Alien Emergencies - James White [191]
“Coming,” Conway said. To Murchison he muttered, “Don’t wait up for me.”
While Tyrell was taking him to the scene of the accident, an area where three of the coilship sections were being fitted together, Conway reviewed his necessarily scant surgical experience with the Hudlar life-form.
They were a species who rarely took sick, and then only during preadolescence, and they were fantastically resistant to physical injury, with eyes which were protected by a hard, transparent membrane, tegument like flexible armor, and no body orifices except for the temporary ones opened for mating and birth.
The FROBs were ideally suited to space construction projects. Their home planet, Hudlar, pulled four Earth gravities, and its atmospheric pressure—if that dense, soupy mixture of oxygen, inerts, and masses of microscopic animal and vegetable nutrient in suspension could be called an atmosphere—was seven times Earth-normal. At home they absorbed the food-laden air through their incredibly tough yet porous skin, while offplanet they sprayed themselves regularly and frequently with nutrient paint. Their six flexible and immensely strong limbs terminated in four-digited hands which, when the fingers were curled inward and the knuckles presented to the ground, served also as feet.
Environmentally, the Hudlars were a very adaptable species, because the physiological features which protected them against their own planet’s crushing gravity and pressure also enabled them to work comfortably in any noncorrosive atmosphere of lesser pressure right down to and including the vacuum of space. The only item of equipment a Hudlar space construction engineer needed, apart from its tools, was a communicator which took the form of a small, air-filled blister enclosing its speaking membrane and a two-way radio.
Conway had not bothered to ask if there was an FROB medic on the Hudlar ship. Curative surgery had been a completely alien concept to that virtually indestructible species until they had joined the Federation and learned about places like Sector General, so that medically trained Hudlars were about as rare outside the hospital as physically injured ones inside it.
Captain Nelson placed Tyrell within fifty meters of the scene of the accident. Conway headed for the injured Hudlar. Krach-Yul had already reached the Earth-human casualties, one of whom was blaming himself loudly and unprintably for causing the accident and tying up the suit frequency in the process.
Conway gathered that the two Earth-humans had been saved from certain death by being crushed between two slowly closing ship sections by the Hudlar interposing its enormously strong body, which would have escaped without injury if the jagged-edged stump of an external bracing member had not snagged one of the FROB’s limbs close to the point where it joined the body.
When Conway arrived, the Hudlar was gripping the injured limb with three of its hands, tourniquet fashion, while the two free hands remaining were trying to hold the edges of the wound together—unsuccessfully. Tiny, misshapen globules of blood were forming between its fingers to drift weightlessly away, steaming furiously. It could not talk because its air bag had been lost, leaving its speaking membranes to vibrate silently in the vacuum.
Conway withdrew a limb sleeve-piece, the largest size he carried, from his Hudlar medical kit and motioned for the casualty to bare the wound.
He could see that it was a deep wound by the way the dark red bubbles grew suddenly larger before they broke away, but he was able to snap the sleeve-piece in position before too much blood was lost. Even so there was a considerable leakage around both ends of the sleeve as the Hudlar’s high internal pressure tried to empty it of body fluids. Conway quickly attached circlips at each end of the sleeve and began to tighten one while the Hudlar itself tightened the other. Gradually the fluid loss slowed and then ceased, the casualty’s hands drifted away from the injured