His swelling head was rapidly shrunk back to size by the entity waiting for him at Lock Eight. It was another of the furry, multi-pedal DBLF nurses, and it began hooting and whining immediately when he came into sight. The DBLF’s own language was unintelligible, but Conway’s Translator pack converted the sounds which it made — as it did all the other grunts, chirps and gobblings heard in the hospital — into English.
“I have been awaiting you for over seven minutes,” it said. “They told me this was an emergency, yet I find you ambling along as if you had all the time in the world …
Like all Translated speech the words had been flat and strained free of all emotional content. So the DBLF could have been joking, or half joking, or even making a simple statement of fact as it saw them with no disrespect intended. Conway doubted the last very strongly, but knew that losing his temper at this stage would be futile.
He took a deep breath and said, “I might have shortened your waiting period if I had run all the way. But I am against running for the reason that undue haste in a being in my position gives a bad impression — people tend to think I am in a panic over something and so feel unsure of my capabilities. So for the record,” he ended dryly, “I wasn’t ambling, I was walking with a confident, unhurried tread.”
The sound which the DBLF made in reply was not Translatable.
Conway went through the boarding tube ahead of the nurse, and seconds later they shot away from the lock. In the tender’s rear vision screen the sprawling mass of lights which was Sector General began to crawl together and shrink, and Conway started worrying.
This was not the first time he had been called to a wreck, and he knew the drill. But suddenly it was brought home to him that he would be solely responsible for what was to happen — he couldn’t scream for help if something went wrong. Not that he had ever done that, but it had been comforting to know that he could have done so if necessary. He had an urgent desire to share some of his newly-acquired responsibility with someone — Dr. Prilicla, for instance, the gentle, spidery, emotion sensitive who had been his assistant in the Nursery, or any of his other human and non-human colleagues.
During the trip to the wreck the DBLF, who told him that its name was Kursedd, tried Conway’s patience sorely. The nurse was completely without tact, and although Conway knew the reason for this failing, it was still a little hard to take.
As a race Kursedd’s species were not telepathic, but among themselves they could read each other’s thoughts with a high degree of accuracy by the observation of expression. With four extensible eyes, two hearing antenna, a coat of fur which could lie silky smooth or stick out in spikes like a newly-bathed dog, plus various other highly flexible and expressive features — all of which they had very little control over — it was understandable that this caterpillar-like race had never learned diplomacy. Invariably they said exactly what they thought, because to another member of their race those thoughts were already plain anyhow, so that saying something different would have been stupid.
Then all at once they were sliding up to the Monitor cruiser and the wreck which hung beside it.
Apart from the bright orange coloring it looked pretty much like any other wreck he had seen, Conway thought; ships resembled people in that respect — a violent end stripped them of all individuality. He directed Kursedd to circle a few times, and moved to the forward observation panel.
At close range the internal structure of the wreck was revealed by the mishap which had practically sheered it in two, it was of dark and fairly normal-looking metal, so that the garish coloration of the hull must be due simply to paint. Conway filed that datum away carefully in his mind, because the shade of paint a being used could give an accurate guide to the range of its visual equipment, and the opacity or otherwise of its atmosphere. A few minutes later he decided that nothing further could be abstracted from an external examination of the ship, and signaled Kursedd to lock onto Sheldon.
The lock antechamber of the cruiser was small and made even more cramped by the crowd of green- uniformed Corpsmen staring, discussing and cautiously poking at an odd-looking mechanism — obviously something salvaged from the wreck — which was lying on the deck. The compartment buzzed with the technical jargon of half a dozen specialties and nobody paid any attention to the doctor and nurse until Conway cleared his throat loudly twice. Then an officer with Major’s insignia, a thin faced, graying man, detached himself from the crowd, and came toward them.
“Summerfield, Captain,” he said crisply, giving the thing on the floor a fond backward glance as he spoke. “You, I take it, will be the high-powered medical types from the hospital?”
Conway felt irritated. He could understand these people’s feelings, of course-a wrecked interstellar ship belonging to an unknown alien culture was a rare find indeed, a technological treasure trove on whose value no limit could be set. But Conway’s mind was oriented differently; alien artifacts came a long way second in importance to the study, investigation and eventual restoration of alien life. That was why he got right down to business.
“Captain Summerfield,” he said sharply, “we must ascertain and reproduce this survivor’s living conditions as quickly as possible, both at the hospital and in the tender which will take it there. Could we have someone to show us over the wreck please. A fairly responsible officer, if possible, with a knowledge of—”
“Surely,” Summerfield interrupted. He looked as if he was going to say something else, then he shrugged, turned, and barked, “Hendricks!” A Lieutenant wearing the bottom half of a spacesuit and a rather harassed expression joined them. The Captain performed brief introductions, then returned to the enigma on the floor.
Hendricks said, “We’ll need heavy-duty suits. I can fit you Dr. Conway, but Dr. Kursedd is a DBLF..
“There is no problem,” Kursedd put in. “I have a suit in the tender. Give me five minutes.”
The nurse wheeled and undulated toward the airlock, its fur rising and falling in slow waves which ran from the sparse hair at its neck to the bushier growth on the tail. Conway had been on the point of correcting Hendrick’s mistake regarding Kursedd’s status, but he suddenly realized that being called “Doctor” had elicited an intense emotional response from the DBLF — that rippling fur was certainly an expression of something! Not being a DBLF himself Conway could not tell whether the expression registered was one of pleasure or pride at being mistaken for a Doctor, or if the being was simply laughing one of its thirty-four legs off at the error. It wasn’t a vital matter, so Conway decided to say nothing.
II
The next occasion that Hendricks addressed “Doctor” Kursedd was when they were entering the wreck, but this time the DBLF’s expression was hidden by the casing of its spacesuit.
“What happened here?” Conway asked as he looked around curiously. “Accident, collision or what?”
“Our theory,” Lieutenant Hendricks replied, “is that one of the two pairs of generators which maintained the ship in hyperspace during faster than-light velocities failed for some reason. One half of the vessel was suddenly returned to normal space, which automatically meant that it was braked to a velocity far below that of light. The result was that the ship was ripped in two. The section containing the faulty generators was left behind,” Hendricks went on, “because after the accident the remaining pair of generators must have remained functional for a second or so. Various safety devices must have gone into operation to seal off the damage, but the shock had practically shaken the whole ship to pieces so they weren’t very successful. But an automatic distress signal was emitted which we were fortunate enough to hear, and obviously there is still pressure somewhere inside because we heard the survivor moving about. But the thing I can’t help wondering about,” he ended soberly, “is the condition of the other half of the wreck. It didn’t, or couldn’t, send out a distress signal or we would have heard it also. Someone might have survived in that section, too.”
“A pity if they did,” said Conway. Then, in a firmer voice, “But we’re going to save this one. How do I get close to it?”
Hendricks checked their suits’ anti-gravity belts and air tanks, then said, “You can’t, at least not for some time. Follow me and I’ll show you why.
O’Mara had made reference to difficulties in reaching the alien, Conway remembered, and he had assumed
