He charged the gloves and pushed his hands against the sagging, transparent fabric of the tent. Immediately the thin, tough material became rubbery and pliable without losing any of its strength. It clung to the charged gloves, if not like a second skin at least like another pair of thin gloves. Carefully so as not to strain the fabric which separated the two mutually poisonous atmospheres, Conway removed the patient’s suit with instruments clipped to the inside of the litter.
Quite complex procedures were possible while operating a flexible tent- Conway had a couple of PVSJs and a QCQL a few beds away to prove it-but they were limited by the instruments and medication available inside the tent, and the slight hampering effect of the fabric.
He had been removing the splinters of carapace from the damaged area when the crash of a missile striking nearby made the floor jump. The alarm bell which indicated a pressure drop sounded a few minutes later and Murchison and the Kelgian military doctor-the entire ward staff-had hurried to check the seals on the tents of patients who were not able to check their own. The drop was slight, probably a small leak caused by sprung plating, but to Con way’s patient inside the tent it could be deadly. He had begun working with frantic speed.
But while he had striven to tie off the severed blood vessels the thin, tough fabric of the pressure litter began to swell out. It had become difficult to hold instruments, virtually impossible to guide them accurately, and his hands were actually pushed away from the operative field. The difference in pressure between the interior of the tent and the ward was only a few pounds per square inch at most, barely enough to have made Con way’s ears pop, but the fabric of the litter had continued to balloon out. He had withdrawn helplessly, and half an hour later when the leak had been sealed and normal pressure restored, he had started again. By then it had been too much.
He remembered a sudden impairment of vision then, and a shock of surprise when he realized that he was crying. Tears weren’t a conditioned medical reflex, he knew, because doctors just did not cry over patients.
Probably it had been a combination of anger at losing the patient-who really should not have been lost-and his extreme fatigue. And when he’d seen the expressions of all the patients watching him, Conway had felt horribly embarrassed.
Now the events around him had taken on a jerky, erratic motion. His eyes kept closing and several seconds, or minutes, passed before he could force them open again even though to himself no time at all went by. The walking wounded-patients with injuries which allowed them to move about the ward and return quickly to their tents in the event of a puncture-were moving from bed to bed doing the small, necessary jobs, or chatting with patients who couldn’t move, or hanging like ungainly shoals of fish while they talked among themselves. But Conway was always too busy with the newly-arrived patients, or too confused with a multiplicity of tapes, to chat with the older ones. Mostly, however, his eyes went to the sleeping figures of Murchison and the Kelgian who floated near the entrance to the ward.
The Kelgian hung like a great, furry question mark, now and then emitting the low moaning sound which some DBLFs made when they were asleep. Murchison floated at the end of a snaking, ten-foot safety line, turning slowly. It was odd how sleepers in the weightless condition adopted the fetal position, Conway thought tenderly as he watched his beautiful, adult girl baby swaying at the end of an impossibly thin umbilical cord. He desperately wanted to sleep himself, but it was his spell on duty and he would not be relieved for a long time-five minutes maybe, or five hours, but an eternity in either case. He would have to keep doing something.
Without realizing he had made a decision he found himself moving into the empty storeroom which housed the terminal and probable terminal cases. It was only here that Conway spared himself the time to chat, or if talking was not possible to do the essential and at the same time useless things which help to comfort the dying. With the e-ts he could only stand by and hope that the shattered, bloody wreckage of the Tralthan or Melfan or whatever would be given a tiny flash of Prilicla’s emphathetic faculty so that they would know he was a friend and how he felt.