Sector General Omnibus 2 - Alien Emergencies by James White Read Free Book Online Page A

flame of the torch burned the rootlet material into a fine, incandescent web. One of the briefly incandescent rootlets pointed towards a barnacle which was larger and differently shaped.
    Patiently they painted both objects and their immediate surroundings with the cutting torches, brushing away the crumbling layers of coating until it was wafer thin. They cracked it, carefully peeled back the remains of the coating and lifted away two perfect specimens.
    “They are dead,” asked Conway, “not just dormant?”
    “They are dead,” said Prilicla.
    “And the patient?”
    “Life is still present, friend Conway, but the radiation is extremely weak, and diffuse.”
    Conway studied the area bared by the removal of the two specimens. Beneath the first was a small, deep hollow which followed the contours of the reversed shell. The underlying tissues showed a high degree of compression, and the few rootlets in evidence were much too weak and fine to have held the barnacle so tightly against the patient. Something or somebody had pressed the barnacle into position with considerable force.
    The second, and different, specimen had been held only by the coating, apparently—it did not possess rootlets. But it did possess wings folded into long slits in its carapace and so, on closer inspection, did the first type.
    Prilicla alighted beside them, trembling slightly and erraticallyin the fashion which denoted excitement. It said, “You will have noticed that these are two entirely different species, friend Conway. Both are large, winged insects of the type which require a low-gravity planet with a thick air envelope—not unlike Cinruss. It is possible that the first type is a predator parasite and that the second is a natural enemy, introduced by a third party in an attempt to cure the patient.”
    Conway nodded. “It would explain why type one turned on to its back when approached by type two…”
    “I hope,” said Murchison apologetically, “that your theory is flexible enough to accept another datum.” She had been scraping persistently at a piece of coating which was still adhering to a smaller slit in the barnacle. “The coating material was not applied by a third party, it is a body secretion of type one.
    “If you don’t mind,” she added, “I’ll take both of these beasties to Pathology for a long, close look.”
    For several minutes after she left nobody spoke. Prilicla began to tremble again and, judging by the expression of Brenner’s face, it was at something the officer was feeling. It was the Lieutenant who broke the silence.
    “If the parasites are responsible for the coating,” he said sickly, “then there was no earlier attempt to cure the patient. Our heavy-gravity patient was probably attacked on the light-gravity planet of the flying barnacles, they sank in their rootlets or tendrils, paralyzed its muscles and nervous system and encased it in a…a shell of slowly feeding maggots when it wasn’t even dead—”
    “A little more clinical detachment, Lieutenant,” said Conway sharply. “You’re bothering Prilicla. And while something like that may have happened, there are still a few awkward facts which don’t fit. That depression under the inverted barnacle still bothers me.”
    “Maybe it sat on one of them,” said Brenner angrily, his feeling of revulsion temporarily overcoming his manners. “And I can understand why its friends dumped the patient into space—there was nothing else they could do.”
    He hesitated, then said, “I’m sorry, Doctor. But is there anything else that you can do?”
    “There is something,” said Conway grimly, “that we can try… ”
    IV
    According to Prilicla their patient was, just barely, alive, and now that the barnacles were known to be the attacking organisms and not just surface eruptions, they and their coating must be removed as quickly as possible. Removal of the tendrils would require more delicate and time-consuming work, but the surface