“…Dammit I’m offering you a job! You fit here, can’t you see that? This is a hospital, man, and you’ve cured our first patient…
CHAPTER 2
SECTOR GENERAL
Like a sprawling, misshapen Christmas tree the lights of Sector Twelve General Hospital blazed against the misty backdrop of the
stars. From its view-ports shone lights that were yellow and red-orange and soft, liquid green, and others which were a searing actinic blue. There was darkness in places also. Behind these areas of opaque metal plating lay sections wherein the lighting was so viciously incandescent that the eyes of approaching ships’ pilots had to be protected from it, or compartments which were so dark and cold that not even the light which filtered in from the stars could be allowed to penetrate to their inhabitants.
To the occupants of the Telfi ship which slid out of hyper-space to hang some twenty miles from this mighty structure, the garish display of visual radiation was too dim to be detected without the use of instruments. The Telfi were energy-eaters. Their ship’s hull shone with a crawling blue glow of radioactivity and its interior was awash with a high level of hard radiation which was also in all respects normal. Only in the stern section of the tiny ship were the conditions not normal. Here the active core of a power pile lay scattered in small, sub critical and unshielded masses throughout the ship’s Planetary Engines room, and here it was too hot even for the Telfi.
The group-mind entity that was the Telfi spaceship Captain-and Crew-energized its short-range communicator and spoke in the staccato clicking and buzzing language used to converse with those benighted beings who were unable to merge into a Telfi gestalt.
“This is a Telfi hundred-unit gestalt,” it said slowly and distinctly.
“We have casualties and require assistance. Our Classification to one group is VTXM, repeat VTXM. .
“Details, please, and degree of urgency,” said a voice briskly as the Telfi was about to repeat the message. It was translated into the same language used by the Captain. The Telfi gave details quickly, then waited. Around it and through it lay the hundred specialized units that were both its mind and multiple body. Some of the units were blind, deaf and perhaps even dead cells that received or recorded no sensory impressions whatever, but there were others who radiated waves of such sheer, excruciating agony that the group-mind writhed and twisted silently in sympathy. Would that voice never reply, they wondered, and if it did, would it be able to help them…?
“You must not approach the Hospital nearer than a distance of five miles,” said the voice suddenly. “Otherwise there will be danger to unshielded traffic in the vicinity, or to beings within the establishment with low radiation tolerance.”
“We understand,” said the Telfi.
“Very well,” said the voice. “You must also realize that your race is too hot for us to handle directly. Remote controlled mechanisms are already on the way to you, and it would ease the problem of evacuation if you arranged to have your casualties brought as closely as possible to the ship’s largest entry port. If this cannot be done, do not worry-we have mechanisms capable of entering your vessel and removing them.”
The voice ended by saying that while they hoped to be able to help the patients, any sort of accurate prognosis was impossible at the present time.
The Telfi gestalt thought that soon the agony that tortured its mind and wide-flung multiple body would be gone, but so also would nearly one quarter of that body…
With that feeling of happiness possible only with eight hours sleep behind, a comfortable breakfast within and an interesting job in front of one, Conway stepped out briskly for his wards. They were not really his wards, of course-if anything went seriously wrong in one of them the most he would be expected to do would be to scream for help. But considering the fact that he had been here only two months he did not mind that, or knowing that it would be a long time before he could be trusted to deal with cases requiring other than mechanical methods of treatment.