Alien Emergencies - James White [276]
How those Diagnosticians had been able to watch without intervening, or suggesting alternative procedures, or giving step-by-step instructions at every stage, Conway did not know, because he himself was finding it just barely possible to do so.
He managed to continue doing the near-impossible while the hours slid past, dividing his attention between the operating stations of Yarrence, Edanelt, and Hossantir as well as the activity around the deceased Eighteen, where the surgery required to withdraw the donor organs and limbs was as painstaking and precise as that being performed on the recipients. There were several aspects of the work he could have commented upon, although not in overly critical terms, so he remained silent and gave advice only when it was requested. But while the three Seniors were doing very well and he was careful to divide his time equally among them, the one he watched most carefully was Hossantir. If any of the patients were going to cause problems, it would be FROB-Forty-three.
It happened in the fifth hour of the operations. The depressed cranial fracture and arterial repair on Three had gone well, and the less critical work of limb replacement was proceeding in satisfactory fashion. On FROB-Ten the absorption organ replacement work was completed and the decompression damage had been repaired so that it, too, had only the time-consuming microsurgical work on the limbs to undergo. It was natural, therefore, for Conway to hook himself to Forty-three’s frame to watch Hossantir performing the highly delicate initial stages of reconnecting the replacement heart.
There was a sudden, silent explosion of Hudlar blood.
Chapter 15
Hossantir made a sound which did not translate, and its manipulators holding the long-handled instruments moved with incredible slowness as they felt about in the totally obscured operative field. Its assistant, also moving with a lack of urgency which could only have been subjective to Conway’s racing mind, introduced a clamp but could not find the vessel which was hemorrhaging. Trained as he was to react quickly and positively to such emergencies, Conway did not move slowly.
He could not move at all.
His hands, his stupid five-fingered, Earth-human, and utterly alien hands, trembled uncontrollably while his multiple mind tried desperately to decide what to do with them.
He knew that this kind of thing could happen to medics who were carrying too many tapes, but that it should not happen too often if the Doctor concerned hoped to make it as a Diagnostician. Frantically, he tried to impose order on the warring factions within his mind by calling up the memory of O’Mara, who was totally unsympathetic where disorderly thinkers were concerned—in particular, the memory of the Chief Psychologist telling him what the Educator tapes were and, more importantly, what they were not.
No matter how he felt subjectively, his mind was not being taken over by the alien personalities who were apparently sharing it—his Earth-human mind had simply been given a large quantity of extraterrestrial knowledge on which it could draw. But it was very difficult to convince himself of that when the other-species material in his mind belonged to medical people with their own individual ideas on how he should react to this emergency.
The ideas were very good, particularly those of the Melfan and Tralthan components. But they required the use of ELNT pincers or FGLI primary manipulators, not Earth-human fingers, and he was being urged to do too many things at once with the wrong organic equipment.
Hossantir’s Melfan assistant whose ID, like everything else in the immediate area, was obscured by the bloody spray, said urgently, “I can’t see. My visor is—”
One of the nurses quickly cleaned the helmet in front of the eyes, not wasting time on the rest of the transparent bubble. But the fine red spray was re-covering it as Conway watched. And that was not the only