Alien Emergencies - James White [54]
Conway tried to control his irritation at the other’s lecturing and faintly condescending tone, realizing that the Captain could not help his academic background. Conway knew that if one of a matched set of hyperdrive generators was to fail, the other was supposed to cut out automatically; the vessel concerned would emerge suddenly into normal space somewhere between the stars, and sit there, unable to make it home on impulse drive, until either it repaired the sick generator or help arrived. But there had been instances when the safety cutoff on the good generator had failed or had been a split second late in functioning, which meant that a part of the ship had been proceeding at hyperspeed while the rest had been slowed instantaneously to sublight velocity. The effect on the vessel concerned was, at best, only slightly less catastrophic than a reactor explosion—but at least there would be no heat fusion, radiation and the other complications of a reactor blowup to worry about. The chance of finding survivors was very slightly increased.
“I understand,” said Conway. He flipped the intercom switch on his console and said, “Casualty Deck, Conway here. You may stand down. Nothing will be happening for at least two hours.”
“That is a pretty accurate estimate,” Fletcher said dryly. “Since when have you become an astrogator, Doctor? Never mind. Dodds, compute a course linking the three largest pieces of wreckage, and put the figures on the Power Room repeater. Chen, we will apply maximum thrust in ten minutes. To save time I plan to make a close pass of the likeliest prospects and decelerate only if Haslam’s sensors or Doctor Prilicla’s empathy say it is worth doing so. Haslam, stay on the sensors and pick out a few more possibilities for us to look at once we’ve checked the first three. And continue searching the radio frequencies in case a survivor is trying to attract our attention in that fashion, and keep an eye on your scope in case it is trying to flash a light at us.”
As Conway was leaving the Control Deck to rejoin his medical team aft, Haslam said in a quiet, respectful voice, “I’ve only got two eyes, sir, and they don’t swivel independently…”
One hour and fifty-two minutes later they passed heart-stoppingly close to the first piece of wreckage. The sensors had already reported negatively on it—no organic material present other than structural plastic trimming panels and furniture, no pockets of atmosphere that might have contained a living entity. When they tried to put a tractor beam on it to check its spin, the whole mass began to fly apart and they had to take violent evasive action.
They caught up with the next piece in less than an hour. They had to decelerate and return to it, because the sensors reported small pockets of atmosphere inside the wreckage and organic material of a non-structural but not necessarily still-living kind. This time they did not risk trying to check its spin in case the loose mass of wreckage fell apart and the potentially life-giving pockets of air were lost to space. Instead, they set the sensor and vision recorders going during their slow, careful and extremely close approach. The close approach was for Prilicla’s benefit, but the empath reported apologetically that none of the organic material was alive.
They had three hours to study the recordings before reaching the third piece of wreckage, which was the largest and most promising to be detected. In the process they learned quite a lot about the design philosophy of the alien ship-builders from the way the structural members and bulkheads had been twisted apart by the accident. The dimensions of the corridors and compartments gave an indication of the size of the life-forms that had crewed the ship. They had glimpses of things that looked like thick pieces of many-colored fur trapped and partially hidden in the wreckage. It might have been floor covering or bedding, except that a few of the pieces were restrained by webbing