Alien Emergencies - James White [146]
The objects had been, or were, living creatures, and even though they had been partly covered by windblown sand, he could see a collection of protuberances, fissures, and angular projections which had to be sensory organs and limbs. There was a general similarity in shape but a marked difference in size of the beings, but he thought they were more likely to be representatives of different subspecies rather than adults and their young at different stages of development.
“Those life-forms are new to me,” the pathologist said, standing back from the screen. She looked at Conway and the others in turn. There was no dissent.
Conway thumbed the communicator button. “Captain,” he said briskly, “Murchison and Naydrad will go down with me. Prilicla will remain on board to receive casualties.” Normally that would have been the Kelgian Charge Nurse’s job, but nobody there had to be told that the fragile little empath would last for only a few minutes on the surface before being blown away and smashed against the rocky terrain. He went on, “I realize that four people on the lander will be a tight squeeze, but initially I’d like to take a couple of pressure litters and the usual portable equipment—”
“One large pressure litter, Doctor,” Fletcher broke in. “There will be five people on board. I am going down as well in case there are technical problems getting into the wreck. You’re forgetting that if the life-forms are new to the Federation, then their spaceship technology could be strange as well. Dodds will fetch anything else you need on the next trip down. Can you be ready at the lander bay in fifteen minutes?”
“We’ll be there,” Conway said, smiling at the eagerness in the other’s voice. Fletcher wanted to look at the inside of that wrecked ship just as badly as Conway wanted to investigate the internal workings of its crew. And if there were survivors, Rhabwar would shortly be engaged in conducting another medical first contact with all the hidden problems, both clinical and cultural, which that implied.
Fletcher’s eagerness was underlined by the fact that he rather than Dodds took the vehicle down and landed it in a ridiculously small area of flat sand within one hundred meters of the wreck. From the surface the wind-eroded rock outcroppings looked higher, sharper, and much more dangerous, but the sandstorm had died down to a stiff breeze which lifted the grains no more than a few feet above the ground. From the orbiting Rhabwar, Haslam reported occasional wind flurries passing through their area which might briefly inconvenience them.
One of the flurries struck while they were helping Naydrad unload the litter, a bulky vehicle whose pressure envelope was capable of reproducing the gravity, pressure, and atmosphere requirements of most of the known life-forms. Gravity nullifiers compensated for the litter’s considerable weight, making it easily manageable by one person, but when the sudden wind caught it, Naydrad, Dodds, and Conway had to throw themselves across it to keep it from blowing away.
“Sorry about this,” Lieutenant Dodds said, as if by studying the available information on the planet he was somehow responsible for its misdemeanors. “It is about two hours before local midday here, and the wind usually dies down by now. It remains calm until just before sunset, and again in the middle of the night when there is a severe drop in temperature. The sandstorms after sunset and before dawn are very bad and last for three to five hours, when outside work would be very dangerous. Work during the night lull is possible but inadvisable. The local animal life is small and omnivorous, but those thorn carpets on the slope over there have a degree of mobility and have to be watched, especially at night. I’d estimate five hours of daylight calm to complete the rescue. If it takes longer than