that it won’t spread along the boarding tunnel to the waiting ship or into the
main concourse. The system can be overridden at this end, but only by a special
key carried by the Nidian senior ground staff member on duty in the lounge. Have
you seen this being?”
“Yes,” MacEwan said grimly. “It was standing at the exit port just before the
crash. I think it is somewhere underneath the transporter.”
Grawlya-Ki whined quietly, then went on, “The Colonel is using his personal
radio to contact a docked Monitor Corps vessel to try to patch into the port
network that way, but so far without effect. The Nidian rescue teams are doing
all the talking and are not listening to outsiders. But if he gets through he
wants to know what to tell them. The number and condition of the casualties, the
degree of contamination, and optimum entry points for the rescue teams. He wants
to talk to you.”
“I don’t want to talk to him,” MacEwan said. He did not know enough to be able
to make a useful situation report, and until he did their time could be used to
much better effect than worrying out loud to the Colonel. He pointed to an
object which looked like a gray, bloodstained sack which twitched and made
untranslatable sounds, and said, “That one first.”
The injured Kelgian was difficult to move, MacEwan found, especially when there
was just one Orligian arm and two human ones to take the weight. Grawlya-Ki’s
mask was such a bad fit that it had to hold it in position. The casualty was a
caterpillar-like being with more than twenty legs and an overall covering of
silvery fur now badly bloodstained. But the body, although no more massive than
that of a human, was completely flaccid. There seerned to be no skeleton, no
bony parts at all except possibly in the head section, but it felt as though
there were wide, concentric bands of muscle running the length of the body just
underneath the fur.
It rolled and flopped about so much that by the time he had raised it from the
floor, supporting its head and midsection between his outstretched arms and
chest—Grawlya-Ki had the toil gripped between its side and free arm—one of the
wounds began bleeding. Because MacEwan was concentrating on holding the
Kelgian’s body immobile as they moved it toward the boarding tunnel entrance,
his mind was not on his feet; they became tangled in a piece of decorative
curtain, and he fell to his knees. Immediately the Kelgian’s blood began to well
out at an alarming rate.
“We should do something about that,” the Orligian said, its voice muffled by the
too-small mask. “Any ideas?”
The Service had taught MacEwan only the rudiments of first
aid because casualties in a space war tended to be explosive decompressions and
rarely if ever treatable, and what little he had learned applied to beings of
his own species. Serious bleeding was controlled by cutting off the supply of
blood to the wound with a tourniquet or local pressure. The Kelgian’s
circulatory system seemed to be very close to its skin, possibly because those
great, circular bands of muscle required lots of blood. But the position of the
veins were hidden by the being’s thick fur. He thought that a pad and tight
bandages were the only treatment possible. He did not have a pad and there was
no time to go looking for one, but there was a bandage of sorts still wrapped
loosely around his ankle.
He kicked the length of plastic curtain off his foot, then pulled about two
meters free of the pile of debris which had fallen with it. The stuff was tough
and he needed all his strength to make a transverse tear in it, but it was wide
enough to cover the wound with several inches to spare. With the Orligian’s help
he held the plastic in position over the wound and passed the two ends around
the cylindrical body, knotting them very tightly together.
Probably the makeshift bandage was too tight, and where it passed around the
Kelgian’s underside it was pressing two sets of the being’s legs against the