Sector General Omnibus 2 - Alien Emergencies Read Free Page B

the most popular character in the series. The patient that Conway and Prilicla were treating was physically incapable of becoming sick, although it was, of course, subject to psychological disturbances. This particular patient was amoebic, highly adaptable and had the ability to extrude any limbs or sensory organs required for any given situation. It reproduced by fission and inherited at the time of its “birth” all of the experience and knowledge of its parent, and of its parent’s parent, and on back to the beginning of its evolution. The creature’s problem was that it had suffered a trauma that had caused it to withdraw from all outside contact and it was slowly dissolving into water; and water turned out to be the solution in both senses of the word.
    The next story featured a jump backwards in time to the period when the hospital was under construction, and the central character was O’Mara, who was later to become its Chief Psychologist. This was followed by a story that featured a patient with a most distressing collection of symptoms, which Conway steadfastly, and against all the advice and direct orders of his superiors, refused to treat. The stories were called “Medic” and “Outpatient” respectively, and they also appeared in the Hospital Station collection, which contained all five of the Sector General stories written at that time.
    Around this time the one-hundredth issue of New Worlds was coming up and Ted Carnell had been writing to his regular authors asking them to produce something special for it. I submitted a 14,000-worder called “The Apprentice”—it later appeared in my Monsters and Medics collection—which he straightaway stuck into issue 99 because, he said, he had only a 7,000-word hole left in number 100. Could I fill it with a Sector General short story, within three weeks?
    I badly wanted to make it into that one-hundredth issue with its lineup of top authors, but I did not have a single alien ailment in my head. In desperation I tried to build a story around an Earthhuman condition that might have an extraterrestrial equivalent, an ailment of which I had firsthand experience, diabetes.
    Now there is no great problem in pushing a hypodermic needle through the tegument and subcutaneous tissue of an Earth-human and injecting a measured dose of insulin—except sometimes I go “Ouch.” But suppose the diabetic patient was a crab-like life-form, whose limbs and body were covered by a hard shell? Obviously the same procedure would not be suitable, unless one used a sterile power drill and even this, in time, would lead to grave weakening of the body structure by leaving it in the condition of an exoskeletal sieve. Solving this problem, with the help of a magnificently proportioned nurse and later an e-t pathologist called Murchison, was the plot line for the story “Countercharm,” which dropped nicely into Ted’s 7,000-word hole as well as appearing later in The Aliens Among Us collection.
    Probably the next idea for the series came about because of a second or third re-reading of Hal Clement’s Needle . The situation was that a Very Important Extraterrestrial Person had had a disagreement with its personal medic and as a result had been admitted to the hospital. Only much later in the story did Conway discover that the medic in question was an intelligent, organized virus life-form who lived and worked inside its patient. The story was called, inevitably, “Resident Physician” and was an introductory novelette to the first, and so far the only, Sector General novel-length work, “Field Hospital.” “Resident Physician” and “Field Hospital” were later published together as Star Surgeon .
    Normally I do not like stories of violence or the senseless killing that is war. But if a story is to hold the interest of the reader there must be conflict, which means violence or struggle of some kind. However, in a medical SF story of the Sector General type the violence is