Sector General Omnibus 2 - Alien Emergencies (12 page)

“It is possible to send messages by short and long bursts of static. It is a very old method of signaling still used in certain emergency situations. Do you know Morse?”

“No,” said Conway. “At least, only enough to send SOS.”

“I hope you don’t have to, Doctor.”

Following the marked path through the wreckage was slow, dangerous work. The residual spin on the derelict made them feel as if they were climbing up towards the center of the ship, while Conway’s eyes and all of his instincts insisted that he was moving downwards. When they reached the first daub of paint and grease, another mark became visible deeper inside the ship, but the path inclined sharply to avoid a solid mass of wreckage and the next leg of the journey angled in a new direction for the same reason. They
were progressing towards the center of the ship, but in a series of flat zigzags.

Prilicla had taken the lead to avoid the risk of Conway falling onto it. With its six legs projecting through its spherical pressure envelope—Prilicla’s bony extremities were not affected by vacuum conditions—it looked like a fat metallic spider picking its way gracefully through a vast, alien web. Only once did its magnetic pads slip, when it began to fall towards him. Instinctively, Conway reached out a hand to check the creature’s slow tumble as it was going past, then pulled his hand back again. If he had gripped one of those fragile legs, it would probably have snapped off.

But Prilicla checked its own fall with the suit thrusters, and they resumed the long, slow climb.

Just before communications with the ambulance ship became unworkable, Fletcher reported that they had been gone four hours, and asked if Conway was sure that he was following the missing Sutherland and not just the path marked by the party of the
Tenelphi
crew-members. Conway looked at the patch of luminous paint just ahead of them, and at the smear of grease beside it, and said he was sure.

I’m missing something
, he told himself angrily,
something that is right in front of my stupid face…!

As they moved deeper into the ship the wreckage became less densely packed, but the apparent gravity pull exerted by the spin had diminished so much that quite large masses of plating, loose equipment and demolished furnishings moved or slipped or settled ponderously whenever they tried to grip them. The suit spotlights showed other things, too—crushed, torn and unidentifiable masses of desiccated organic material, which were the remains of the crew or domestic animals caught in the centuries-old catastrophe. But separating the organic from the metallic wreckage would have been both highly dangerous and a waste of time. Finding Sutherland had to take priority over satisfying their curiosity regarding the physiological classification of the species that had built the ship.

They had been traveling for just under seven hours and had begun to move through levels that, although their structure was ruptured and contorted, were no longer choked with wreckage. This was fortunate because Prilicla kept blundering gently into walls and
bulkheads through sheer fatigue, and every second or third breath that Conway took seemed to turn into a yawn.

He called a halt and asked the empath if it could detect any emotional radiation apart from Conway’s own. Prilicla said no and was too tired even to sound apologetic. When Conway next heard the periodic hiss in his suit phones, he acknowledged by flipping his transmit switch on and off rapidly three times, pausing, then repeating the signal at short intervals for several minutes.

The Captain would realize, he hoped, that the repeated S signal meant that Prilicla and Conway were going to sleep.

They made much better time on the next stage of the journey, which involved simply walking along virtually undamaged decks and climbing broad ramps or narrower stairs towards the center of the ship. Only once did they have to slow to negotiate a plug of wreckage, which had been caused, apparently, by a large and slow-moving meteorite that had punched its way deep inside the ship. A few minutes later they found their first internal airlock.

Obviously the lock had been built by the survivors after the catastrophe, because it was little more than a large metal cube welded to the surround of an airtight door and containing a very crude outer seal mechanism. Both seals were open and had been that way for a very long time, because the compartment beyond was filled with desiccated vegetation, that practically exploded into dust when they brushed against it.

Conway shivered suddenly as he thought of the vast ship, grievously but not mortally wounded by multiple meteorite collisions, blinded but not powerless, and with groups of survivors living in little islands of light and heat and isolated by steadily dropping pressure. But the survivors had been resourceful. They had built airlocks, which had enabled them to travel between their islands and cooperate in the matter of life-support, and they had been able to go on living for a time.

“Friend Conway,” said Prilicla, “your emotional radiation is difficult to analyze.”

Conway laughed nervously. “I keep telling myself that I don’t believe in ghosts, but I still won’t believe me.”

They went around the hydroponics room because the markers said that they should, and an hour or so later they entered a corridor
that was intact except for two large ragged-edged holes in the ceiling and deck. There was a strange dilution of the absolute darkness of the corridor, and they switched off their spotlights.

A faint glow was coming from one of the holes, and when they moved to the edge it was as if they were looking down a deep well with a tiny circle of sunlight at the bottom. Within a few seconds the sunlight had disappeared, and for a few more seconds the wreckage at the other end of the tunnel was illuminated. Then the darkness was complete again.

“Now,” Conway said with relief, “at least we know a shortcut back to the outer hull. But if we hadn’t happened to be here at precisely the right time when the sun was shining in—”

He broke off, thinking that they had been very lucky and that there might be more luck to come, because at the end of the corridor containing the newly discovered exit they could see another airlock. It was marked with luminous paint and a very large smear of grease, and the outer seal was closed, a clear indication that there was pressure in the compartment beyond.

Prilicla was trembling with its own excitement as well as with Conway’s as Conway began to operate the simple actuator mechanism. He had to stop for a moment because the suit radio was hissing at him and he had to acknowledge. But when he had done so it kept on hissing at him.

“The Captain is not a very patient man,” said Conway irritably. “We’ve been gone just over thirty-eight hours and he said he would give me two days…” He paused for a moment and held his breath, listening to the faint, erratic hissing, which was quieter than the sound of his own breathing, so deep inside the derelict had they penetrated. It was difficult to tell when a hiss stopped or started, but gradually he detected a pattern in the signals. Three short bursts. Pause. Three long bursts. Pause. Three short bursts, followed by a longer pause, after which the sequence was repeated again and again. A distress signal. An SOS…

“There can’t be anything wrong with the ship,” he said. “That would be ridiculous. So it has to be a problem with the patients. Anyway, they want us back there and I would say the matter is urgent.”

Prilicla, clinging to the wall beside the airlock, did not reply for
several seconds. Finally it said, “Pardon the seeming unpoliteness, friend Conway, but my attention was elsewhere. It is at the limit of my range, but I have detected an intelligent life-form.”

“Sutherland!” said Conway.

“I should think so, friend Conway,” Prilicla said. It began to tremble in sympathy with Conway’s dilemma.

Somewhere within a few hundred feet was the missing
Tenelphi
medic, physical condition unknown, but very definitely alive. It might take an hour or more to find him, even with Prilicla’s help. Conway desperately wanted to find and rescue the man, not just for the usual reasons but because he felt sure that he possessed the answer to what had happened to the other
Tenelphi
officers. But he and Prilicla were wanted back on the
Rhabwar
, urgently. Fletcher would not send an SOS signal without good reason.

Obviously the ship was not in distress, so it had to be a problem involving the patients. A sudden worsening of their condition, perhaps, which was serious enough for Murchison and Naydrad—two beings who did not panic without reason—to agree to this method of recalling the two doctors. But, thought Conway suddenly, one doctor could satisfy them temporarily until they got two more a little later, one of whom, Sutherland, had a greater knowledge of the malady concerned than the ambulance ship medics.

Prilicla ceased trembling as soon as Conway made his decision. He turned to his companion. “Doctor, we’ll have to split up. They need us urgently on the ship, or maybe they just want to talk to us urgently. Would you mind taking the shortcut to the outer hull? Find out what the problem is and give what advice you can. But don’t move away from the outer end of that tunnel for at least an hour after you get there. If you do that you will be in line of sight with the
Rhabwar
and, via the tunnel, with me down here, and can relay messages in either direction.

“You should be able to get to the other end of the tunnel, with no zigzagging necessary and with the centrifugal force of the spin helping you along, in roughly two hours,” Conway went on. “This should give me enough time to find Sutherland and start bringing him out. It has to be my job because it will need DBDG muscles rather than Cinrusskin sympathy to help him through that tunnel.”

“I agree, friend Conway,” said Prilicla, already moving along the
corridor towards the opening. “I have rarely agreed to a request with more enthusiasm…”

The first surprise when he went through the airlock was that there was light. He found himself in a large, open compartment, which, judging from the remains of equipment attached to the deck, walls and ceiling, had been the ship’s assembly and recreation area. The equipment, which had originally been used for weightless exercising and probably for competitive sports as well, had been drastically modified to provide supports for the sandwich hammocks, which were necessary for sleeping in the weightless condition. Apart from a few sections sheeted in with transparent plastic and containing vegetation, some of which was still green, the interior surfaces of the enormous compartment were covered with bedding and furniture modified for gravity-free conditions. It looked as if up to two hundred survivors of the original meteorite collisions, including their young, had once been packed into this compartment. The visual evidence indicated that they had lived there for a long time. The second surprise was that there were no traces of them other than the furniture and fittings they had used. Where were the bodies of the long-dead survivors?

Conway felt his scalp prickle. He turned up the volume of his external suit speaker to full and yelled “
Sutherland!
”

No response.

Conway launched himself across the compartment towards the opposite wall, where there were two doors. One of them was partly open and light was shining through. When he landed beside it he knew it was the ship’s library.

It was not just the neat racks of books and tape-spools that covered the walls and ceiling of the empty room, or the reading and scanning equipment attached to the deck, or even the present-day tapes and portable recorders that had belonged to the
Tenelphi
officers but that had been abandoned to drift weightlessly about the room. He knew it was the library because he had been able to read the sign on the door, just as he was able to read the name below the ship’s crest mounted at eye-level on the opposite wall. As he stared at that famous crest everything suddenly became clear.

He knew why the
Tenelphi
had run into trouble, why the officers had left their ship for the derelict, leaving only their medic as watch
keeping officer. He knew why they had returned so hastily, why they were sick and why there was so little he, or anyone else for that matter, could do for them. He also knew why Surgeon-Lieutenant Sutherland used grease instead of marker paint, and he had a fair idea of the situation confronting the doctor that had driven him back to the derelict. He knew because that ship’s name and crest appeared in the history books of Earth and of every Earth-seeded planet.

Conway swallowed, blinked away the fog that was temporarily impairing his vision, and backed slowly out of the room.

The sign on the other door had read
Sports Equipment Stowage
, but it had been relettered
Sick Bay
. When he slid it open he found that it, too, was lighted, but dimly.

Along the walls on both sides of the door, equipment storage shelves had been modified to serve as tiers of bunks, and two of them were occupied. The bodies occupying them were emaciated to the point of deformity, partly because of malnutrition and partly because of being born and living out their lives in the weightless condition. Unlike the desiccated sections of bodies Prilicla and he had encountered on the outer decks, these two had been exposed to atmosphere, and decomposition had taken place. The process was not sufficiently advanced, however, to conceal the fact that the bodies were of classification DBDG, an old male and a girl-child, both Earth-human, and that their deaths had occurred within the past few months.

Conway thought of the voyage that had lasted nearly seven centuries and of the last two survivors who had almost made it, and he had to blink again. Angrily, he moved deeper into the room, pulling himself along the edge of a treatment table and instrument cabinet. In a far corner his spotlight illuminated a spacesuited figure holding a squarish object in one hand and supporting itself against an open cabinet door with the other.

“S… Sutherland?”