several hours they had been studying a flaccid, purplish lump of something which
might have been the organic trigger for the being’s hibernation phase, and
making very little progress with it, when Prilicla broke into their angry,
impatient silence.
“Friend Murchison,” the empath said, “is feeling tired.”
“I’m not,” the pathologist said, with a yawn which threatened to dislocate her
firm but beautifully formed lower mandible. “At least, I wasn’t until you
reminded me.”
“As are you, friend Conway—” Prilicla began, when there was an interruption. The
furry features of Surgeon-Lieutenant Krach-Yul replaced the pieces of alien
hardware which had been filling the repeater screen.
“Doctor Conway,” the Orligian medic said, “I have to report an accident. Two
Earth-human DBDGs, simple fractures, no decompression damage—”
“Very well,” said Conway, clenching his teeth on a yawn. “Now’s your chance to
get in some more other-species surgical experience.”
“—And a Hudlar engineer, physiological classification FROB,” Krach-Yul went on.
“It has sustained a deep, incised,
and lacerated wound which has been quickly but inadequately treated by the being
itself. There has been a considerable loss of body fluid and associated internal
pressure, diminished sen-soria, and—”
“Coming,” Conway said. To Murchison he muttered, “Don’t wait up for me.”
While Tyrell was taking him to the scene of the accident, an area where three of
the coilship sections were being fitted together, Conway reviewed his
necessarily scant surgical experience with the Hudlar life-form.
They were a species who rarely took sick, and then only during preadolescence,
and they were fantastically resistant to physical injury, with eyes which were
protected by a hardv transparent membrane, tegument like flexible armor, and no
body orifices except for the temporary ones opened for mating and birth.
The FROBs were ideally suited to space construction projects. Their home
planet, Hudlar, pulled four Earth gravities, and its atmospheric pressure—if
that dense, soupy mixture of oxygen, inerts, and masses of microscopic animal
and vegetable nutrient in suspension could be called an atmosphere— was seven
times Earth-normal. At home they absorbed the food-laden air through their
incredibly tough yet porous skin, while offplanet they sprayed themselves
regularly and frequently with nutrient paint. Their six flexible and immensely
strong limbs terminated in four-digited hands which, when the fingers were
curled inward and the knuckles presented to the ground, served also as feet.
Environmentally, the Hudlars were a very adaptable species, because the
physiological features which protected them against their own planet’s crushing
gravity and pressure also enabled them to work comfortably in any noncorrosive
atmosphere of lesser pressure right down to and including the vacuum of space.
The only item of equipment a Hudlar space construction engineer needed, apart
from its tools, was a communicator which took the form of a small, air-filled
blister enclosing its speaking membrane and a two-way radio.
Conway had not bothered to ask if there was an FROB medic on the Hudlar ship.
Curative surgery had been a completely alien concept to that virtually
indestructible species until
they had joined the Federation and learned about places like Sector General, so
that medically trained Hudlars were about as rare outside the hospital as
physically injured ones inside it.
Captain Nelson placed Tyrell within fifty meters of the scene of the accident.
Conway headed for the injured Hudlar. Krach-Yul had already reached the
Earth-human casualties, one of whom was blaming himself loudly and unprintably
for causing the accident and tying up the suit frequency in the process.
Conway gathered that the two Earth-humans had been saved from certain death by
being crushed between two slowly closing ship sections by the Hudlar interposing
its enormously strong body, which would have escaped without injury if the
jagged-edged stump of an external bracing member had not snagged one of the
FROB’s limbs close to the point where it joined the body.
When Conway arrived, the Hudlar was gripping the injured limb with three of its
hands, tourniquet fashion, while the two free hands remaining were trying to
hold the edges of the wound together—unsuccessfully.’ Tiny, misshapen globules
of blood were forming between its fingers to drift weightlessly away, steaming
furiously. It could not talk because its air bag had been lost, leaving its
speaking membranes to vibrate silently in the vacuum.