Sector General Omnibus 1 - Beginning Operations by James White Page B

intelligence and nonexistent morals? It was hard to believe. As he watched the Monitor covertly between patients, Conway gradually came to a decision. It was a very difficult decision. If he wasn’t careful he would very likely get clipped.
    O’Mara had been impossible, so had Bryson and Mannon for various reasons, but Williamson now …
    “Ah … er, Williamson,” Conway began hesitantly, then finished with a rush, “have you ever killed anybody?”
    The Monitor straightened suddenly, his lips a thin, bloodless line. He said tonelessly, “You should know better than to ask a Monitor that question, Doctor. Or should you?” He hesitated, his curiosity keeping check on the anger growing in him because of the tangle of emotion which must have been mirrored on Conway’s face, then said heavily, “What’s eating you, Doc?”
    Conway wished fervently that he had never asked the question, but it was too late to back out now. Stammering at first, he began to tell of his ideals of service and of his alarm and confusion on discovering that Sector General—an establishment which he had thought embodied all his high ideals—employed a Monitor as its Chief Psychologist, and probably other members of the Corps in positions of responsibility. Conway knew now that the Corps was not all bad, that they had rushed units of their Medical Division here to aid them during the present emergency. But even so, Monitors … !
    “I’ll give you another shock,” Williamson said dryly, “by telling you something that is so widely known that nobody thinks to mention it. Dr.
Lister, the Director, also belongs to the Monitor Corps.
    “He doesn’t wear uniform, of course,” the Monitor added quickly, “because Diagnosticians grow forgetful and are careless about small things. The Corps frowns on untidiness, even in a Lieutenant-General.”
    Lister, a Monitor! “But, why?” Conway burst out in spite of himself. “Everybody knows what you are. How did you gain power here in the first place … ?”
    “Everybody does not know, obviously,” Williamson cut in, “because you don’t, for one.”
    VI
    The Monitor was no longer angry, Conway saw as they finished with their current patient and moved onto the next. Instead there was an expression on the other’s face oddly reminiscent of a parent about to lecture an offspring on some of the unpleasant facts of life.
    “Basically,” said Williamson as he gently peeled back a field dressing of a wounded DBLF, “your trouble is that you, and your whole social group, are a protected species.”
    Conway said, “ What? ”
    “A protected species,” he repeated. “Shielded from the crudities of present-day life. From your social strata—on all the worlds of the Union, not only on Earth—come practically all the great artists, musicians and professional men. Most of you live out your lives in ignorance of the fact that you are protected, that you are insulated from childhood against the grosser realities of our interstellar so-called civilization, and that your ideas of pacifism and ethical behavior are a luxury which a great many of us simply cannot afford. You are allowed this luxury in the hope that from it may come a philosophy which may one day make every being in the Galaxy truly civilized, truly good.”
    “I didn’t know,” Conway stammered. “And … and you make us—me, I mean—look so useless …”
    “Of course you didn’t know,” said Williamson gently. Conway wondered why it was that such a young man could talk down to him without giving offense; he seemed to possess authority somehow. Continuing, he said, “You were probably reserved, untalkative and all wrapped up in your high ideals. Not that there’s anything wrong with them, understand, it’s just that you have to allow for a little gray with the black and white. Our present culture,” he went on, returning to the main line of discussion,
“is based on maximum freedom for the individual. An entity may do