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
intrument 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.