Conway squirmed uneasily in his couch: he had the answer to that question, too.
Summerfield had said that the wreck was the worst damaged section of a ship, the other half of which could be presumed to have continued under its own power to the nearest repair base. So the section containing the survivor had been torn from the ship during the original accident, which meant that the course constants of this unpowered fragment had to be the same as that of the ship as a whole before the disaster.
The ship had been coming, then, from a planet which was listed as uninhabited. But in a hundred years someone could have set up a base there, or even a colony. And the ambulance ship had been heading away from that world and into intergalactic space…
A culture which had crossed from one Galaxy to plant a colony on the fringes of this one, Conway thought grimly, had to be treated with great respect. And caution. Especially since its only representative so far could not, by any stretch of toleration or semantic work-juggling, be considered nice. And the survivor’s race, probably highly advanced medically might not take kindly to news that someone was botching the treatment of one of their sick. On the present evidence Conway thought that they would not take kindly to anything or anybody.
Interstellar wars of conquest were logistically impossible, Conway knew. But the same did not apply to simple wars of annihilation, where planetary atmospheres were exploded or otherwise rendered useless forever with no thought of eventual occupation or assimilation. Remembering his last contact with the patient, Conway wondered if at last they had encountered a completely vicious and inimical race.
The communicator buzzed suddenly. It was Kursedd reporting that the patient had been quiet for the last hour, but that the growth seemed to be spreading rapidly and threatened to cover one of the being’s breathing openings. Conway said he would be along presently. He put out a call for Dr. Prilicla, then sat down again.
He dare not tell anyone of his discovery, Conway told himself as he resumed his interrupted thought. To do so would mean a force of Monitors swarming out there to make premature contact-premature, that was, so far as Conway was concerned. For he was afraid that that first meeting between cultures would be in the nature of an ideological head-on collision, and the only possibility of cushioning the shock would be if the Federation could show that they had rescued, taken care of, and cured one of the intergalactic colonists.
Of course there was the possibility that the patient was atypical of its race, that it was mentally ill as O’Mara had suggested. But Conway doubted if the aliens would consider that an excuse for not curing it. And against that idea was the fact that the patient had had logical-to it-reasons for being afraid and hating the person trying to help it. For a moment Conway wondered wildly if there was such a thing as a contra terrene mind, a mentality wherein assistance produced feelings of hate instead of gratitude. Even the fact of its being found in an ambulance was no reassurance. To people like himself the concept of an ambulance had altruistic implications, errands of mercy, and so on. But many races, even within the Federation, tended to look upon illness as mere physical inefficiency and corrected it as such.
As he left his room Conway did not have the faintest idea of how to go about curing his patient. Neither, he knew, did he have much time to do it in. At the moment, Captain Summerfield, Hendricks and the others investigating the wreck were too dazzled by a multiplicity of puzzles to think about anything else. But it was only a matter of time before they got around to it, a matter of days or even hours, and then they would come to the same conclusions as had Conway.
Shortly thereafter the Monitor Corps would make contact with the aliens, who would naturally want to know about their ailing brother, who by that time would have to be either cured or well on the way to recovery.