“Where did you put them?” said Conway .
“They’re still in the ship,” the officer replied, relaxing slightly. “We thought it better for someone to look at them before they were moved. Some of them… I mean… Uh, will you follow me, sir?”
There were eighteen of them, the wreckage of men who had been fished out of the wreckage of a ship, whose suits were still cold to the touch. Only their helmets had been taken off, and that had been to ascertain whether or not they still lived. Conway counted three decompressions, the rest being fractures of varying degrees of complication one of which was quite definitely a depressed fracture of the skull. There were no radiation cases. So far it had been a clean war, if any war could have been described as clean…
Conway felt himself getting angry, but fought it back. This was no time to become emotional over broken, bleeding and asphyxiated patients or the reasons for them being in that condition. Instead he straightened and turned to Murchison.
“I’ll take another pep-shot,” he said briskly, “this will be a long session. But first I’ll have the DBLF tape erased and try to around up some help. While I’m gone you might see to getting these men out of their suits and moved to DBLF Theater Five, then you can catch up on your sleep.
“And thank you,” he added awkwardly, not wanting to say too much because the Corpsman was still at his elbow. If he had tried to say the things he wanted to say to Murchison with eighteen urgent cases lying around their feet the officer would have been scandalized, and Conway would not have blamed him. But dammit the Corpsman hadn’t been working beside Murchison for the last three hours, with a pep-shot heightening all his senses…
“If it would help you,” said Murchison suddenly, “I could take a pep shot, too.”
Gratefully, Conway said, “You’re a very silly girl, but I was hoping you would say that…
CHAPTER 17
By the eighth day all the extra-terrestrial patients had been evacuated and with them had gone nearly four-fifths of the hospital’s staff. On the levels which maintained extremes of temperature, pressure or gravity the power was withdrawn causing the ultra-frigid solids to melt and gasify and the dense or superheated atmospheres to condense into a sludgy liquid mess on the floors. Then as the days passed more and more Corpsmen of the Engineering Division arrived, converting the one-time wards into barracks and tearing out large sections of the outer hull so that they could erect projector bases and launching platforms. Dermod’s idea now was that Sector General should defend itself instead of relying completely on the fleet, which had already shown that it wasn’t capable of stopping everything. By the twenty-fifth day Sector General had made the transition from being a defenseless hospital into what amounted to a heavily armed military base.
Because of its tremendous size and vast reserves of power-several times greater than that of the mobile forces defending it-the weapons were many and truly formidable. Which was as well because on the twenty-ninth day they were tested to the utmost in the first major attack by the enemy.
It lasted for three days.
Conway knew that there were sound, logical reasons for the Corps fortifying the hospital as they had done, but he didn’t like it. Even after that fantastic, three-day long attack when the hospital had been hit four times-again with chemical warheads, luckily he still felt wrong about it: Every time he thought of the tremendous structure which had been dedicated to the highest ideals of humanity and medicine being made into an engine of destruction, geared to a hellish and unnatural ecology wherein it produced its own casualties, Conway felt angry and sad and not a little sickened by the whole ghastly mess. Sometimes he was apt to give vent to his opinions…
It was five weeks after the beginning of the evacuation and he was lunching with Mannon and Prilicla. The main dining hall was no longer crowded at mealtimes and green uniformed Corpsmen heavily outnumbered the e-ts at the tables, but there were still upward of two hundred extra-terrestrials in the place and this was what Conway was currently objecting to.