O’Mara was saying that they were all friends, that they liked and felt sympathy for the patient, and that they would do everything in their power to help it. He spoke quietly into his own Translator, and a series of alien clicks and gobbles roared out from the other which had been placed near the patient’s head. In the pauses between sentences Prilicla reported on the being’s mental state.
“Confusion, anger, great fear,” the GLNO’s voice came tonelessly through its own Translator. And for several minutes the intensity and type of emotional radiation remained constant. Conway decided to take the next step.
“Tell it I am going to make physical contact,” he said to O’Mara. “That I apologize for any discomfort this may cause, but that I intend no harm.”
He took a long, needle-pointed probe and gently touched the area where the growth was thickest. The GLNO reported no reaction. Apparently it was only on an area unaffected by the growth where a touch could send the patient wild. Conway felt that at least he was beginning to get somewhere.
Switching off the patient’s Translator, he said, “I was hoping for this. If the affected areas are dead to pain we should be able, with the patient’s cooperation, to cut the mouth free without using an anesthetic. As yet we don’t know enough about its metabolism to anesthetize without risk of killing the patient. Are you sure,” he asked Prilicla suddenly, “that it hears and understands what we’re saying?”
“Yes, Doctor,” the GLNO replied, “so long as you speak slowly and without ambiguity.”
Conway switched the Translator on again and said quietly. “We are going to help you. First we will enable you to resume your natural posture by freeing your mouth, and then we will remove this growth …”
Abruptly the restraining net bulged as five pairs of tentacles whipped furiously back and forward. Conway jumped away cursing, angry with the patient and angrier with himself for having rushed things too much.
“Fear and anger,” said Prilicla, and added: “The being… it seems to have reasons for these emotions.”
“But why? I’m trying to help it …
The patient’s struggles increased to a violence that was incredible. Prilicla’s fragile, pipe stem body trembled under the impact of the emotional gale from the survivor’s mind. One of its tentacles, a member which projected from the growth area, became entangled in a fold of net and was torn off.
Such blind, unreasoning panic, Conway thought sickly. But Prilicla had said that there were reasons for this reaction on the alien’s part. Conway swore: even the workings of the survivor’s mind were contradictory.
“Well!” said Mannon explosively, when the patient had quietened down again.
“Fear, anger, hatred,” the GLNO reported. “I would say, most definitely, that it does not want your help.”
“We have here,” O’Mara put in grimly, “a very sick beastie indeed.”
The words seemed to echo back and forth in Conway’s brain, growing louder and more insistent every time. They had significance. O’Mara had, of course, been alluding to the mental condition of the patient, but that didn’t matter. A very sick beastie — that was the key — piece of the puzzle, and the picture was beginning to fall into place around it. As yet it was incomplete, but there was enough of it there to make Conway feel more horribly afraid than he had ever been before in his life.
When he spoke he hardly recognized his own voice.
“Thank you, gentlemen. I’ll have to think of another approach. When I do I’ll let you know …
Conway wished that they would all go away and let him think this thing out. He also wanted to run away and hide somewhere, except that there was probably nowhere in the whole Galaxy safe from what he was afraid.
They were all staring at him now, their expressions reflecting a mixture of surprise, concern and embarrassment. Lots of patients resisted treatment aimed at helping them, but that didn’t mean the doctor ceased treating such a case at the first sign of resistance. Obviously they thought he had taken cold feet over what promised to be a highly unpleasant and technically strenuous operation, and in their various ways they tried to reassure him. Even Skempton was offering suggestions.
If a safe anesthetic is your chief problem,” the Colonel was saying, “isn’t it possible for Pathology to develop one, from a dead or damaged, er, specimen. I have in mind the search you requested earlier. It seems to me you have ample reason to order it now. Shall I—”
“No!”
They were really staring at him now. O’Mara in particular wore a decidedly clinical expression. Conway said hurriedly, “I forgot to tell you that Summerfield contacted me again. He says that current investigations now show that the wreck, instead of being the most nearly intact half of the original ship, is the half which came off worst in the accident. The other part, he says, instead of being scattered all over space, was probably in good enough shape to make it home under its own steam. So you can see that the search would be pointless.”
Conway hoped desperately that Skempton was not going to be difficult about this, or insist on checking the information himself. Summerfield had reported again from the wreck, but the Captain’s findings had not been nearly so definite as Conway had just made out. The thought of a Monitor search force blundering about in that area of space, in the light of what he knew now, made Conway break into a cold sweat.
But the Colonel merely nodded and dropped the subject. Conway relaxed, a little, and said quickly, “Dr. Prilicla, I would like a discussion with you on the patient’s emotional state during the past few minutes, but later. Thank you again, gentlemen, for your advice and assistance …
He was practically kicking them out, and their expressions told him that they knew it-there was going to be some very searching questions asked about his behavior in this affair by O’Mara, but at the moment Conway didn’t care. When they had gone he told Kursedd to make a visual check on the patient’s condition every half-hour, and to call him if there was any change. Then he headed for his room.
V
Conway often groused at the tininess of the place where he slept, kept his few personal possessions, and infrequently entertained colleagues, but now its very smallness was comforting. He sat down as there was no room to pace about. He began to extend and fill in the picture which had come in a single flash of insight back in the ward.
Really, the thing had been staring him in the face from the very beginning. First there had been the wreck’s artificial gravity grids — Conway had stupidly overlooked the fact that they did not have to be operated at full power, but could be turned to any point between zero and five-Gs. Then there had been the air-supply layout — confusing only because he had not realized that it had been designed to many different forms of life instead of only one. And there had been the physical condition of the survivor, and the color of the outer hull — a nice, urgent, dramatic orange. Earth ships of that type, even surface vessels, were traditionally painted white.
The wreck was an ambulance ship.
But interstellar vessels of any kind were products of an advanced technical culture which must cover, or shortly hope to cover, many solar systems. And when a culture progressed to the point where such ships reached the stage of simplification and specialization which had been reached here, then that race was highly advanced indeed. In the Galactic Federation only the cultures of Illensa, Traltha and Earth had reached that stage, and their spheres of influence were tremendous. How could a culture of that size have remained hidden for so long?
Conway squirmed uneasily in his couch: he had the answer to that question, too.
Summerfield had said that the wreck was the worst damaged section of a ship, the other half of which could be presumed to have continued under its own power to the nearest repair base. So the section containing the survivor had been torn from the ship during the original accident, which meant that the course constants of this unpowered fragment had to be the same as that of the ship as a whole before the disaster.
The ship had been coming, then, from a planet which was listed as uninhabited. But in a hundred years someone could have set up a base there, or even a colony. And the ambulance ship had been heading away from that world and into intergalactic space …
A culture which had crossed from one Galaxy to plant a colony on the fringes of this one, Conway thought grimly, had to be treated with great respect. And caution. Especially since its only representative so far could not, by any stretch of toleration or semantic work — juggling, be considered nice. And the survivor’s race, probably
