In addition to the patients, whose numbers and physiological classifications were a constant variable, there was a medical and maintenance staff comprising sixty-odd differing life-forms with sixty different sets of mannerisms, body odors and ways of looking at life.
The staff of Sector General prided themselves that no case was too big, too small or too hopeless, and their reputation and facilities were second to none. They were an extremely able, dedicated, but not always serious bunch, and Senior Physician Conway could not rid himself of the idea that on this occasion someone was playing a complicated joke on him.
“Now that I see it,” he said dryly, “I still can’t believe it.”
Pathologist Murchison, who occupied the position beside him, stared at the image of Torrance and its tow without comment. On the controlroom ceiling, where it clung with six fragile, suckertipped legs, Doctor Prilicla trembled slightly and said, “It could prove to be an interesting and exciting professional challenge, friend Conway.”
The musical trills and clicks of the Cinrusskin’s speech were received by Conway’s translator pack, relayed to the translation computer at the center of the hospital and transmitted back to his earpiece as flat, emotionless English. As expected, the reply was pleasant, polite and extremely non-controversial.
Prilicla was insectile, exe-skeletal, six-legged and with a pair of iridescent and not quite atrophied wings and possessing a highlydeveloped empathic faculty. Only on Cinruss with its one-eighth gravity and dense atmosphere could a race of insects have grown to such dimensions and in time developed intelligence and an advanced civilization. But in Sector General Prilicla was in deadly danger for most of its working day. It had to wear gravity nullifiers everywhere outside its own quarters because the gravity pull which most of its colleagues considered normal would instantly have crushed it flat, and when Prilicla held a conversation with anyone it kept well out of reach of any thoughtless movement of an arm or tentacle which could easily cave in its fragile body or snap off a leg.
Not that anyone would have wanted to hurt Prilicla-it was too well-liked for that. The Cinrusskin’s empathic faculty forced it to be kind and considerate to everyone in order to make the emotional radiation of the people around it as pleasant for itself as possible.
Except when its professional duty exposed it to pain and violent emotion in a patient, and that situation might arise within the next few minutes.
Turning suddenly to Prilicla, Conway said, “Wear your lightweight suit but stay well clear of the being until we tell you that there is no danger of movement, involuntary or otherwise, from it. We shall wear heavy duty suits, mostly because they have more hooks on which to hang our diagnostic equipment, and I shall ask Torrance’s medic to do the same.”
Half an hour later Lieutenant Brenner, Murchison and Conway were hanging beside the form of the enormous bird while Prilicla, wearing a transparent plastic bubble through which projected its bony mandibles, drifted beside the lock of their tender.
“No detectable emotional radiation, friend Conway,” reported the empath.
“I’m not surprised,” said Murchison.
“It could be dead,” said the Lieutenant defensively. “But when we found it the body temperature was measurably above the norm for an object warmed only by a two light-years distant sun.
“There was no criticism intended, Doctor,” said Murchison soothingly. “I was simply agreeing with our empathic friend. But did you, before or during the trip here, carry out any examinations, observations or tests on this patient, or reach any tentative conclusions as a result of such tests? And don’t be shy, Lieutenant-we may be the acknowledged experts in xenological medicine and physiology here, but we got that way by listening and looking, not by gratuitous displays of our expertise. You were curious, naturally, and…
“Yes, ma’am,” said Brenner, his voice registering surprise that there was an Earth-human female inside the bulky suit. “I assumed that, lacking information on its planet of origin, you might want to know if there were any safe atmospheric compositions in which it could be examined-I was assuming that, being a bird, it needed an atmosphere to fly in and that it had been dumped in space because of its diseased condition . .