White, James – Sector General 04 – Ambulance Ship

“Physically impossible,” said Conway.

“-without blundering against actuators every foot of the way,” the Captain went on, ‘and switching on every system in the ship. I wonder why these people, who do not appear to be stupid, even if they are blind, placed a control position so close to the cage of a dangerous captive animal. That was taking a risk.”

“If they couldn’t keep an eye on it,” said Conway dryly, “they had to keep closely in touch.”

“Was that a joke?” the Captain asked disapprovingly while he detached one of his gauntlets and reached into the opening. A few seconds later he said, “I think I feel the actuator we must have snagged pulling the blind one out. I’m pressing it, now.”

Chen’s voice on the suit frequency broke in. “There is another antenna array deploying, close to the first one, sir.”

“Sorry,” said Fletcher. For a moment his face registered an expression of deep concentration as his fingers felt their way over the alien controls; then Chen reported that both antennae had retracted.

The Captain smiled. “Assuming that they group their controls together in sensible fashion, and the actuators for power, altitude control, life-support, communications and so on occupy their own specific areas on the control panels, I’d say that the blind one was touching its communications panel when it died. It managed to release a distress beacon, but that was probably the last thing it was able to do.

“Doctor,” he added, “could you give me your hand, please?”

Conway gave his hand to the Captain to steady him and help him to his feet while Fletcher carefully withdrew his other hand from the opening. Suddenly one of Fletcher’s foot magnets slipped along the deck. His arm jerked backwards instinctively to prevent him from falling, even though in the weightless condition he could not fall, sending the hand back inside the control area.

“I touched something.” He sounded worried.

“You certainly did,” said Conway, and pointed at the caged section of corridor.

“Sir!” said Haslam on the suit frequency. “We are detecting strong intermittent vibrations throughout the fabric of the ship. Also metallic sounds!”

Murchison came diving along the corridor from the airlock. She checked herself expertly against the wall. “What’s happening?” Then she, too, looked into the caged corridor. “What is happening?”

For as far as they could see along the curvature of the corridor there was violent and noisy mechanical activity. The long metal bars projecting from their slots in the walls were whipping back and forth or up and down to the limits of their angles of travel, while the rods with their pointed or mace-like ends were jabbing up and down like pistons from the ceiling. Several of the bars and pistons were badly warped and were striking one another, which caused the awful din. As they watched, a small flap opened in the inboard wall of the corridor a few meters inside the grill, and a mass of something resembling thick porridge was extruded, to drift like a misshapen football into the path of the nearest wildly swinging bar.

The material splattered in all directions, and the smaller pieces were batted about by the other bars and pistons until they moved about the corridor like a sticky hailstorm. Murchison captured some of it in a specimen bag.

“Obviously a food dispenser of some kind,” she observed. “An analysis of this stuff will tell us a lot about the large one’s metabolism. But those bars and pistons are not, to my mind, a means of restraining the FSOJ. Not unless restraint includes clubbing it unconscious.”

“With a physiological classification of FSOJ,” said Conway thoughtfully, “that might be the only way to do it, short of using a heavy-duty pressor beam.”

“All the same,” Murchison went on, “I am feeling a slight attenuation of sympathy for the blind ones. That corridor looks more like a torture chamber than a cage.”

Conway had been thinking the same thing and so, judging by his shocked and sickened expression, had the Captain. They had all been taught, and were themselves convinced, that there was no such thing as a completely evil and inimical intelligent race, and even the suggestion that they believed such a thing possible would have led to their dismissal from the Monitor Corps or from the Federation’s largest multienvironment hospital. Extraterrestrials were different, sometimes wildly and weirdly different, and during the early stages of contact a great deal of caution was necessary until a full understanding of their physiological, psychological and cultural background was available. But there was no such thing as an evil race. Evil or antisocial individuals, perhaps, but not an evil species.