Rhabwar. It is our job which is important enough to command the reassignment of
a few flotillas of scoutships to assist.”
“But it requires the rank of subfleet Commander or highej to order such a
thing—” Nelson began, and broke off as Con-way shook his head.
“To explain it I must first fill in some background, Captain,” he said. “Some of
this information is common knowledge. Much of it is not because the relevant
decisions of the Federation Council and their effects on Monitor Corps
operational priorities are too recent for it to have filtered down to you. And
you’ll excuse me, I hope, if some of it is elementary, especially to a scoutship
Captain on a survey mission…”
Only a tiny fraction of the Galaxy had been explored by the Earth-humans or by
any of the sixty-odd other races who made up the Galactic Federation, so that
the member races were in the peculiar position of people who had friends in far
countries but had no idea who was living in the next street. The reason for this
was that travelers tended to meet each other more often than the people who
stayed at home, especially when the travelers exchanged addresses and visited
each other regularly.
Visiting was comparatively easy. Providing there were no major distorting
influences on the way and the exact coordinates of the destination were known,
it was almost as easy to travel through hyperspace to a neighboring solar system
as to one at the other side of the galaxy. But first one had to find a system
containing a planet with intelligent life before its coordinates could be
logged, and finding new inhabited systems was proving to be no easy task.
Very, very slowly a few of the blank areas in the star maps were being surveyed
and explored, but with little success. When
:
survey scoutship like Tyrell turned up a star with planets it was a rare find,
even rarer if one of the planets harbored life. And if one of these life-forms
was intelligent then jubilation, not unmixed with concern over what might
possibly be a future threat to the Pax Galactica, swept the worlds of the
Federation, and the cultural contact specialists of the Monitor Corps were
assigned the tricky, time-consuming, and often dangerous job of establishing
contact in depth.
The cultural contact people were the elite of the Monitor Corps, a small group
of specialists in extraterrestrial communications, philosophy, and psychology.
Although small, the group was not, regrettably, overworked.
“During the past twenty years,” Conway went on, “they have initiated
first-contact procedure on three occasions, all of which were successful and
resulted in the species concerned joining the Federation. There is no need to
bore you with such details as the fantastically large number of survey missions
mounted, the ships, personnel, and material involved, or shock you with the cost
of it all. I mention the cultural contact group’s three successes simply to make
the point that within the same period Sector Twelve General Hospital, our first
multienviron-ment medical treatment center, became fully operational and
initiated first contacts which resulted in seven new species joining the
Federation.
“This was accomplished,” he explained, “not by a slow, patient buildup and
widening of communications until the exchange of complex philosophical and
sociological concepts became possible, but by giving medical assistance to a
sick alien.”
This was something of an oversimplification, Conway admitted. There were the
medical and surgical problems inherent in treating a hitherto unknown life-form.
Sector General’s translation computer, the second largest in the Federation,
was available, as was the assistance of the Monitor Corps’ hospital-based
communications specialists, and the Corps had been responsible for rescuing and
bringing in many of the extraterrestrial casualties in the first place. But the
fact remained that the hospital, by giving medical assistance, demonstrated the
Federation’s goodwill toward e-ts much more simply and directly than could have
been done by any time-consuming exchange of concepts.
Because all Federation ships were required to file course and passenger or crew
details before departure, the position of a distress signal was usually a good
indication of the ship and therefore the physiological classification of the
beings who had run into trouble, and an ambulance ship with matching crew and