Sector General Omnibus 1 - Beginning Operations Read Online Free Page B

illogical and somewhat maudlin thinking did not seem strange to O’Mara at all.
    Then abruptly there came a change in what O’Mara had accepted as the order of things. The FROB after complaining, was fed and refused to shut up!
    O’Mara’s first reaction was a feeling of hurt surprise; this was against the rules . They cried, you fed them, they stopped crying—at least for a while. This was so unfair that it left him too shocked and helpless to react.
    The noise was bedlam, with variations. Long, discordant blasts of sound beat over him. Sometimes the pitch and volume varied in an insanely arbitrary manner and at others it had a grinding, staccato quality as if broken glass had got into its vocal gears. There were intervals of quiet, varying between two seconds and half a minute, during which O’Mara cringed waiting for the next blast. He struck it out for as long as he could—a matter of ten minutes or so—then he dragged his leaden body off the couch again.
    “What the blazes is wrong with you?” O’Mara roared against the din. The FROB was thoroughly covered by food compound so it couldn’t be hungry.
    Now that the infant had seen him the volume and urgency of its cries increased. The external, bellows-like flap of muscle on the infant’s back—used for sound production only, the FROBs being non—breathers—continued swelling and deflating rapidly. O’Mara jammed the palms of his hands against his ears, an action which did no good at all, and yelled, “Shut up!”
    He knew that the recently orphaned Hudlarian must still be feeling confused and frightened, that the mere process of feeding it could not possibly fulfill all of its emotional needs—he knew all this and felt a deep pity for the being. But these feelings were in some quiet, sane and civilized portion of his mind and divorced from all the pain and weariness and frightful onslaughts of sound currently torturing his body. He was really two people, and while one of him knew the reason for the noise and accepted it, the other—the purely physical O’Mara—reacted instinctively and viciously to stop it.
    “Shut up! SHUT UP!” screamed O’Mara, and started swinging with his fists and feet.

    Miraculously after about ten minutes of it, the Hudlarian stopped crying.
    O’Mara returned to the couch shaking. For those ten minutes he had been in the grip of a murderous, uncontrollable rage. He had punched and kicked savagely until the pains from his hands and injured leg forced him to stop using those members, but he had gone on kicking and screeching invective with the only other weapons left to him, his good leg and tongue. The sheer viciousness of what he had done shocked and sickened him.
    It was no good telling himself that the Hudlarian was tough and might not have felt the beating; the infant had stopped crying so he must have got through to it somehow. Admittedly Hudlarians were hard and tough, but this was a baby and babies had weak spots. Human babies, for instance, had a very soft spot on the top of their heads …
    When O’Mara’s utterly exhausted body plunged into sleep his last coherent thought was that he was the dirtiest, lowest louse that had ever been born.
     
     
    Sixteen hours later he awoke. It was a slow, natural process which brought him barely above the level of unconsciousness. He had a brief feeling of wonder at the fact that the infant was not responsible for waking him before he drifted back to sleep again. The next time he wakened was five hours later and to the sound of Waring coming through the airlock.
    “Dr. P-Pelling asked me to bring this,” he said, tossing O’Mara a small book. “And I’m not doing you a favor, understand—it’s just that he said it was for the good of the youngster. How is it doing?”
    “Sleeping,” said O’Mara.
    Waring moistened his lips. “I’m-I’m supposed to check. C-C-Caxton says so.”
    “Ca-Ca-Caxton would,” mimicked O’Mara.
    He watched the other silently as