What I love about this story is that it has such a modest nature about it, as its style is as far as a writer can get from being pretentious--yet a reader can sense that there's an important theme underneath it all.
Also, SRD's gift for writing gripping action scenes is on disply once again, as in the following passage.
Red rage filled his heart. He charged on through the halls.
Then suddenly he came to the great room where the medicomputers lived.
Rank upon rank, they stood before him. Their displays glared evilly at him, and their voices shouted. He heard several of them shout together, "Absolute emergency! Atmospheric control, activate all nerve gas! Saturation gassing, all floors!"
They were trying to kill him. They were going to kill everybody in the Hospital.
The medicomputers were made of magnacite and plasmium. Their circuits were fireproof. But they were not proof against the power of his horn. When he attacked them, they began to burn in white fire, as incandescent as the sun.
He could hear gas hissing into the air. He took a deep breath and ran. The gas was hissing into all the corridors of the Hospital. Patients began to die. Men and women in white coats began to die. Norman began to think that he would not be able to get out of the Hospital before he had to breathe.
A moment later, the fire in the medicomputers ignited the gas. The gas burned. Oxygen tanks began to explode. Dispensaries went up into flames. The fire extinguishers could not stop the intense heat of burning magnacite and plasmium. When the cylinders of nerve gas burst, they had enough force to shatter the floors and walls.
Norman flashed through the doors and galloped into the road with the General Hospital raging behind him like a furnace.
He breathed the night air deep into his chest and skittered to a stop on the far side of the road to shake the sparks out of his mane. Then he turned to watch the Hospital burn.
At first he was alone in the road. The people who lived nearby did not come to watch the blaze. They were afraid of it. They did not try to help the people who escaped the flames.
The deep fear of anything different from the routine of their lives keeps all the neighbors by the hospital from having the simple compassion of coming out and seeing what is wrong and if anyone needs help. Quite unlike the personality that Norman has become.
That's one thing about our world today that I find heartening: no matter what traumatic event you see on the news, you will always see people risking their own lives to help others get out of harm's way.
I hope that's a part of our humanity that we never surrender for the lure of the false safety that can be found in managed conformity.
I have no idea if that's the point SRD intended to make with this charming short story, but that's what I have gotten out of it on this recent re-read.
