Alien Emergencies - James White [3]
One of the few characters ever to have engaged in deliberate killing is Monitor Fleet Commander (later Sector Marshal) Dermod, who has spent his life expiating his role in the small but bloody conflict of “Occupation: Warrior” (1959), a story whose Sector General links were removed by an editor who thought it too grim for the series. Now Dermod’s colossal Emperor-class battleship Vespasian is chiefly called on for shows of force or vast rescue manoeuvres—as in Major Operation, where it literally has to hold a giant tourniquet, and the present volume’s “Combined Operation.”
That underlying moral sense illuminates such later and slightly darker segments as Star Healer, where after all the fireworks of his brilliant diagnoses and miracle cures, Conway is kicked upstairs to try his hand at the full responsibilities of a Diagnostician and to tackle cases that can’t be solved with a single dazzling intuition. Instead he must brace himself for tougher tussles: with the grim evolutionary dilemmas of the Gogleskans who daren’t approach each other and the reflexively violent Protectors who cannot be approached, with terminal injuries and recognition of the need for triage after major accidents, with normally cheerful and ultra-tough Hudlar FROB space roustabouts who have been reduced to a pitiable state by post-transplant shock or crippling senility.
Before this chance of promotion, though, the lighter-hearted Ambulance Ship and Sector General take Conway far away from the massive presence of the hospital and its permanent staff, to investigate medical enigmas with no immediate resources but the tiny Rhabwar team. This makes for a pleasant series of shorter adventures revisiting favourite auctorial themes.
Without too overtly giving away surprises, it can be said that most of Ambulance Ship and Sector General see our man working his way thoughtfully around two pet concepts which crop up elsewhere in the sequence. One is best phrased as a question: is there any inherent biological or physical handicap to space travel which sufficient intelligence and ingenuity cannot overcome? Series readers will remember that a certain immodest alien in Major Operation, whose deeply weird physiology should have trapped him for life on the sea bed, is first encountered as an orbiting astronaut.
Stories building on this question in Ambulance Ship and Sector General confront the baffled but eventually insightful Conway with five even more extreme cases. How can the dream of space possibly apply to e-t species who are blind, or limbless, or utterly devoid of mechanical technology, or helpless prisoners within insensately violent host-bodies, or larger than the greatest monsters of Earth’s deep seas? Aha.
The stories’ other repeated issue is the cheeky challenging of a Sector General axiom: that cross-species infection is as a rule impossible and that Conway and friends therefore need never fear catching something awful from their patients. Three clever exceptions are presented, though not of the kind that disprove the rule. Gulfs of time, a common chemistry, and the established (through Prilicla) premise of psychic empathy all sneak around the apparent constraints. A fourth and particularly far-out possibility—already planted in the early Star Surgeon— becomes the heart of the medical mystery in the later novel Final Diagnosis.
Among this volume’s shorts the odd man out is “Accident,” set before the building of Sector General and linking it to James’s moving war or antiwar story “Tableau,” which can be found in his 1970 collection The Aliens Among Us. An all too credible accident in a multi-species spaceport facility, and the resulting nightmare struggle with intractable wreckage in an increasingly toxic atmosphere, crystallize the need for medical and paramedical expertise that