White, James – Sector General 05 – Sector General

several hours they had been studying a flaccid, purplish lump of something which

might have been the organic trigger for the being’s hibernation phase, and

mak­ing very little progress with it, when Prilicla broke into their angry,

impatient silence.

“Friend Murchison,” the empath said, “is feeling tired.”

“I’m not,” the pathologist said, with a yawn which threat­ened to dislocate her

firm but beautifully formed lower man­dible. “At least, I wasn’t until you

reminded me.”

“As are you, friend Conway—” Prilicla began, when there was an interruption. The

furry features of Surgeon-Lieutenant Krach-Yul replaced the pieces of alien

hardware which had been filling the repeater screen.

“Doctor Conway,” the Orligian medic said, “I have to report an accident. Two

Earth-human DBDGs, simple fractures, no decompression damage—”

“Very well,” said Conway, clenching his teeth on a yawn. “Now’s your chance to

get in some more other-species surgical experience.”

“—And a Hudlar engineer, physiological classification FROB,” Krach-Yul went on.

“It has sustained a deep, incised,

and lacerated wound which has been quickly but inadequately treated by the being

itself. There has been a considerable loss of body fluid and associated internal

pressure, diminished sen-soria, and—”

“Coming,” Conway said. To Murchison he muttered, “Don’t wait up for me.”

While Tyrell was taking him to the scene of the accident, an area where three of

the coilship sections were being fitted together, Conway reviewed his

necessarily scant surgical ex­perience with the Hudlar life-form.

They were a species who rarely took sick, and then only during preadolescence,

and they were fantastically resistant to physical injury, with eyes which were

protected by a hardv transparent membrane, tegument like flexible armor, and no

body orifices except for the temporary ones opened for mating and birth.

The FROBs were ideally suited to space construction proj­ects. Their home

planet, Hudlar, pulled four Earth gravities, and its atmospheric pressure—if

that dense, soupy mixture of oxygen, inerts, and masses of microscopic animal

and vege­table nutrient in suspension could be called an atmosphere— was seven

times Earth-normal. At home they absorbed the food-laden air through their

incredibly tough yet porous skin, while offplanet they sprayed themselves

regularly and frequently with nutrient paint. Their six flexible and immensely

strong limbs terminated in four-digited hands which, when the fingers were

curled inward and the knuckles presented to the ground, served also as feet.

Environmentally, the Hudlars were a very adaptable species, because the

physiological features which protected them against their own planet’s crushing

gravity and pressure also enabled them to work comfortably in any noncorrosive

atmosphere of lesser pressure right down to and including the vacuum of space.

The only item of equipment a Hudlar space construction engineer needed, apart

from its tools, was a communicator which took the form of a small, air-filled

blister enclosing its speaking membrane and a two-way radio.

Conway had not bothered to ask if there was an FROB medic on the Hudlar ship.

Curative surgery had been a com­pletely alien concept to that virtually

indestructible species until

they had joined the Federation and learned about places like Sector General, so

that medically trained Hudlars were about as rare outside the hospital as

physically injured ones inside it.

Captain Nelson placed Tyrell within fifty meters of the scene of the accident.

Conway headed for the injured Hudlar. Krach-Yul had already reached the

Earth-human casualties, one of whom was blaming himself loudly and unprintably

for causing the accident and tying up the suit frequency in the process.

Conway gathered that the two Earth-humans had been saved from certain death by

being crushed between two slowly closing ship sections by the Hudlar interposing

its enormously strong body, which would have escaped without injury if the

jagged-edged stump of an external bracing member had not snagged one of the

FROB’s limbs close to the point where it joined the body.

When Conway arrived, the Hudlar was gripping the injured limb with three of its

hands, tourniquet fashion, while the two free hands remaining were trying to

hold the edges of the wound together—unsuccessfully.’ Tiny, misshapen globules

of blood were forming between its fingers to drift weightlessly away, steaming

furiously. It could not talk because its air bag had been lost, leaving its

speaking membranes to vibrate silently in the vacuum.