Alien Emergencies - James White [180]
“Excuse me, Doctor,” Nelson said. For several seconds the voices from Rhabwar and the scoutships had been silent and the Captain had seized the chance to send a message of his own. He went on, “Tyrell here. Will you accept a visual relay, Rhabwar? Doctor Conway thinks it’s important.”
“Go ahead, Tyrell,” Fletcher’s voice said. “All other traffic wait out.”
There was a long silence while Rhabwar’s Captain studied the image of the slowly rotating wreck and the attached cadaver, long enough for it to make three complete revolutions, then Fletcher spoke. The tone and words were so uncharacteristic that they scarcely recognized his voice. “I’m a fool, a stupid damned fool for not seeing it!”
It was Murchison who asked the obvious question.
“For not seeing how that endplate opened,” Fletcher replied. He made several more self-derogatory remarks in an undertone, then went on, “It drops out, or there is probably a spring-loaded actuator which pushes it out through the slot which you can see behind the coupling collar. No doubt there is an internal air pressure sensor linked to the actuator to keep the endplate from popping out accidentally when the section is in space or the adjoining section is airless. Do you intend returning with this section and not just the cadaver?”
The tone of the question suggested that if such was not the Doctor’s intention, then forceful arguments would be forthcoming to make him change his mind.
“As quickly as possible,” Conway said dryly. “Pathologist Murchison is just as keen to look inside that alien as you are to look inside its ship. Please ask Naydrad to stand by the Casualty Lock.”
“Will do,” Fletcher said. He paused for a moment, then went on seriously, “You realize, Doctor, that the manner in which these cylinders open means that their occupants were sealed into their suspended animation compartments while in atmosphere, almost certainly on their home planet, and the cylinders were not meant to be opened until their arrival on the target world. These people are members of a sublight colonization attempt.”
“Yes,” Conway said absently. He was thinking about the probable reaction of the hospital to receiving a bunch of outsize, hibernating e-ts who were not, strictly speaking, patients but the survivors of a failed colonization flight. Sector General was a hospital, not a refugee camp. It would insist, and rightly, that the colonists be transferred either to their planet of origin or destination. Since the surviving colonists were in no immediate danger there might be no need to involve the hospital at all—or the ambulance ship—except in an advisory capacity. He added, “We are going to need more help.”
“Yes,” Fletcher said with great feeling. It was obvious that his thinking had been parallelling Conway’s. “Rhabwar out.”
By the time Tyrell had returned to the assembly area, it was beginning to look congested. Twenty-eight hibernation compartments—all of which, according to Prilicla, contained living e-ts—hung in the darkness like a gigantic, three-dimensional picture showing the agglutinization of a strain of rod-shaped bacilli. Each section had been numbered for later identification and examination. There were no other scoutships in the area because they were busy retrieving more cylinders.
Even with the Casualty Deck’s artificial gravity switched off and tractor beams aiding the transfer, it took Murchison, Naydrad, and Conway more than an hour to extricate the cadaver from its wrecked compartment and bring it into Rhabwar. Once inside it flowed over the examination table on each side and on to instrument trolleys, beds, and whatever else could be found around the room to support its massive, coiling body.
Fletcher paid them a visit some hours later to see the cadaver at close range, but he had chosen a moment when Murchison’s investigation was moving from the visual examination to the dissection stage and his stay was brief. As he was leaving he said, “When you can be spared here, Doctor, would you mind coming up to Control?