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,