Sector General by James White (New Worlds #65, November 1957) is the first of a long series of stories,1 and it gets off to a pretty good start with an alien spaceship coming out of hyperspace beside the Sector Twelve General Hospital:
The Telfi were energy-eaters. Their ship’s hull shone with a crawling blue glow of radioactivity and its interior was awash with a high level of hard radiation which was also in all respects normal. Only in the stern section of the tiny ship were the conditions not normal. Here the active core of a power pile lay scattered in small, sub-critical, and unshielded masses throughout the ship’s Planetary Engines room, and here it was too hot even for the Telfi.
The group-mind entity that was the Telfi spaceship captain—and crew—energised its short-range communicator and spoke in the staccato clicking and buzzing language used to converse with those benighted beings who were unable to merge into a Telfi gestalt.
“This is a Telfi hundred-unit gestalt,” it said slowly and distinctly. “We have casualties and require assistance. Our classification to one group is VTXM, repeat VTXM….” pp. 4-5
After this the story continues with Dr Conway, a medic who has recently arrived at the Sector General. As he wanders around its corridors, we learn that (a) all species are described by a four letter codes, (b) there are doctors from a variety of species in the hospital (c) the hospital has multiple treatment environments, and (d) the pacifistic Conway does not like the Monitors, the “military peacekeepers”, who run the hospital.
The rest of the tale is a fairly episodic affair. Conway is summoned to treat the Telfi, but first has to go to the tape room, where he will be programmed with an alien physiology learning tape. When Conway sees the Chief Psychologist in charge of the process, O’Mara, is a Monitor, Conway’s attitude shows. O’Mara subsequently tells Conway that he wants to talk to him after the tape programming is removed.
Conway then goes to treat the Telfi, later dodging the interview with O’Mara by not getting the programming removed. Instead, he goes on his rounds but, after dealing with his first patient, a hypochondriac crocodile-like being called Chalder, Conway starts to feel cold and lonely. This turns out to be a side-effect of the learning tape, which is making Conway act like a Telfi, and his symptoms develop to the point that he leans against the dining hall oven and scorches his clothes. When he eventually recovers consciousness he gets a dressing down from O’Mara for not mentioning it was his first tape (which made him more susceptible to what happened).
The next part of the story sees Conway encounter a large number of Monitor troops who have arrived at the station; they have been in combat and need treatment, and this causes the doctor to do more brooding. Before he can consult another doctor about the way he feels, more troops arrive needing attention. As he treats them Conway learns that they have been intervening in a human-DBLF (a caterpillar-like alien) war, and that the Monitor who is telling Conway about this looks as disgusted as he does. Eventually, Conway learns the Monitors aren’t the warlike people he thinks they are, and that his own social group is 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 civilisation, and that your ideas of pacifism and ethical behaviour 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 civilised, truly good.” pp. 26-27
At the end of this lecture/data dump (spoiler), a spaceship crashes into the station, and a blundering alien patient runs amok in the gravity control section. This sets up an extended final act, which sees Conway make a perilous journey into the area where the alien is rampaging. There he undergoes a crisis of conscience when he is told to kill the alien to stop the catastrophic casualties that the fluctuating gravity field is causing. (Conway eventually, and reluctantly, does so, but the author bottles out of his Trolley Problem2 by having Conway later discover that the alien has the sentience of a dog).
This story has some pretty good parts (the multi-species hospital, the interesting aliens, etc.) but it is (a) overlong (the couple of thousand words after the climax are largely redundant, not to mention Conway’s overdone—and at times somewhat unconvincing and ill-informed—pacifistic agonising), (b) uneven (the gobbets of exposition and moralising), and (c) generally gives the impression of a writer who is trying to run before he can walk. The later stories were better, but this is a promising start.
**+ (Average to Good). 17,700 words. Story link.
1. The ISFDB page for the Sector General series is here.
2. The Wikipedia page for the philosophical conundrum of the Trolley Problem.