“You have a question, Captain?” asked Conway.
“No, Doctor. Instructions. Lieutenants Haslam and Dodds to Control and Lieutenant Chen to the Power Room, at once. Casualty Deck, we have a distress call, physiological classification unknown. Please ensure maximum readiness—”
“We’re always ready,” said Naydrad, its fur bristling in irritation.
“Pathologist Murchison and Doctor Conway, come to Control as soon as convenient.”
As the three Monitor Corps officers disappeared rapidly up the ladder of the central well, Murchison said, “You realize, of course, that this means we will probably not be given the Captain’s second lecture on control- system organization and identification in vessels of non-bifurcate extraterrestrials this afternoon.” She laughed suddenly. “I am not an empath like Prilicla here, but I detect an overall feeling of relief.”
Naydrad made an untranslatable noise, which was possibly a subdued cheer in Kelgian.
“I also feel,” she went on, “that our Captain is merely being polite. He wants to see us up there as soon as possible.”
“Everybody,” said Prilicla as it began checking the e-t instrument packs, “wants to be an empath, friend Murchison.”
They arrived in Control slightly breathless after their climb up the gravity-free well past the five intervening decks. Murchison had considerably more breath available than Conway, even though she had used a lot of it telling him that he was running to adipose and that his center of gravity was beginning to drop below his waistline- something that had not happened to the delightfully topheavy pathologist over the years. As they straightened up, looking around the small, darkened compartment and at the intent faces lit only by indicator lights and displays, Captain Fletcher motioned them into the two supernumerary positions and waited for them to strap in before he spoke.
“We were unable to obtain an accurate fix on the distress beacon,” he began without preamble, “because of distortion caused by stellar activity in the area, a small cluster whose stars are in an early and very active period of evolution. But I expect the signal has been received by other and much closer Corps installations, who will obtain a more accurate fix, which they will relay to the hospital before we make the first Jump. For this reason I intend proceeding at one instead of four-G thrust to Jump-distance, losing perhaps half an hour, in the hope of obtaining a closer fix, which would save time, a great deal of time, when we reach the disaster site. Do you understand?”
Conway nodded. On many occasions he had been awaiting a subspace radio message, usually in answer to a request for environmental information regarding a patient whose physiological type was new to the hospital, and the signal had been well-nigh unreadable because of interference from intervening stellar objects. The hospital’s receptors were the equal of those used by the major Monitor Corps bases, and were hundreds of times more sensitive than any equipment mounted in a ship. If any sort of message carrying the coordinates of the distressed vessel’s position was received by Sector General, it would be filtered and deloused and relayed to the ambulance ship within seconds.
Always provided, of course, that their ship had not already left normal space.
“Is anything known about the disaster area?” asked Conway, trying to hide his irritation at being treated as a complete ignoramus in all matters outside his medical specialty. “Nearby planetary systems, perhaps, whose inhabitants might have some knowledge regarding the physiology of the survivors, if any?”
“In this kind of operation,” said the Captain, “I did not think there would be time to go looking for the survivors’ friends.”
Conway shook his head. “You’d be surprised, Captain,” he said. “In the hospital’s rescue experience, if the initial disaster does not kill everyone within the first few minutes, the ship’s safety devices can keep the survivors alive for several hours or even days. Furthermore, unless faced with a surgical emergency, it is better and safer to institute palliative treatment on a completely strange lifeform and if it can be found, send for the being’s own doctor, as we would have done with the Dwerlan casualty had its injuries been less serious. There may even be times when it is better to do nothing at all for the patient and allow its own healing processes to proceed without interruption.”
Fletcher started to laugh, thought better of it when be realized that Conway was serious, then began tapping buttons on his console. In the big astrogation cube at the center of the control room there appeared a three-dimensional star chart with a fuzzy red spot at its center. There were about twenty stars in the volume of space represented by the projection, three of which were joined and enclosed by motionless swirls and tendrils of luminous material.
“That fuzzy spot,” said the Captain apologetically, “should be a point of light signifying the position of the distressed ship. As it is, we know its whereabouts only to the nearest hundred million miles. The area has not been surveyed or even visited by Federation ships, because we would not expect to find inhabited systems in a star cluster that is at such an early stage in its formation. In any case, the present position of the distressed ship does not indicate that it is native to the area, unless it malfunctioned soon after Jumping. But a closer study of the probabilities—”
“What bothers me,” said Murchison quickly as she sensed another highly specialized lecture coming on, “is why more of our distressed aliens are not rescued by their own people. That rarely happens.”
“True, ma’am,” Fletcher replied. “A few cases have been recorded where we found technologically interesting wrecks and a few odds and ends-the equivalent of e-t pin-ups, magazines, that sort of thing-but there were no dead e-ts. Their bodies and those of the survivors, if any, had been taken away. It is odd, but thus far we have found no civilized species that does not show respect for its dead. Also, do not forget that a space disaster is a fairly rare occurrence for a single star-traveling species, and any rescue mission they could mount would probably be too little and too late. But to the Galaxy-wide, multispecies Federation, space accidents are not rare. They are expected. Our reaction time to any disaster is very fast because ships like this one are constantly on standby; and so we tend to get there first.
“But we were discussing the difficulties of establishing the original course constants of a wrecked ship,” the Captain went on, refusing to be sidetracked from his lecture. “First, there is the fact that a detour is frequently necessary to reach the destination system. This is because of pockets of unusual stellar density, black holes and similar normal-space obstructions that cause dangerous areas of distortion in the hyperspace medium, so very few ships are able to reach their destinations in fewer than five Jumps. Second, there are the factors associated with the size of the distressed ship and the number of its hypergenerators. A small vessel with one generator poses fewest problems. But if the ship is similar in mass to ourselves, and we carry a matched pair, or if it is a very large ship requiring four or six hypergenerators … Well, it would then depend on whether the generators went out simultaneously or consecutively.
“Our ships and, presumably, theirs,” Fletcher continued, warming to his subject, “are fitted with safety cutoffs to all generators, should one fail. But those safety devices are not always foolproof, because it takes only a split-second delay in shutting down a generator and the section of the ship structurally associated with it pops into normal space, tearing free of the rest of the vessel and in the process imparting an unbalanced braking motion, which sends the ship spinning off at a tangent to its original course. The shock to the vessel’s structure would probably cause the other generator or generators to fail, and the process would be repeated, so that a series of such events occurring within a few seconds in hyperspace could very well leave the wreckage of the distressed ship strung out across a distance of several light-years. That is the reason why—”
He broke off as an attention signal flashed on his panel. “Astrogation, sir,” Lieutenant Dodds announced briskly. “Five minutes to Jump.”
“Sorry, ma’am,” said the Captain. “We will have to continue this discussion at another time. Power Room, status report, please.”
“Both hypergenerators at optimum, and output matched within the safety limits, sir,” came Chen’s reply.
“Life-support?”
“Systems also optimum,” Chen said. “Artificial gravity on all deck levels at one-G Earth-normal setting. Zero-G in the central well, generator housings and in the Cinrusskin doctor’s quarters.”
“Communications?”
“Still nothing from the hospital, sir,” Haslam replied.
“Very well,” said the Captain. “Power Room, shut down the thrusters, and stand by to abort the Jump until
