Alien Emergencies - James White [7]
There was a four-year gap before the next stories in the series were written. These were five novelettes that were planned, like the Ambulance Ship trio, to build progressively into a novel. They were “Invader,” “Vertigo,” “Blood Brother,” “Meatball” and “Major Operation,” and with linking material added they were published as the book-length Major Operation.
“Invader” set the stage by introducing to the hospital a thought-controlled tool that caused havoc until Conway realized how valuable such a device could be in the hands of a surgeon who fully understood its uses. During further investigation of the planet on which the tool originated, the Monitor Corps rescued a doughnut-shaped alien who had to roll all the time to live because it did not have a heart but depended on a gravity feed system for blood circulation. This story was called “Vertigo,” and the alien was a present of my friend Bob Shaw, who called it a Drambon.
Bob thought it might be fun if I used his e-t and called it a Drambon because he had used the Drambon species in one of his stories; then we could wait and see how long it would take one of the science-fiction buffs to spot the fact that a certain extraterrestrial had cropped up, or rather rolled up, in the work of two different authors. But up until now the widely traveled Drambon life-form seems to have gone unspotted.
The next story in the series derived from an original idea by a well-known English fan of the time, Ken Cheslin. We were at a convention party when he said, as nearly as I can remember, “James, you know how doctors used to be called leeches? Why don’t you write a story where the doctor really is a leech?” The e-t that resulted was a life-form whose method of treatment was to withdraw practically all of its patient’s blood—a very disconcerting process for the being concerned—and remove the offending toxic material or micro-organisms before returning the blood to the patient good as new. The story was called “Blood Brother.” Thanks, Ken.
Regarding “Meatball” and the climactic “Major Operation,” there is very little to say except that the poisoned and polluted living planet that was the patient in those stories required treatment on such a vast scale that the operation was a military as well as a medical one.
The next story in the series, so far published only in Britain in New Writings in SF 22, was called “Spacebird.” The idea for an organic, completely non-metallic spaceship had been in my notebook for a long time, but it could not be used until I could discover a means of boosting such a bird to escape velocity. Then at one of the conventions I mentioned my problem to Jack Cohen. Jack, who is a very helpful person and a stickler for xenobiological verisimilitude, is senior lecturer in animal reproduction at the University of Birmingham in England. He knows so much about strange and alien life-forms that, when asked if a certain hypothetical extraterrestrial is physiologically possible, he invariably cites examples of a couple of terrestrial life-forms that are even weirder. The answer to my problem, Jack said, was the bombardier beetle—a small, mid-European insect that, when threatened with danger, expels and ignites gas from its rear so violently that it lands many inches away.
When the story was written, the launching of the spacecraft was from a Mesklin-type planet with high centrifugal force and low gravity at its equator to aid the process; and it was with millions of outsize bombardier beetles forming the multistaging sequences, all blasting