Sector General Omnibus 2 - Alien Emergencies (48 page)

“Scoutship
Tenelphi
to
Rhabwar
, requesting reassignment instructions.”

“Scoutship
Torrance
, acting flotilla leader. I have seven units and eighteen more to follow presently. You have work for us,
Rhabwar
?”

Finally Nelson muted the speaker and the sound of Captain Fletcher assigning search areas to the newly arrived scoutships, which were being ordered to search for sections of the alien space station and bring them to the vicinity of
Rhabwar
. With so much help available, Fletcher had decided that the ambulance ship would not itself join in the search but would instead remain by the first section to coordinate the operation and give medical assistance. Confident that the situation was under control, Conway relaxed and turned to face Captain Nelson, whose curiosity had become an almost palpable thing.

“You—you
are
just a doctor, Doctor?” he said.

“That’s right, Captain,” Murchison said before Conway could reply. She laughed and went on, “And stop looking at him like that, you’ll give him an inflated sense of his own importance.”

“My colleagues are constantly on guard against the possibility of that happening,” Conway said dryly. “But Pathologist Murchison is right. I am not important, nor are any of the Monitor Corps officers or the medical team on
Rhabwar
. It is our job which is important enough to command the reassignment of a few flotillas of scoutships to assist.”

“But it requires the rank of subfleet Commander or higher to order such a thing—” Nelson began, and broke off as Conway shook his head.

“To explain it I must first fill in some background, Captain,” he said. “Some of this information is common knowledge. Much of it is not because the relevant decisions of the Federation Council and their effects on Monitor Corps operational priorities are too recent for it to have filtered down to you. And you’ll excuse me, I hope, if some of it is elementary, especially to a scoutship Captain on a survey mission…”

Only a tiny fraction of the Galaxy had been explored by the Earth-humans or by any of the sixty-odd other races who made up the Galactic Federation, so that the member races were in the peculiar position of people who had friends in far countries but had no idea who was living in the next street. The reason for this was that travelers tended to meet each other more often than the people who stayed at home, especially when the travelers exchanged addresses and visited each other regularly.

Visiting was comparatively easy. Providing there were no major distorting influences on the way and the exact coordinates of the destination were known, it was almost as easy to travel through hyperspace to a neighboring solar system as to one at the other side of the galaxy. But first one had to find a system containing a planet with intelligent life before its coordinates could be logged, and finding new inhabited systems was proving to be no easy task.

Very, very slowly a few of the blank areas in the star maps were being surveyed and explored, but with little success. When a survey scoutship like
Tyrell
turned up a star with planets it was a rare find, even rarer if one of the planets harbored life. And if one of these life-forms was intelligent then jubilation, not unmixed with concern over what might possibly be a future threat to the Pax Galactica, swept the worlds of the Federation, and the cultural contact spe
cialists of the Monitor Corps were assigned the tricky, time-consuming, and often dangerous job of establishing contact in depth.

The cultural contact people were the elite of the Monitor Corps, a small group of specialists in extraterrestrial communications, philosophy, and psychology. Although small, the group was not, regrettably, overworked.

“During the past twenty years,” Conway went on, “they have initiated first-contact procedure on three occasions, all of which were successful and resulted in the species concerned joining the Federation. There is no need to bore you with such details as the fantastically large number of survey missions mounted, the ships, personnel, and material involved, or shock you with the cost of it all. I mention the cultural contact group’s three successes simply to make the point that within the same period Sector Twelve General Hospital, our first multienvironment medical treatment center, became fully operational and initiated first contacts which resulted in seven new species joining the Federation.

“This was accomplished,” he explained, “not by a slow, patient buildup and widening of communications until the exchange of complex philosophical and sociological concepts became possible, but by giving medical assistance to a sick alien.”

This was something of an oversimplification, Conway admitted. There were the medical and surgical problems inherent in treating a hitherto unknown life-form. Sector General’s translation computer, the second largest in the Federation, was available, as was the assistance of the Monitor Corps’ hospital-based communications specialists, and the Corps had been responsible for rescuing and bringing in many of the extraterrestrial casualities in the first place. But the fact remained that the hospital, by giving medical assistance, demonstrated the Federation’s goodwill toward e-ts much more simply and directly than could have been done by any time-consuming exchange of concepts.

Because all Federation ships were required to file course and passenger or crew details before departure, the position of a distress signal was usually a good indication of the ship and therefore the physiological classification of the beings who had run into trouble,
and an ambulance ship with matching crew and life-support equipment was sent from Sector General or from the ship’s home planet to assist it. But there had been instances, far more than was generally realized, when the disasters involved beings unknown to the Federation in urgent need of help, help which the would-be rescuers were powerless to give.

Only when the rescue ship concerned had the capability of extending its hyperspace envelope to include the distressed vessel, or the survivors could be extricated safely and a suitable environment provided for them within the Federation ship could they be transported to Sector General for treatment. The result was that many hitherto unknown life-forms, entities of high intelligence and advanced technology, were lost except as interesting specimens for dissection and study.

But an answer to this problem had been sought and, hopefully, found.

“It was decided to build and equip a very special ambulance ship,” Conway continued, “which would give priority to answering distress signals whose positions did not agree with the flight plans filed by Federation vessels. The First Contact people consider
Rhabwar
to be the near-perfect answer in that we involve ourselves only with star-traveling species, beings who are
expecting
to encounter new and to them alien life-forms and who, should they get into trouble, would not be expected to display serious xenophobic reactions when we try to help them. Another reason why the Cultural Contact people prefer meeting star travelers to planetbound species is that they can never be sure whether they are helping or hindering the newly discovered culture’s natural development, giving them a technological leg up or a crushing inferiority complex.

“Anyway,” Conway said, smiling as he pointed at Nelson’s main display where the newly arrived scoutships covered the screen, “now you know that it is
Rhabwar
which has the rank and not any member of its crew.”

Nelson was looking only slightly less impressed, but before he could speak the voices of two scoutship commanders reporting to
Rhabwar
sounded in quick succession. Both vessels had emerged from hyperspace close to sections of alien space station and were
already returning to the rendezvous point with them in tow on long-focus tractor beams. In both cases the sections gave sensor indications of life on board.

“The news isn’t all good, however,” Nelson said, pointing at his main display where an enlarged picture of the section toward which they were heading filled the screen. “That one has taken a beating and I don’t see how the occupant could have survived.”

Conway nodded, and as the wrecked section turned slowly to present an end view, Murchison added, “Obviously it didn’t.”

The alien cylinder had been dented and punctured by multiple collisions with some of the structural members which had furnished the supporting framework of the original space station and which was still drifting nearby. Amid the loose tangle of debris was one of the section’s circular endplates, and from the open end of the compartment the body of its occupant protruded like an enormous, dessicated caterpillar.

“Can you relay this picture to
Rhabwar
?” Conway asked.

“If I can get a word in edgewise,” Nelson replied, glancing at his speaker, which was carrying a continuous, muted conversation between Fletcher and the scoutships.

Murchison had been staring intently at the screen. She said suddenly, “It would be a waste of time examining that cadaver out here. Can you put a tractor on it, Captain, and take us back to
Rhabwar
?”

“We’ll need to bring back the wreck for study as well,” Conway said. “The life-support and suspended animation systems will give us important information on the being’s physiology and—”

“Excuse me, Doctor,” Nelson said. For several seconds the voices from
Rhabwar
and the scoutships had been silent and the Captain had seized the chance to send a message of his own. He went on, “
Tyrell
here. Will you accept a visual relay,
Rhabwar
? Doctor Conway thinks it’s important.”

“Go ahead,
Tyrell
,” Fletcher’s voice said. “All other traffic wait out.”

There was a long silence while
Rhabwar
’s Captain studied the image of the slowly rotating wreck and the attached cadaver, long enough for it to make three complete revolutions, then Fletcher spoke. The tone and words were so uncharacteristic that they
scarcely recognized his voice. “I’m a fool, a stupid damned fool for not seeing it!”

It was Murchison who asked the obvious question.

“For not seeing how that endplate opened,” Fletcher replied. He made several more self-derogatory remarks in an undertone, then went on, “It
drops
out, or there is probably a spring-loaded actuator which pushes it out through the slot which you can see behind the coupling collar. No doubt there is an internal air pressure sensor linked to the actuator to keep the endplate from popping out accidentally when the section is in space or the adjoining section is airless. Do you intend returning with this section and not just the cadaver?”

The tone of the question suggested that if such was not the Doctor’s intention, then forceful arguments would be forthcoming to make him change his mind.

“As quickly as possible,” Conway said dryly. “Pathologist Murchison is just as keen to look inside that alien as you are to look inside its ship. Please ask Naydrad to stand by the Casualty Lock.”

“Will do,” Fletcher said. He paused for a moment, then went on seriously, “You realize, Doctor, that the manner in which these cylinders open means that their occupants were sealed into their suspended animation compartments while in atmosphere, almost certainly on their home planet, and the cylinders were not meant to be opened until their arrival on the target world. These people are members of a sublight colonization attempt.”

“Yes,” Conway said absently. He was thinking about the probable reaction of the hospital to receiving a bunch of outsize, hibernating e-ts who were not, strictly speaking, patients but the survivors of a failed colonization flight. Sector General was a hospital, not a refugee camp. It would insist, and rightly, that the colonists be transferred either to their planet of origin or destination. Since the surviving colonists were in no immediate danger there might be no need to involve the hospital at all—or the ambulance ship—except in an advisory capacity. He added, “We are going to need more help.”

“Yes,” Fletcher said with great feeling. It was obvious that his thinking had been parallelling Conway’s. “
Rhabwar
out.”

By the time
Tyrell
had returned to the assembly area, it was beginning to look congested. Twenty-eight hibernation compartments—all of which, according to Prilicla, contained living e-ts—hung in the darkness like a gigantic, three-dimensional picture showing the agglutinization of a strain of rod-shaped bacilli. Each section had been numbered for later identification and examination. There were no other scoutships in the area because they were busy retrieving more cylinders.

Even with the Casualty Deck’s artificial gravity switched off and tractor beams aiding the transfer, it took Murchison, Naydrad, and Conway more than an hour to extricate the cadaver from its wrecked compartment and bring it into
Rhabwar
. Once inside it flowed over the examination table on each side and on to instrument trolleys, beds, and whatever else could be found around the room to support its massive, coiling body.

Fletcher paid them a visit some hours later to see the cadaver at close range, but he had chosen a moment when Murchison’s investigation was moving from the visual examination to the dissection stage and his stay was brief. As he was leaving he said, “When you can be spared here, Doctor, would you mind coming up to Control?”

Conway nodded without looking up from his scanner examination of one of the alien’s breathing orifices and its tracheal connection. The Captain had left when he straightened up a few minutes later and said, “I just can’t make head or tail of this thing.”

“That is understandable, Doctor,” Naydrad said, who belonged to a very literal-minded species. “The being appears to have neither.”

Murchison looked up from her microscopic examination of a length of nerve ganglia and rubbed her eyes. She said, “Naydrad is quite right. Both head and tail sections are absent and may have been surgically removed, although I cannot be certain of that even though there are indications of minor surgery having taken place at one extremity. All that we know for sure is that it is a warm-blooded oxygen breather and probably an adult. I say ‘probably’ despite the fact that the creature in the first cylinder was relatively more massive. Genetic factors generally make for size differences among the adults of most species, so I cannot assume that it is an adolescent
or younger. Of one thing I am sure—Thornnastor is going to enjoy itself with this one.”