Sector General Omnibus 2 - Alien Emergencies (50 page)

“The mechanism of reproduction was unclear,” he continued, “and the specimen showed evidence of possessing both male and female genitalia on the forward and rear extremities respectively. The brain, if it was the brain, took the form of a cable of nerve ganglia with localized swellings in three places, running longitudinally through the cadaver like a central core. There was another and much thinner nerve cable running parallel to the thicker core, but below it and about twenty-five centimeters from the underside. Positioned close to each extremity were two sets of three eyes, two of which were mounted dorsally and two on the forward and rear flanks. They were recessed but capable of limited extension and together gave the being complete and continuous vision vertically and horizontally. The type and positioning of the visual equipment and appendages suggest that it evolved on a very unfriendly world.

“Our tentative classification of the being,” Conway ended, “was an incomplete CRLT.”

“Incomplete?” Thornnastor said.

“Yes, sir,” Conway said. “The cadaver we examined had sustained minimum damage since it had died during a slow decompression while in suspended animation. We could be wrong, but there were signs of some kind of radical surgery having taken place, a double removal of what may have been the head and tail of the being. This was not a traumatic amputation caused by the disaster to their ship, but a deliberate procedure which may have been required to fit the being into its suspended animation container for the colonization attempt. The body tegument overall is thick and very tough, but at the extremities the only protection is a hard, transparent layer of organic material, and the underlying protrusions, fissures, orifices, and musculature look raw. This suggests—”

“Conway,” O’Mara said sharply, with a glance toward the suddenly paling Colonel. “With respect to Thornnastor, you have moved too quickly from the general to the particular. Please confine
yourself at this stage to a simple statement of the problem and your proposed solution.”

Colonel Skempton was the man responsible for making Sector General function as an organization—but, as he was fond of telling his medical friends when they started to talk shop in grisly detail, he was a glorified bookkeeper, not a bloody surgeon! The trouble was that there was no way Conway could state his problem simply without offending the sensibilities of the overly squeamish Colonel.

“Simply,” Conway said, “the problem is a gigantic, wormlike entity, perhaps five kilometers or more in length, which has been chopped into many hundreds of pieces. The indicated treatment is to join the pieces together again, in the correct order.”

The Colonel’s stylus stopped in mid-doodle, Thornnastor made a loud, untranslatable sound, and O’Mara, normally a phlegmatic individual, said with considerable vehemence, “Conway, you are not considering bringing that—that Midgard Serpent to the hospital?”

Conway shook his head. “The hospital is much too small to handle it.”

“And so,” Skempton said, looking up for the first time, “is your ambulance ship.”

Before Conway could reply, Thornnastor said, “I find it difficult to believe that the entity you describe could survive such radical amputation. However, if Prilicla and yourself state that the separate sections so far recovered are alive, then I must accept it. But have you considered the possibility that it is a group entity, similar to the Telphi life-form which are stupid as individuals but highly intelligent as a gestalt? Physical fragmentation in those circumstances would be slightly more credible, Doctor.”

“Yes, sir, and we have not yet discarded that possibility—” Conway began.

“Very well, Doctor,” O’Mara broke in dryly. “You may restate the problem in less simple form.”

The problem…
thought Conway.

He began by asking them to visualize the vast, alien ship as it had been before the disaster—not the multiple Wheel shape first discussed but a great, continuous, open coil of constant diameter and similar in configuration to the shape on the Colonel’s pad. The
separate turns of the coil had been laced together by an open latticework of metal beams which held the vessel together as a rigid unit and provided the structural support needed along the thrust axis during take-off, acceleration, and landing. Assembled in orbit, the ship had been approximately five hundred meters in diameter and close on a mile long, with its power and propulsion system at one end of an axial support structure and the automatic guidance system and sensors at the other.

The exact nature of the accident or malfunction was not yet known, but judging by the observed effects it had been caused by a collision with a large natural object which, striking the vessel head-on, had taken out the guidance system forward, the axial structure, and the stern thrusters. The shock of the collision had shaken the great, rotating coil into its component suspended animation compartments, and centrifugal force had done the rest.

“This being—or beings—is so physiologically constituted,” Conway went on, “that to assist it we must first rebuild its ship and land it successfully. Fitting the pieces together again can be done most easily in weightless conditions. The fact that the twenty-meter sections of the coil have flown apart but retained their positions with respect to each other will greatly assist the reassembly operation—”

“Wait, wait,” the Colonel said. “I cannot see this operation being possible, Doctor. For one thing, you will need a very potent computer indeed to work out the trajectories of those expanding sections accurately enough to return them to their original positions in this—this jigsaw puzzle—and the equipment needed to reassemble it would be—”

“Captain Fletcher says it is possible,” Conway said firmly. “Piecing together the remains of an extraterrestrial ship has been done before, and much valuable knowledge was gained in the process. Admittedly, on previous occasions there were no living survivors to be pieced together as well and the work was on a much smaller scale.”

“Much smaller,” O’Mara said dryly. “Captain Fletcher is a theoretician and
Rhabwar
is his first operational command. Is he happy ordering three scoutship flotillas around?”

The Chief Psychologist was considering the problem in the terms of his own specialty, Conway knew, and as usual O’Mara was a jump ahead of everyone else.

“He seems to enjoy worrying about it,” Conway said carefully, “and there are no overt signs of megalomania.”

O’Mara nodded and sat back in his chair.

But the Colonel could jump to correct conclusions as well, if not always as quickly as the Chief Psychologist. He said, “Surely, O’Mara, you are not suggesting that
Rhabwar
direct this operation? It’s too damned big, and expensive. It has to be referred up to—”

“There isn’t time for committee decisions,” Conway began.

“—the Federation Council,” the Colonel finished. “And anyway, did Fletcher tell you how he proposed fitting this puzzle together?”

Conway nodded. “Yes, sir. It is a matter of basic design philosophy…” Captain Fletcher was of the opinion—an opinion shared by the majority of the Federation’s top designers—that any piece of machinery beyond a certain degree of complexity, be it a simple groundcar or a spaceship one kilometer long, required an enormous amount of prior design work, planning and tooling long before the first simple parts and subassemblies could become three-dimensional metal on someone’s workbench. The number of detail and assembly drawings, wiring diagrams, and so on for even a small spaceship was mind-staggering, and the purpose of all this paperwork was simply to instruct beings
of average intelligence
how to manufacture and fit together the pieces of the jigsaw without knowing, or perhaps even caring, anything about the completed picture.

If normal Earth-human, Tralthan, Illensan, and Melfan practice was observed—and the engineers of those races and many others insisted that there was no easier way—then those drawings and the components they described must include instructions, identifying symbols, to guide the builders in the correct placing of these parts within the jigsaw.

Possibly there were extraterrestrial species which used more exotic methods of identifying components before assembly such as tagging each part with an olfactory or tactile coding system, but this, considering the tremendous size of the coil ship and the number of parts to be identified and joined, would represent a totally
unnecessary complication unless there were physiological reasons for doing things the hard way.

The cadaver had possessed eyes which operated within the normal visible spectrum, and Captain Fletcher was sure that the alien shipbuilders would do things the easy way by marking the surface of the components with identifying symbols which could be read at a glance. Following a detailed examination of a damaged suspended animation cylinder and the remains of its supporting framework, Fletcher found that the system of identification used was groups of symbols vibro-etched into the metal, and that adjoining components bore the same type and sequence of symbols except for the final letter or number.

“Clearly they think, and put their spaceships together, much the same as we do,” Conway concluded.

“I see,” the Colonel said. He sat forward in his chair. “But decoding those symbols and fitting the parts together will take a lot of time.”

“Or a lot of extra help,” Conway said.

Skempton sat back, shaking his head. Thornnastor was silent also, but the slow, impatient thumping of its massive feet indicated that it was not likely to remain so for long. It was O’Mara who spoke first.

“What assistance will you need, Doctor?”

Conway looked gratefully at the Chief Psychologist for getting straight to the point as well as for the implied support. But he knew that O’Mara would withdraw that support without hesitation if he had the slightest doubt about Conway’s ability to handle the problem. If Conway was to be confirmed in this assignment, he would have to convince O’Mara that he knew exactly what he was doing. He cleared his throat.

“First,” he said, “we should initiate an immediate search for the vessel’s home world so that we can learn as much as possible about this entity’s culture, environment, and food requirements, as well as having somewhere to put it when the rescue is complete. It is almost certain that the disaster caused a large deviation in the coilship’s course, and it is possible that the vessel suffered a guidance malfunction not associated with the accident which fragmented it, and
it has already overshot the target world. This would complicate the search and increase the number of units conducting it.”

Before the Colonel could react, Conway went on quickly, “I also need a search of the Federation Archives. For many centuries before the Federation came into being there were species who possessed the startravel capability and did a lot of independent exploration. There is a slight chance that one of them may have encountered or heard reports of an entity resembling an intelligent Midgard Serpent—”

He broke off, then for Thornnastor’s benefit he explained that the Midgard Serpent was a creature of Earth-human mythology, an enormous snake which was supposed to have encircled the planet with its tail in its mouth. Thornnastor thanked him and expressed its relief that the being was mythological.

“Until now,” the Colonel said sourly.

“Second,” Conway went on, “comes the problem of rapid retrieval and placement of the scattered suspended animation cylinders. Many more scoutships will be required, supported by all of the available specialists in e-t languages and technical notation systems, and computer facilities capable of analyzing this material. A large, ship-borne translation computer should be able to handle the job—”

“That means
Descartes
!” Skempton protested.

“—In the time remaining to us,” Conway resumed, “and I hear
Descartes
recently completed its first contact program on Dwerla and is free. But the third and most technically difficult part of the problem is the reassembly. For this we need fleet auxiliaries with the engineering facilities and space construction personnel capable of rapidly rebuilding those parts of the alien vessel’s supporting framework which cannot be salvaged from the wreckage. Ideally the people concerned should be experienced Tralthan and Hudlar space construction teams.

“Four,” he continued, allowing no time for objections, “we need a ship capable of coordinating the reassembly operation, and mounting a large number of tractor and pressor beam batteries with officers highly trained in their use. This will reduce the risk of collision in the assembly area between the retrieved sections and our
own ships. The coordinating vessel will have its own computer capable of handling the logistic—”

“
Vespasian
, he wants,” Skempton said dully.

“Yes, its tactical computer would be ideal,” Conway replied. “It also has the necessary tractor and pressor batteries and, I believe, a very large cargo lock in case I have to withdraw some of the CRLTs from their suspended animation compartments. Remember, several segments of the entity were destroyed and surgery may be required in these areas to close the gaps. But until we know a great deal more about this entity’s physiology and environment I have no clear idea of the type and quantity of medical assistance which will be needed.”

“At last,” Thornnastor growled through its translator, “you are about to discuss the needs of the patient.”

“The delay was intentional, sir,” Conway said, “since we must repair the ship before we can help the occupant. Regarding this entity, or entities, Pathologist Murchison and myself have examined one cadaver and we seek confirmation of our preliminary findings and as much additional physiological data as you can provide from the specimens brought back in
Tyrell
, and from the contents of the intravenous infusion equipment which is used, apparently, to induce, extend, and reverse the suspended animation process. Specifically, we require much more information on the nervous system, the linkages to the voluntary and involuntary musculature, the degree and rapidity of tissue regeneration we can expect if surgical intervention is necessary and additional data on the transparent material which covers and protects the raw areas at the forward and rear extremities. Naturally, sir, this information is required the day before yesterday.”