Sector General Omnibus 2 - Alien Emergencies Read Free Page A

background, reckoning that it was a new idea. Harry still intended doing the stories, Ted said, but his enthusiasm had been blunted.
    This last piece of news scared me half to death.
    At that time I had not met Harry Harrison, but I knew quite a lot about him. I knew since reading Rockdiver as a very young fan that he had been one of my favorite authors; that he spoke rather loudly to people when he was roused; and that he was probably Deathworld on two feet. And there was I, a fan and a professional writer still wet behind the ears, having the effrontery to actually blunt his enthusiasm! But Harry must be a truly kind and forgiving soul because nothing catastrophic has happened to me. At least not yet.
    All the same, there must be a probability world somewhere in which he got in first with the idea and blunted my enthusiasm, and the SF shelves in the bookshops carry a series of books by Harry Harrison about an interstellar hospital. If someone would invent a transverse time-travel machine, I should dearly like to borrow it for a few hours to buy those books.
    The second story in the series was “Trouble with Emily” and Ted was much happier with this one. It featured Doctor Conway—carrying a pint-sized alien with psi powers on his shoulder instead of a large chip—and a party of Monitor Corpsmen, who were assisting him with the treatment of a brontosaurus-like patient calledEmily, because one of the Corps officers had a fondness for reading the Brontë sisters.
    But the function of the Monitor Corps, the law enforcement and executive arm of the Galactic Federation whose sixty-odd intelligent species were represented on the staff of Sector General, was something that needed clarification, I thought. The result was a very long novelette of some 21,000 words.
    Essentially the Monitor Corps was a police force on an interstellar scale, but I did not want them to be the usual ruthless, routine-indoctrinated, basically stupid organization that is so handy to have around when an idealistic principal character needs a bit of ethical conflict. Conway was one of the good guys and I wanted them to be good guys too, but with different ideas as to the kind of activity that produces the greater good.
    Their duties included interstellar survey and first-contact work as well as maintaining the Federation’s peace—a job that could, if they were unable to discourage the warmongers, give rise to a police action that was indistinguishable from an act of war. But the Corps much preferred to wage psychological warfare aimed at discouraging planetary and interplanetary violence and when, despite their efforts, a war broke out, then they very closely monitored the beings who were waging it.
    These warlike entities belonged to a psychological rather than physiological classification, and regardless of species they were the classification responsible for most of the trouble within the Federation. The story told of the efforts of the Monitor Corps first to attempt to prevent the war and then damp down the war, and Conway and Sector General came into it only when things went catastrophically wrong and large numbers of human and e-t casualties had to be dealt with. The original title of the story was “Classification: Warrior.”
    Ted, however, insisted that it was much too serious a story to be tied into the Sector General series, and he had me delete all references to the Monitor Corps (rechristening them the Stellar Guard), the Federation, Sector General hospital and Conway. The story was retitled “Occupation: Warrior.” It appeared in the collection The Aliens Among Us , which also contained a proper Sector General story called “Countercharm.”
    With the next story, “Visitor at Large,” later published in the collection entitled Hospital Station , the series was firmly back on the rails. Appearing for the first time in the hospital was the insectile, incredibly fragile and emotion-sensitive Doctor Prilicla, who was later to become