White, James – Sector General 07 – Code Blue Emergency

with the deck, and changes in direction were effected by lowering friction pads,

angling the thrusters, or, for fine control, leaning sideways. If emergency

braking was necessary, the power was switched off. This caused the vehicle to

drop to the deck and grind noisily to a halt. But this maneuver was discouraged

because it made the driver very unpopular with the service crew who had to

realign the repulsor grids.

By the end of the day her vehicle had slipped and spun all over the transport

hangar floor, hit every collapsible marker that she was supposed to steer

around, and generally displayed a high level of noncooperation. Timmins gave her

a packet of study tapes, told her to look over them before next morning, and

said that her driving was pretty good for a beginner.

Three days later she began to believe it.

“I drove a sled with a trailer attached, both fully loaded, from Level Eighteen

to Thirty-three,” she told Tarsedth, when her one-time classmate visited her for

the customary evening gossip. “I did it Using only theservice tunnels, and

without hitting anything or anybody.”

“Should I be impressed?” the Kelgian asked.

“A little,” Cha Thrat said, feeling more than a little deflated. “What’s been

happening to you?”

“Cresk-Sar transferred to me LSVO Surgical,” Tar-sedth said, its fur rippling in

an unreadable mixture of emotions. “It said I was ready to broaden my

other-species nursing experience, and working with a light-gravity life-form

would improve my delicacy of touch. And anyway, it said, Charge Nurse

Lentilatsar, the rotten, chlorine-breathing slimy slob, was not entirely happy

with the way I exercised my initiative. What tape is that? It looks massively

uninteresting.”

“To the contrary,” Cha Thrat said, touching the pause stud. The screen showed a

picture of a group of Monitor Corps officers meeting the great Earth-human

MacEwan and the equally legendary Orligian Grawlya-Ki, the true founders, it was

said, of Sector General hospital. “It’s the history, organization, and present

activities of the Monitor Corps. I find it very interesting, but ethically

confusing. For example, why must a peace-keeping force be so heavily armed?”

“Because, stupid, it couldn’t if it wasn’t,” Tarsedth said. It went on quickly.

“But on the subject of the Monitor Corps I’m an expert. A lot of Kelgians join

these days, and I was going to try for a position as Surgeon-Lieutenant, a

ship’s medic, that is, and might still do it if 1 don’t qualify here.

“Of course,” it went on enthusiastically, “there are other, nonmilitary,

openings…”

As the Galactic Federation’s executive and law-enforcement arm, the Monitor

Corps was essentially a police force on an interstellar scale, but during the

first century since it had come into existence it had becomemuch more.

Originally, when the Federation naa comprised a rather unstable alliance of only

four inhabited systems—Nidia, Orligia, Traltha, and Earth—its personnel had been

exclusively Earth-human. But those Earth-humans were responsible for discovering

other inhabited systems, and more and more intelligent life-forms, and for

establishing friendly contact with them.

The result was that the Federation now numbered among its citizens close on

seventy different species— the figure was constantly being revised upward—and

the peace-keeping function had taken second place to that of the Survey,

Exploration, and Other-species Communications activities. The people with the

heavy weaponry did not mind because a police force, unlike an army, feels at its

most effective when there is nothing for it to do but keep in training by

carving up the odd mineral-rich asteroid for the mining people, or clearing and

leveling large tracts of virgin land on a newly discovered world in preparation

for the landing of colonists.

The last time a Monitor Corps police action had been indistinguishable from an

act of war had been nearly two decades ago, when they had defended Sector

General itself from the badly misguided Etlans, who had since become law-abiding

citizens of the Federation. A few of them had even joined the Corps.

“Nowadays membership is open to any species,” Tarsedth continued, “although for

physiological reasons, life-support and accommodation problems on board the

smaller ships, most of the space-going personnel are warm-blooded

oxygen-breathers.

“Like I said,” the Kelgian went on, undulating forward and restarting the tape,