Desperately Conway tried to hang on to his resolution, to draw it tightly around him like a shell. But that insistent, that cowardly voice in his brain was putting cracks in it. It was with a sense of pure relief that he saw the Monitor’s lips moving again. He touched helmets quickly.
… Hard for you, a Doctor,” the voice came faintly, “but you’ve got to. Just suppose you were that being down below, driven mad with fear and pain maybe, and for a moment you became sane and somebody told you what you had done — what you were doing, and the deaths you had caused …” The voice wavered, sank, then returned. “Wouldn’t you want to die rather than go on killing …
“But I can’t …
“Wouldn’t you want to die, in its place?”
Conway felt the defensive shell of his resolution begin to disintegrate around him. He said desperately, in a last attempt to hold firm, to stave off the awful decision, “Well, maybe, but I couldn’t kill it even if I tried — it would tear me to pieces before I got near it …
“I’ve got a gun,” said the Monitor.
Conway could not remember adjusting the firing controls, or even taking the weapon from the Monitor’s holster. It was in his hand and trained on the AACL below, and Conway felt sick and cold. But he had not given in to Williamson completely. Near at hand was a sprayer of the fast-setting plastic which, when used quickly enough, could sometimes save a person whose suit had been holed. Conway planned to wound the being, immobilize it, then re-seal its suit with cement. It would be a close thing and risky to himself, but he could not deliberately kill the being.
Carefully he brought his other hand up to steady the gun and took aim. He fired.
When he lowered it there was not much left except shredded twitching pieces of tentacles scattered all over the room. Conway wished now that he had known more about guns, known that this one shot explosive bullets, and that it had been set for continuous automatic fire …
Williamson’s lips were moving again. Conway touched helmets out of pure reflex. He was past caring about anything anymore.
It’s all right, Doctor,” the Monitor was saying. “It isn’t anybody..
“It isn’t anybody now,” Conway agreed. He went back to examining the Monitor’s gun and wished that it wasn’t empty. If there had been one bullet left, just one, he knew how he would have used it.
“It was hard, we know that,” said Major O’Mara. The rasp was no longer in his voice and the iron-gray eyes were soft with sympathy, and something akin to pride. “A doctor doesn’t have to make a decision like that usually until he’s older, more balanced, mature, if ever. You are, or were, just an over-idealistic kid — a bit on the smug and self-righteous side maybe — who didn’t even know what a Monitor really was.”
O’Mara smiled. His two big, hard hands rested on Conway’s shoulders in an oddly fatherly gesture. He went on, “Doing what you forced yourself to do could have ruined both your career and your mental stability. But it doesn’t matter, you don’t have to feel guilty about a thing. Everything’s all right.”
Conway wished dully that he had opened his face-plate and ended it all before those Engineers had swarmed into the gravity grid control room and carried Williamson and himself off to O’Mara. O’Mara must be mad. He, Conway, had violated the prime ethic of his profession and killed an intelligent being. Everything most definitely was not all right.
“Listen to me,” O’Mara said seriously. “The Communications boys managed to get a picture of the crashed ship’s control room, with the occupant in it, before it hit. The occupant was not your AACL, understand? It was an AMSO, one of the bigger life-forms who are in the habit of keeping a non-intelligent AACL-type creature as pets. Also, there are no AACLs listed in the hospital, so the beastie you killed was simply the equivalent of a fear-maddened dog in a protective suit.” O’Mara shook Conway’s shoulder until his head wobbled. “Now do you feel better?”
Conway felt himself coming alive again. He nodded wordlessly.
“You can go,” said O’Mara, smiling, “and catch up on your sleep. As for the reorientation talk, I’m afraid I haven’t the time to spare. Remind me about it sometime, if you still think you need it …
During the fourteen hours in which Conway slept, the intake of wounded dropped to a manageable trickle, and news came that the war was over. Monitor engineers and maintenance men succeeded in clearing the wreckage and repairing the damaged outer hull. With pressure restored, the internal repair work proceeded rapidly, so that when Conway awoke and went in search of Dr. Mannon he found patients being moved into a section which only hours ago had been a dark, airless tangle of wreckage.
He tracked his superior down in a side ward off the main FGLI Casualty section. Mannon was working over a badly burned DBLF whose caterpillar-like body was dwarfed by a table which was designed to take the more massive Tralthan FGLIs. Two other DBLFs, under sedation, showed as white mounds on a similarly outsize bed against the wall, and another lay twitching slightly on a stretcher-carrier near the door.
“Where the blazes have you been?” Mannon said in a voice too tired to be angry. Before Conway could reply he went on impatiently, “Oh, don’t tell me. Everybody is grabbing everybody else’s staff, and junior interns have to do as they’re told …
Conway felt his face going red. Suddenly he was ashamed of that fourteen hours sleep, but was too much of a coward to correct Mannon’s wrong assumption. Instead he said, “Can I help, sir?”
“Yes,” said Mannon, waving toward his patients. “But these are going to be tricky. Punctured and incised wounds, deep. Metallic fragments still within the body, abdominal damage and severe internal hemorrhage. You won’t be able to do much without a tape. Go get it. And come straight back, mind!”
A few minutes later he was in O’Mara’s office absorbing the DBLF physiology tape. This time he didn’t flinch from the Major’s hands. While the headband was being removed he asked, “How is Corpsman Williamson?”
“He’ll live,” said O’Mara dryly. “The bones were set by a Diagnostician. Williamson won’t dare die …
Conway rejoined Mannon as quickly as possible. He was experiencing the characteristic mental double-vision and had to resist the urge to crawl on his stomach, so he knew that the DBLF tape was taking. The caterpillar-like inhabitants of Kelgia were very close to Earth-humans both in basic metabolism and temperament, so there was less of the confusion he had encountered with the earlier Telfi tape. But it gave him an affinity for the beings he was treating which was actually painful.
The concept of gun, bullet and target was a very simple one-just point, pull the trigger, and the target is dead or disabled. The bullet didn’t think at all, the pointer didn’t think enough, and the target … suffered.
Conway had seen too many disabled targets recently, and lumps of metal which had plowed their way into them leaving red craters in torn flesh, bone splinters and ruptured blood vessels. In addition there was the long, painful process of recovery. Anyone who would inflict such damage on a thinking, feeling entity deserved something much more painful than the Monitor corrective psychiatry.
A few days previously Conway would have been ashamed of such thoughts-and he was now, a little. He wondered if recent events had initiated in him a process of moral degeneration, or was it that he was merely beginning to grow up?
Five hours later they were through. Mannon gave his nurse instructions to keep the four patients under observation, but told her to get something to eat first. She was back within minutes carrying a large pack of sandwiches and bearing the news that their dining hall had been taken over by Tralthan Male Medical. Shortly after that Dr. Mannon went to sleep in the middle of his second sandwich. Conway loaded him onto the stretcher-carrier and took him to his room. On the way out he was collared by a Tralthan Diagnostician who ordered him to a DBDG casualty section.