Alien Emergencies - James White [148]
“Yes, friend Conway,” replied the empath. “A most interesting life-form.”
“There is considerable tissue wastage,” he went on, still using the scanner “Possibly the result of dehydration. And there is a similarity in degree and type of the injuries which I find strange…” He trailed off into silence as Naydrad helped him lift the casualty into the litter.
“No doubt it has already occurred to you, friend Conway,” Prilicla said, using the form of words which was the closest it ever came to suggesting that someone had missed the obvious, “that the dehydration and the deeper coloration on the upper areas of the epidermis may be connected with local environmental factors, and the redness is due to sunburn.”
It had not occurred to Conway, but fortunately the emotional radiation associated with his embarrassment was well beyond the range of the empath. He indicated the litter and said, “Naydrad, don’t forget to fit the sun filter.”
In his phones he heard Murchison laughing quietly, then she said, “It hadn’t occurred to me, either, so don’t feel bad about it. But I have a couple of beasties over here I’d like you to look at. Both are alive, just barely, with a large number of incised wounds. There is a great disparity in mass between them, and the arrangement of the internal organs in the large one is, well, peculiar. For instance, the alimentary canal is—”
“Right now,” Conway broke in, “we must concentrate on separating the living and the dead. Detailed examinations and discussions will have to wait until we’re back on the ship, so spend as little time as possible on each one. But I know how you feel—my casualty has some peculiarities as well.”
“Yes, Doctor,” she replied coldly, in spite of his half apology. Pathologists, even beautiful ones like Murchison, he thought, were strange people.
“Captain? Lieutenant Dodds?” he said irritably. “Any other survivors?”
“I haven’t been looking at them closely, Doctor,” Fletcher replied. There was an odd harshness in his voice. Possibly the condition of the crash victims was distressing to a nonmedical man, Conway thought, and some of these casualties were in really bad shape. But before he could reply the Captain went on, “I’ve been moving around the area quickly, counting them and looking to see if any have been covered by sand or hidden between rocks. There are twenty-seven of them in all. But the positioning of the bodies is odd, Doctor. It’s as if the ship was in imminent danger of blowing up or catching fire, and they used the last of their remaining strength to escape from it.
“The sensors show no such danger,” he added.
Dodds waited for a few seconds to be sure that the Captain had finished speaking, then said, “Three alive and showing slight movement. One that looks dead, but you’re the doctor, Doctor.”
“Thank you,” Conway said dryly. “We’ll look at them as soon as possible. Meanwhile, Lieutenant, help Naydrad load the litter, please.”
He joined Murchison then, and for the next hour they moved among the casualties, assessing the degree of injury and readying them for transfer to the lander. The litter was almost full and had space for two of the medium-sized casualties, which they had tentatively classified as belonging to physiological type DCMH, or one of the large DCOJs. The very small DCLGs, which were less than half the mass of the DCMH Conway had first examined, were left for the time being because they all showed flickerings of life. As yet neither Murchison nor Conway could make sense of them physiologically. She thought the small DCLGs might be nonintelligent lab animals or possibly ship’s pets, while Conway was convinced that the large DCOJs were food animals, also nonintelligent. But with newly discovered extraterrestrial life-forms, one could never be sure of anything, and all of them would therefore have to be treated as patients.
Then they found one of the small aliens who was quite definitely dead. Murchison said briskly, “I’ll work on it in the lander. Give me fifteen minutes and I’ll have something to tell Prilicla about their basal metabolism before