Alien Emergencies - James White [58]
“Doctor Prilicla, please,” came Haslam’s voice from Control. “Minus ten minutes.”
The little empath hovered briefly over the cabinet, assured them that there was no marked change in the survivor’s emotional radiation—it was still deeply unconscious, but far from being terminal—and hurried to the airlock so that when the astrogator made a close approach to the next mass of wreckage Prilicla would be able to ascertain whether or not anything had survived in it. As the Cinrusskin left, Murchison straightened up from the analyzer display.
“If we assume that the first sample was taken from a compartment at normal atmospheric composition and pressure,” she said, “then, apart from a few innocuous trace elements that our ship atmosphere does not contain, we would be quite happy breathing the same air as they do. But the sample from the cabinet is at half normal pressure and is high in carbon dioxide and water vapor. In short, the air inside that cabinet is dangerously thin and stale, and the sooner we get that beastie out of there the better.”
“Right,” said Conway. He removed the sampling drill without sealing the hole it had made, and as the Casualty Deck’s air whistled into the cabinet, he said, “Open her up, Captain.”
The cabinet was lying on its back with the door fastening, a rectangular metal plate with three conical indentations on it, facing upwards. Fletcher pulled off one of his gauntlets, pressed three fingers hard into the impressions and slid the plate aside. They heard a loud click, then he lifted the door open. Inside was a confused, bloody mess.
It took Conway several minutes to realize what had happened and to withdraw the bloodstained clothing or bedding from around the survivor. The cabinet had once contained upwards of twenty shelves, which had been pulled out hastily and the metal shelf supports padded with bedding or clothing to protect the occupant. But the collision had been a violent one, and there had been no time to attach the padding properly to the supports. As a result, both the padding and the survivor had been tumbled about the interior of the cabinet. The hapless e-t was jammed tightly into one end of the box, still bleeding sluggishly from a great many lacerations made by the shelf supports, and the colored bands of fur could barely be seen through tufted and matted patches of dried blood.
Very gently Murchison and Naydrad helped Conway lift out the survivor and lay it on the examination table. One of the gashes in its side began to bleed more freely, but as yet they did not know enough about the being to risk using one of their coagulants. Conway began going over its body with his scanner. “There must not have been any spacesuits in that compartment. But they must have had a few minutes’ warning, enough for this one to clear and pad the cabinet and get inside, leaving the other three we saw to—”
“No, Doctor,” said the Captain. He indicated the airtight cabinet. “It cannot be closed or opened from inside. The four of them must have decided which one was to survive, and they did their best for it, very quickly and, I should say, with minimum argument. As a species they seem to be very…civilized.”
“I see,” said Conway without looking up.
He did not know if there was any minor displacement of the survivor’s internal organs, but his scanner indicated that none of the major ones were damaged or radically out of position. The spine also appeared to be undamaged, as did the elongated rib cage. On the back just above the root of the thick, furry tail was a bright pink area, which Conway thought at first was a patch where the fur was missing. But closer examination showed that it was a natural feature, and there were large flakes of what appeared to be some kind of pigment adhering to it. The being’s head, which was tucked against its underside and partially covered by the tail, was conical, rodent-like and thickly furred, The skull itself appeared intact, but there was evidence of subcutaneous