the bells for him as soon asah, here he is now.”
Hoyle was a plump, smooth-faced man with a pursed mouth
and an expression of perpetual reproof. He looked absurd in
his naval whites. He was also four times a Haber medal
winner for advances in space medicine.
“It was a ruptured spleen,” he said primly. “A dead give-
away that we were losing oxygen. I was operating when I
had the captain called, or I’d have been more explicit.”
“Aha,” Oestreicher said. “Your patient’s a Negro, then.”
“A female Negroan eighteen-year-old girl, and incident-
ally one of the most beautiful women I’ve seen in many,
many years.”
“What has her color got to do with it?” Arpe demanded,
feeling somewhat petulant at Oestreicher’s obvious instant
comprehension of the situation.
“Everything,” Hoyle said. “Like many people of African
extraction, she has sicklemiaa hereditary condition in which
some of the red blood cells take on a characteristic sicklelike
shape. In Africa it was pro-survival, because sicklemic people
are nf so susceptible to malaria as are people with normal
erythroyytes. But it makes them less able to take air that’s
poor in oxygenthat was discovered back in the 1940s, dur-
ing the era of unpressurized high altitude airplane flight. It’s
nothing that can’t be dealt with by keeping sufficient oxygen
in the ambient air, but . . .”
“How is she?” Arpe said.
“Dying,” Hoyle said bluntly. “What else? I’ve got her in
a tent but we can’t keep that up forever. I need normal
pressure in my recovery roomor if we can’t do that, get