Dr. Conway never left the dining hall. He had communication with most of the other levels, but the corridors leading to them were in many cases airless or blocked with wreckage, and it was the general opinion that the hospital’s last remaining Senior Physician should stay in a reasonably safe place. He had plenty of human casualties to look after and the difficult e-t cases, whether combatants or casualties among his own staff, were sent to him.
In a way he had the biggest and most compact ward in the hospital. Since nobody had time to gather for meals anymore and relied on packaged food sent to the wards, the main dining hall had been converted. Beds and theater equipment had been clamped to the floor, walls and ceiling of the great room and the patients, being space personnel, were not troubled either by the weightlessness or the sight of other patients hanging a few yards above them. It was convenient for the patients who were able to talk.
Conway had reached the stage of tiredness where he no longer felt tired. The tinny crash and clangor of missiles striking had become a monotonous background noise. He knew that the bombardment was steadily eating through the outer and inner hulls, a deadly erosion which must soon open every corridor and ward to space, but his brain had ceased to react to the sound. When casualties arrived he did what was indicated, but his reactions then were simply the conditioned reflexes of a doctor. He had lost much of his capacity to think or feel or remember, and when he did remember he had no sense of time. The last e-t case — which had required him taking four physiology tapes-stood out amid the weary, bloody, noisy monotony, as did the arrival of Vespasian’s injured. But Conway did not know whether that had been three days of three weeks ago, or which incident had occurred first.
He remembered the Vespasian incident often. Cutting Major Stillman out of his battered suit, stripping it off and pushing away the pieces which persisted in floating around the bed. Stillman had two cracked ribs, a shattered humerus and a minor decompression which was temporarily affecting his eyesight. Until the hypo took hold he kept asking about the Captain.
And Captain Williamson kept asking about his men. Williamson was in a cast from neck to toes, had very little pain and had remembered Conway immediately. It had been a large crew and he must have known them all by their names. Conway didn’t.
“Stillman is three beds away on your right,” Conway had told him, “and there are others all over the place.”
Williamson’s eyes had moved along the patients hanging above him. He couldn’t move anything else. “There’s some of them I don’t recognize,” he had said.
Looking at the livid bruises around Williamson’s right eye, temple and jaw where his face had struck the inside of his helmet, Conway had dragged up his mouth into the semblance of a smile and said, “Some of them won’t recognize you.”
He remembered the second TRLH …
It had arrived strapped to a pressure litter whose atmosphere unit had already filled it with the poison which the occupant called air. Through the twin transparencies of the litter wall and the TRLH’s suit its injuries were plainly apparent-a large, depressed fracture of the carapace which had cut underlying blood vessels. There was no time to take the tapes he had used during the previous TRLH case because the patient was obviously bleeding to death. Conway nodded for the litter to be clamped into the cleared area in the center of the floor and quickly changed his suit gauntlets for litter gloves. From the beds attached to the ceiling, eyes watched his every move.
He charged the gloves and pushed his hands against the sagging, transparent fabric of the tent. Immediately the thin, tough material became rubbery and pliable without losing any of its strength. It clung to the charged gloves, if not like a second skin at least like another pair of thin gloves. Carefully so as not to strain the fabric which separated the two mutually poisonous atmospheres, Conway removed the patient’s suit with instruments clipped to the inside of the litter.
Quite complex procedures were possible while operating a flexible tent-Conway had a couple of PVSJs and a QCQL a few beds away to prove it-but they were limited by the instruments and medication available inside the tent, and the slight hampering effect of the fabric.
He had been removing the splinters of carapace from the damaged area when the crash of a missile striking nearby made the floor jump. The alarm bell which indicated a pressure drop sounded a few minutes later and Murchison and the Kelgian military doctor — the entire ward staff-had hurried to check the seals on the tents of patients who were not able to check their own. The drop was slight, probably a small leak caused by sprung plating, but to Conway’s patient inside the tent it could be deadly. He had begun working with frantic speed.
But while he had striven to tie off the severed blood vessels the thin, tough fabric of the pressure litter began to swell out. It had become difficult to hold instruments, virtually impossible to guide them accurately, and his hands were actually pushed away from the operative field. The difference in pressure between the interior of the tent and the ward was only a few pounds per square inch at most, barely enough to have made Conway’s ears pop, but the fabric of the litter had continued to balloon out. He had withdrawn helplessly, and half an hour later when the leak had been sealed and normal pressure restored, he had started again. By then it had been too much.
He remembered a sudden impairment of vision then, and a shock of surprise when he realized that he was crying. Tears weren’t a conditioned medical reflex, he knew, because doctors just did not cry over patients.
Probably it had been a combination of anger at losing the patient-who really should not have been lost-and his extreme fatigue. And when he’d seen the expressions of all the patients watching him, Conway had felt horribly embarrassed.
Now the events around him had taken on a jerky, erratic motion. His eyes kept closing and several seconds, or minutes, passed before he could force them open again even though to himself no time at all went by. The walking wounded-patients with injuries which allowed them to move about the ward and return quickly to their tents in the event of a puncture-were moving from bed to bed doing the small, necessary jobs, or chatting with patients who couldn’t move, or hanging like ungainly shoals of fish while they talked among themselves. But Conway was always too busy with the newly-arrived patients, or too confused with a multiplicity of tapes, to chat with the older ones. Mostly, however, his eyes went to the sleeping figures of Murchison and the Kelgian who floated near the entrance to the ward.
The Kelgian hung like a great, furry question mark, now and then emitting the low moaning sound which some DBLFs made when they were asleep. Murchison floated at the end of a snaking, ten-foot safety line, turning slowly. It was odd how sleepers in the weightless condition adopted the fetal position, Conway thought tenderly as he watched his beautiful, adult girl baby swaying at the end of an impossibly thin umbilical cord. He desperately wanted to sleep himself, but it was his spell on duty and he would not be relieved for a long time-five minutes maybe, or five hours, but an eternity in either case. He would have to keep doing something.
Without realizing he had made a decision he found himself moving into the empty storeroom which housed the terminal and probable terminal cases. It was only here that Conway spared himself the time to chat, or if talking was not possible to do the essential and at the same time useless things which help to comfort the dying. With the e-ts he could only stand by and hope that the shattered, bloody wreckage of the Tralthan or Melfan or whatever would be given a tiny flash of Prilicla’s emphathetic faculty so that they would know he was a friend and how he felt.
It was only gradually that Conway became aware that the walking wounded had followed him into the room, together with patients who had no business being outside their tents who were being towed by the others. They gathered slowly around and above him, their expression grim, determined and respectful. Major Stillman pushed his way to the front, awkwardly, because in his one good hand he carried a gun.