Alien Emergencies - James White [8]
The latest stories to be written are the three linked which comprise the book you are about to read. It deals with a new aspect of the work at Sector General—the hospital’s special ambulance service—and concerns the extraterrestrial medical, physiological, psychological and engineering problems that must be solved, quickly and on the site of the accident by the ambulance ship’s crew if the casualties are to survive until they reach the hospital. When these problems arise, the ambulance ships are inevitably far removed from the virtually limitless facilities of Sector General, so the alien technologists and medical specialists of the crews concerned must fall back on their own ingenuity and strictly limited resources. If they make a wrong decision, the consequences can be far-reaching indeed.
To date the Sector General series has run to one short story, fifteen novelettes and one novel. I hope to go on writing about extraterrestrials, their exotic physiologies, their alien viewpoints and the problems of communication and understanding they represent. But my problem in recent years has been that, when I dream up a really alien alien, it promptly falls sick or gets itself damaged in an accident and ends up becoming a problem for Sector Twelve General Hospital.
Ambulance Ship
TO JACK COHEN
WHO IS A STICKLER FOR XENOBIOLOGICAL VERISIMILITUDE,
IN APPRECIATION
Part 1
Spacebird
The Monitor Corps scoutship Torrance was engaged on a mission which was both highly important and deadly dull. Like the other units of its flotilla it had been assigned a relatively tiny volume of space in Sector Nine—one of the many three-dimensional blanks which still appeared in the Federation’s charts—to fill in the types and positions of the stars which it contained and the numbers of planets circling them.
Because a ten-man scoutship did not have the facilities for handling a first contact situation, they were forbidden to land or even make a close approach to these planets. They would identify the technologically advanced worlds, if any, by analyzing the radio frequency and other forms of radiation emanating from them. As Major Madden, the vessel’s captain, had told them at the start of the mission, they were simply going to count lights in the sky and that was all.
Naturally, Fate could not resist a temptation like that…
“Radar, sir,” said a voice from the controlroom speaker. “We have a blip on the close-approach screen. Distance six miles, closing slowly, non-collision course.”
“Lock on the telescope,” said the Captain, “and let’s see it.”
“Yes, sir. Repeater screen Two.”
On Corps scoutships discipline was strict only when circumstances warranted it, and normally those circumstances did not arise during a mapping mission. As a result the noises coming from the speaker resembled a debate rather than a series of station reports.
“It looks like a…a bird, sir, with its wings spread.”
“A plucked bird.”
“Has anyone calculated the chances against materializing this close to an object in interstellar space?”
“I think it’s an asteroid, or molten material which congealed by accident into that shape.”
“Two lights years from the nearest sun?”
“Quiet, please,” said the Captain. “Lock on an analyzer and report.”
There was a short pause, then: “Estimated size, roughly one-third that of this ship. It’s non-reflective, non-metallic, non-mineral and—”
“You’re doing a fine job of telling me what it isn’t,” said the Captain dryly.
“It is organic, sir, and…”
“Yes?”
“And alive.”
For a few seconds the controlroom speaker and the Captain held their breath, then Madden said firmly, “Power Room, maneuvering thrust in five minutes. Astrogation, match courses and close to five hundred yards. Ordanace, stand by. Surgeon-Lieutenant Brenner will prepare for