson moved to the direct vision panel and looked out. The waiting swarm of ships seemed only slightly smaller, though he knew that these must be new arrivals. He could not imagine where they were going to put these people — even the habitable corridors in the hospital were beginning to overflow now, and there was constant re-arranging of patients of all species to make more room. But that wasn’t his problem, and the weaving pattern of ships was an oddly restful sight …