signal had worried his subconscious to the extent that he had not unsealed his visor after the scoutship’s officers had been brought aboard.
“Four-G thrust in five seconds,” came Chen’s voice from the speaker. “Artificial gravity compensators ready.”
The next time Conway looked at the repeater screen it showed the Einstein and the Tenelphi shrunk to the size of a tiny double star. He finished making Sutherland as comfortable as possible, checked his IVs and moved on to Haslam and Dodds. He was leaving Murchison to the last, because he wanted to spend more time with her.
She was perspiring profusely despite the reduced temperature inside the pressure litter, muttering to herself and turning her head from side to side, eyes half-open but not really conscious of his presence. He was shocked to see Murchison like this. He realized that she was a very seriously ill patient instead of the colleague he had loved and respected since the days when she was a nurse in the FGLI maternity section, when he was convinced that all the ills of the Galaxy could be cured by his pocket x-ray scanner and his dedication to his profession.
But in Sector General, where the lowliest member of the medical staff would be considered a leading authority in a single-species planetary hospital, all things were possible. An able nurse with wide e-t experience could move up and across the lines of promotion to become one of the hospital’s best pathologists, and a junior doctor with unconventional ideas bubbling about in a head that was much too large could learn sense. Conway sighed, wanting to touch and reassure her. But Naydrad had already done all that it was possible to do for her, and there was nothing he could do except watch and wait while her condition deteriorated towards that of the Tenelphi officers.
With any luck they would soon be transferred to the hospital, where more high-powered help and resources were available. Fletcher and Chen had been lucky in that the Captain had been in Control and the engineer officer in the Power Room while the infected Tenelphi officers were being brought aboard, so they had been the last two to be affected. Fortunately, they were still fit enough to work the ship.
Or were they …
The repeater screen was still showing an expanse of blackness in which the Einstein and the Tenelphi were indistinguishable among the background stars. But by now the screen should be showing the non-color of the hyperdimension. It would be much better for all concerned, Conway thought suddenly, if he stopped doing nothing for Murchison and tried to do something for Chen and the Captain.
“Friend Conway,” said Prilicla, indicating with one of its feelers, “would you look at this patient, please, and at the one over there? I feel they are conscious and need reassurance by a member of their own species.”
Ten minutes later Conway was in the well, pulling himself towards Control. As he entered he could hear the voices of the Captain and engineer officer calling numbers to each other, with frequent stops for repeats and rechecks. Fletcher’s face was red and dripping with perspiration, his eyes were streaming and his delirium seemed to have taken the form of a rigid professional monomania as he blinked and squinted at the displays on his panel and read off the numbers. Meanwhile, Chen, who did not look much better, replied from the strange position of the astrogator’s panel. Conway regarded them clinically and did not like what he saw.
“You need help,” he said firmly.
Fletcher looked up at him through red-rimmed, streaming eyes. “Yes, Doctor, but not yours. You saw what happened to the Tenelphi when the medical officer tried to pilot it. Just tend to your patients and leave us alone.”
Chen rubbed sweat from his face. “What the Captain is trying to say, Doctor, is that he can’t teach you in a few minutes what it took him five years of intensive training to learn, and that the delay in making the Jump is caused by our having to get it right first time in case we aren t fit enough for a second try and we materialize in the wrong galactic sector, and that he is sorry for his bad manners but he is feeling terrible.”
Conway laughed. “I accept his apology. But I have just come from speaking to one of the Tenelphi victims of what we now feel sure is one of the old influenza variants. He was one of the first to fall sick along with the other member of the original boarding party. Now his temperature is returning to normal and that of the other one is also falling rapidly. I would say that this outbreak of sevenhundred-year-old flu can be treated successfully with supportive medication, although the hospital will probably insist on a period of quarantine for all of us when we get back.
“However,” he went on briskly, “the officer I speak of is the Tenelphi’s astrogator, and frankly, he is in much better shape than either of you two. You do need help?”
They were looking at him as if he had just produced a miracle, as if in some peculiar fashion Conway was solely responsible for all the complex mechanisms evolved by the DBDG Earth-human lifeform to protect itself against disease-which was, of course, ridiculous. He nodded to them and returned to the Casualty Deck to send up the Tenelphi astrogator. He was thinking that within two weeks at most, everyone apart from the immune Prilicla and Naydrad would be fully recovered and convalescent, and he would no longer have to treat Pathologist Murchison as a patient.
Part 3
QUARANTINE
Immediately on its return to Sector General, the Rhabwar and the I Earth-human personnel on board were placed in strict quarantine and refused admission to the hospital. Conway, who had had no direct physical contact with either the Tenelphi’s or his ambulance ship’s crews since the infection had come aboard, was doubly quarantined in that he inhabited the man-shaped bubble of virus-free air that was his long-duration spacesuit and a cabin hastily modified to provide life-support independent of the ship’s infected system.
There was no real problem in providing supportive treatment to both crews-who were either responding well or were in varying stages of convalescence-because he had Prilicla and Naydrad assisting him. As extraterrestrials they were, of course, impervious to Earth-human pathogens, and they were being very smug about this. Neither was there any difficulty in accommodating the two crews- the officers of the Tenelphi occupied the Casualty Deck, and the ambulance ship personnel had their own cabins. But there were periods, often as long as twenty-three hours in the day, when the Rhabwar was dreadfully overcrowded.
The real problem was that while the hospital refused them admittance, practically every Earth-human and e-t in Sector General was trying to find an excuse to visit the ambulance ship.
During the first week, combined medical and engineering teams worked around the clock flushing out the ship’s air system and sterilizing everything with which the infected air had come in contact. There were also constant checks on the progress of the patients and constant supervision of the regimen, which would ensure that after their cure was effected they would not retain the ability of passing on the infection to any other member of the Earth-human DBDG classification. Lastly, there were those who came simply to talk to the patients and complain about Conway’s handling of the Einstein incident.
These included Thornnastor, the elephantine Tralthan Diagnostician in charge of the Pathology Department, who came chiefly to raise the morale of its department-member Murchison by providing her with the latest hospital gossip, which in some of the e-t wards was colorful; and a variegated bunch of highly professional medics and bitterly disappointed amateur historians who wanted to talk to the Tenelphi crew about their experiences aboard the derelict, and to castigate Conway for not bringing back more in the way of specimens than a seven-hundred- year-old medical textbook, which had fallen apart as soon as it was exposed to present-day sterilization techniques.
Inside his suit-shaped bubble of sterile air, Conway tried, not always successfully, to remain emotionally cool and aloof. Captain Fletcher, whose convalescence had advanced to the stage where he was convinced that medical red tape was all that was keeping him from resuming active duty, could not remain cool at all. Especially when the Rhabwar personnel gathered together at mealtimes.
“You are a senior physician, after all, and you are still the ranking medical officer on this ship,” the Captain observed in an aggrieved tone while he attacked the rather bland meal the hospital dietitians had prescribed for them. “Unlike us, Doctor, you never were a patient, so your rank was not taken away when you were issued a
