White, James – Sector General 05 – Sector General

Monitor Corps officer, but simply that while Conway was trying to reach Dermod,

the Fleet Commander was trying to contact the Doctor.

It was Dermod who spoke first, with the slight artificiality of tone which told

Conway that not only was the other in a hurry and under pressure but that there

were other people pres­ent beyond the range of the vision pickup. He said,

“Doctor, there is a serious problem regarding the final assembly phase and I

need your help. You are already concerned over the limited time remaining to us

and, frankly, I was unwilling to discuss the problem with you until I was able

to present it, and the solution, in its entirety. This can now be done, in

reverse order, preferably. My immediate requirement is for another capital ship.

Claudius is available and—”

“Why—” Conway began, shaking his head in momentary confusion. He had been about

to list his own problems and requirements and found himself suddenly on the

receiving end.

“Very well, Doctor, I’ll state the problem first,” The Fleet Commander said,

frowning as he nodded to someone out of sight. The screen blanked for a few

seconds, then it displayed a black field on which there was a thick, vertical

gray line. At the lower end of the line a fat red box appeared and on the

opposite end a blue circle. Dermod went on briskly, “We now

have a pretty accurate idea of the configuration of the alien ship, and I am

showing you a very simple representation be­cause 1 haven’t time to do otherwise

right now.

“The ship had a central stem, the gray line,” Dermod ex­plained, “with the power

plant and thrusters represented by the red box aft and the forward-mounted

sensors and navigation systems shown as a blue circle. Since the ship’s occupant

was unconscious, all of these systems were fully automatic. The stem also

provided the anchoring points for the structure which supported the inhabited

coil. You will see that the main supports are angled forward to compensate for

stresses encountered while the vessel was under power and during the landing

maneuver.”

A forest of branches grew suddenly from the stem, making it look like a squat,

cylindrical Christmas tree standing in its * red tub and with a bright-blue

fairy light at the top. Then the continuous spiral of linked hibernation

compartments was at­tached to the ends of the branches, followed by the spacing

members which separated each loop of the coil, and the picture lost all

resemblance to a tree.

“The coil diameter remains constant throughout at just under five hundred

meters,” the Fleet Commander’s voice continued. “Originally there were twelve

turns of the coil and, with each hibernation cylinder measuring twenty meters in

length, this means there were roughly eighty hibernating CRLTs in every loop of

the coil and close on one thousand of the beings on the complete ship.

“Every loop of the coil was separated by a distance of seventy meters, so that

the total height of the coilship was just over eight hundred meters. We were

puzzled by this separation since it would have been structurally much simpler

laying one on top of the other, but we now believe that the open coil

configuration was designed both to reduce and localize meteo­rite collision

damage and remove the majority of the hibernation compartments as far as

possible from radiation leakage from the reactor at the stern. While encased in

its rather unusual vessel we think the creature traveled tail-first so that its

thinking end was at the stern to initiate disembarkation following the landing.

Unfortunately, the stern section had to be heavier and more rigid than the

forward structure since it had to support the weight of the vessel during

deceleration and landing, and

so it was the stern which sustained most of the damage when the collision

occurred, and most of the CRLT casualties were from the sternmost loop of the

coil.”

According to Vespasian’s computer’s reconstruction, the vessel had been in

direct head-on collision with a large meteor, and the closing velocities

involved had been such that the whole central stem had been obliterated, as if

an old-time projectile hand weapon had been used to remove the core of an apple.