“Take over this one, please Nurse,” he said, indicating the sodden mass on the floor, “I think it’s beginning to breath for itself, but will you give it another ten minutes…” He watched while Murchison lay down on her side, knees bent and with both feet planted against the opposite wall. This was definitely neither the time nor the place, but the sight of her lying there in that demoralizingly tight suit made the urgency of patients, evacuations and physiology tapes diminish for just an instant. Then the tight, moisture beaded suit made him remember that Murchison had been in the AUGL tank, too, just a few minutes before the explosion, and he had an awful vision of her lovely body burst open like those of the two hapless DBLFs…
“Between the third and fourth pair of legs, not the fifth and sixth!” Conway said harshly as he turned to go.
Which wasn’t what he had meant to say at all.
CHAPTER 16
For some reason Con way’s mind had been considering the effects of the explosion rather than its cause. Or perhaps he had been deliberately trying not to think along that line, trying to fool himself that there had been some sort of accident rather than that the hospital was under attack. But the yammering PA reminded him of the truth at every intersection and on the way to O’Mara’s office everyone was moving twice as fast as usual and, as usual, all in a direction opposite to Con way’s. He wondered if they all felt as he did, scared, unprotected, momentarily expecting a second explosion to rip the floor apart under their hurrying feet. Yet it was stupid of him to hurry because he might be rushing toward the spot where the next explosion would occur…
He had to force himself to walk slowly into the Chief Psychologist’s office, detail his requirements and ask O’Mara quietly what had happened.
“Seven ships,” O’Mara replied, motioning Conway onto the couch as he lowered the Educator helmet into position. “They seem to have been small jobs, with no evidence of unusual armament or defenses. There was quite a scrap. Three got away and one of the four which didn’t launched a missile at us before it was clobbered. A small missile with a chemical warhead.
“Which is very odd,” O’Mara went on thoughtfully, “because if it had been a nuclear warhead there would be no hospital here now. We weren’t expecting them just as soon as this and were taken by surprise a little. Do you have to take this patient?”
“Eh? Oh, yes,” said Conway . “You know DBLF. Any incised wound is an emergency with them. By the time another doctor had a look at the patient and came up here for a tape it might be too late.”
O’Mara grunted. His hard, square, oddly gentle hands checked the fitting of the helmet, then pressed Conway down onto the couch. He went on, “They tried to press that attack home, it was really vicious. A clear indication, I would say, of their feelings toward us. Yet they used a chemical head when they could have destroyed us completely. Peculiar. One thing, though, it has made the ditherers make up their minds. Anybody who wants to stay here now really wants to stay and the ones who are leaving are going to leave fast, which is a good thing from Dermod’s point of view. .
Dermod was the fleet commander.
….. Now make your mind a blank,” he ended sourly, “or at least make it blanker than usual.”
Conway did not have to try to make his mind a blank, a process which aided the reception of an alien physiology tape. O’Mara’s couch was wonderfully soft and comfortable. He had never appreciated it properly before, he seemed to be sinking right into it…
A sharp tap on the shoulder made him jump. O’Mara said caustically, “Don’t go to sleep! And when you finish with your patient go to bed. Mannon can handle things in Reception and the hospital won’t go to pieces without you unless we get hit with an atomic bomb..
With the first evidence of double-mindedness already becoming apparent, Conway left the office. Basically the tape was a brain recording of one of the great medical minds of the species of the patient to be treated. But the doctor taking such a tape had, literally, to share his mind with a completely alien personality. That was how it felt, because all the memories and experience of the being who had donated the tape were impressed on the receiving mind, not just selected pieces of medical data. Physiology tapes could not be edited.