White, James – Sector General 05 – Sector General

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.