The AACL’s tentacle had only caught him a glancing blow-his back wasn’t broken-and the only damage was a wrecked suit radio.
“Are you all right?” Conway asked anxiously when he had Williamson settled in the compartment above. He had to press his helmet against the other’s-that was the only way he could make himself heard now.
For several minutes there was no reply, then the weary, pain-wrecked near-whisper returned.
“My arms hurt. I’m tired,” it said haltingly. “But I’ll be OK when… they take me… inside.” Williamson paused, his voice seemed to gather strength from somewhere and he went on, “That is if there is anybody left alive in the hospital to treat me. If you don’t stop our friend down there…”
Sudden anger flared in Conway. “Dammit, do you never give up?” he burst out. “Get this, I’m not going to kill an intelligent being! My radio’s gone so I don’t have to listen to Lister and Mannon yammering at me, and all I’ve got to do to shut you up is pull my helmet away from yours. ~
The Monitor’s voice had weakened again. He said, “I can still hear Mannon and Lister. They say the wards in Section Eight have been hit now-that’s the other low-gravity section. Patients and doctors are pinned flat to the floor under three Cs. A few more minutes like that and they’ll never get up-MSVKs aren’t at all sturdy, you know…
“Shut up!” yelled Conway. Furiously, he pulled away from contact.
When his anger had abated enough for him to see again, Conway observed that the Monitor’s lips were no longer moving. Williamson’s eyes were closed, his face gray and sweaty with shock and he did not seem to be breathing. The drying chemicals in his helmet kept the faceplate from fogging, so that Conway could not tell for sure but the Monitor could very easily be dead. With exhaustion held off by repeated pep-shots, then his injuries on top of that, Conway had expected him to be dead long since. For some peculiar reason Conway felt his eyes stinging.
He had seen so much death and dismemberment over the last few hours that his sensitivity to suffering in others had been blunted to the point where he reacted to it merely as a medical machine. This feeling of loss, of bereavement, for the Monitor must be simply a resurgence of that sensitivity, and temporary. Of one thing he was sure, however, nobody was going to make this medical machine commit a murder. The Monitor Corps, Conway now knew, was responsible for a lot more good than bad, but he was not a Monitor.
Yet O’Mara and Lister were both Monitors and Doctors, one of them renowned throughout the Galaxy~ Are you better than they are? a little voice nagged in his mind somewhere. And you’re all alone now, it went on, with the hospital disorganized and people dying all over the place because of that being down there. What do you think your chances of survival are? The way you came is plugged with wreckage and nobody can come to your aid, so you’re going to die, too. Isn’t that so?
Desperately Conway tried to hang on to his resolution, to draw it tightly around him like a shell. But that insistent, that cowardly voice in his brain was putting cracks in it. It was with a sense of pure relief that he saw the Monitor’s lips moving again. He touched helmets quickly.
….. Hard for you, a Doctor,” the voice came faintly, “but you’ve got to. Just suppose you were that being down below, driven mad with fear and pain maybe, and for a moment you became sane and somebody told you what you had done-what you were doing, and the deaths you had caused.. .” The voice wavered, sank, then returned. “Wouldn’t you want to die rather than go on killing.. .
“But I can’t . . .
“Wouldn’t you want to die, in its place?”
Conway felt the defensive shell of his resolution begin to disintegrate around him. He said desperately, in a last attempt to hold firm, to stave off the awful decision, “Well, maybe, but I couldn’t kill it even if I tried- it would tear me to pieces before I got near it. .