White, James – Sector General 05 – Sector General

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

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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