“Time for lunch,” it said. “I’m going to the dining hall. Coming?”
“No, thank you,” she. replied. “There’s something I have to do here.”
“This is the second time in three days you’ve missed lunch,” the Earth-human said. “Do Sommaradvans have some kind of crazy work ethic? Aren’t you hungry, or is it just an understandable aversion to hospital food?”
“No, yes very, and sometimes,” Cha Thrat said.
“I’ve a pack of sandwiches,” it said. “Guaranteed nutritious, nontoxic to all oxy-breathers and if you don’t look too closely at what’s inside, you should be able to make them stay down. Interested?”
“Very much,” Cha Thrat replied gratefully, thinking that now she would be able to satisfy her complaining stomach and spend the whole lunch period watching the FOKT tape.
The muted but insistent sound of the emergency siren brought her mind back from Goglesk and its peculiar problems to the realization that she had spent much longer than the stipulated lunch period watchjng the tape, and that the empty ship was rapidly filling with people.
She saw three Earth-humans in Monitor Corps greengo past the casualty deck entrance, heading toward Control, and a few minutes later the lumpy green ball that was Danalta rolled onto the casualty deck. It was closely followed by an Earth-human, wearing whites with Pathology Department insignia, who had to be the DBDG female, Murchison; then Naydrad and Prilicla entered, the Kelgian undulating rapidly along the deck and the insectile Cinrusskin empath using the ceiling. The Charge Nurse went straight to the viewer, which was still running the FOKT tape, and switched it off as two more Earth-humans came in.
One of them was Timmins and the other, judging by the uniform insignia and its air of authority, was the ship’s ruler, Major Fletcher. It was the Lieutenant who spoke first.
“How long will it take you to finish here?” it said.
“The rest of today,” Cha Thrat replied promptly, “and most of the night.”
Fletcher shook its head.
“I could bring in more people, sir,” Timmins said. “They would have to be briefed on the job, which would waste some time. But I’m sure I could shorten that to four, perhaps three hours.”
The ship ruler shook its head again.
“There is only one alternative,” the Lieutenant said.
For the first time Fletcher looked directly at Cha Thrat. It said, “The Lieutenant tells me that you are capable of completing and testing this facility yourself. Are you?”
“Yes,” Cha Thrat said.
“Have you any objections to doing so during a three-day trip to Goglesk?”
“No,” she said firmly.
The Earth-human looked up at Prilicla, the leader of the ship’s medical team, not needing to speak.
“I fee! no strong objections from my colleagues to this being accompanying us, friend Fletcher,” the empath said, “since this is an emergency.”
“In that case,” Fletcher said as it turned to go, “we leave in fifteen minutes.”
Timmins looked as if it wanted to say something, a word of caution, perhaps, or advice, or reassurance. Instead it held up a loosely clenched fist with the oppos-able thumb projecting vertically from it in a gesture she had not seen it make before, and then it, too, was gone. Cha Thrat heard the sound of its feet on the metal floor of the ship’s boarding tube and, in spite of the four widely different life-forms closely surrounding her, suddenly she felt ail alone.
“Don’t worry, Cha Thrat,” Prilicla said, the musical triils and clicks of its native speech backing the translated words. “You are among friends.”
“There’s a problem,” Naydrad said. “No acceleration furniture to suit that stupid shape of yours. Lie down on a casualty litter and I’ll strap you in.”
CHAPTER 12
The FOKT facility was completed and thoroughly tested, first by Naydrad and then, on the orders of Major Fletcher, by Rhabwar engineer officer, Lieutenant Chen. That, apart from brief meetings on the way to or from the combination dining area and recreationdeck, was her only direct contact with any of the ship’sofficers.
It was not that they tried to discourage such contact between the officer-ruler level and a being of the lowest technical rank, or that they deliberately tried to make her feel inferior. They did neither. But all Monitor Corps personnel who passed the very high technical and academic requirements for service on interstellar ships were automatically considered, at least to the status-conscious mind of a Sommaradvan, to be as close to ruler status as made no difference. Without meaning to give offense they kept slipping into a highly technical and esoteric, language of their own, and they made her feel very uncomfortable.
In any case she felt more at home with the civilian medics than with the beings who, apart from a few small but significant badges on their collars, wore the same uniform as she did. As well, it was impossible to be in the same company as Prilicla without feeling very comfortable indeed. So she made herself as inconspicuous as her physiology would permit, reminded herself constantly that she now belonged to the maintenance rather than the medical fraternity, and tried very hard not to join in while the others were discussing the mission.
Goglesk had been a borderline case so far as the Cultural Contact people were concerned. Full contact with a technologically backward culture could be dangerous because, when the Monitor Corps ships dropped out of their skies, they could never be sure whether they were giving the natives evidence of a future technological goal at which they could aim or a destructive inferiority complex. But the Gogleskans, in spite of their backwardness in the physical sciences and the devastating racial psychosis that forced them to remain so, were psychologi-cally stable, at least as individuals, and their planet had not known war for many thousands of years.
The easiest course would have been for the Corps to withdraw and leave the Gogleskan culture to continue as it had been doing since the dawn of its history, and write their problem off as insoluble. Instead they had made one of their very few compromises by setting up a small base for the purposes of observation, investigation, and limited contact.
Progress for any intelligent species depended on increasing levels of cooperation among its individuals and family or tribal groups. On Goglesk, however, any attempt at close cooperation brought drastically reduced intelligence, a mindless urge to destruction, and serious physical injury in its wake, so that the Gogleskans had been forced into becoming a race of individualists who had close physical contact only during the brief reproductive period or while caring for the very young.
The problem had come about as the result of a solution forced on them in presapient times. They had been a food source for every predator infesting their oceans, but they, too, had evolved natural weapons of offense and defense — stings that paralyzed or killed the smaller life-forms and long cranial tendrils that gave them the faculty of telepathy by contact. When threatened by large predators they had linked bodies and minds together to the size required to neutralize any attacker with their combined stings.
There was fossil evidence on Goglesk of a titanic struggle for survival between them and a gigantic and particularly ferocius species of ocean predator, a battle that had raged for many, many thousands of years. The FOKTs had won in the end, and had evolved into intelligent land-dwellers, but they had paid a terrible price.
In order to sting to death one of those giant predators,physical and telepathic link-ups ot hundreds of individual FOKTs had been required. A great many of them had perished, been torn apart or eaten during every such encounter, and the consequent and oft-repeated death agonies of the slain had been shared telepathically by every single member of the groups. In an attempt to reduce their suffering, the effects of the group telepathy had been diluted by the generation of a mindless urge to destroy indiscriminately everything within reach. But even so, the mental scars inflicted during their prehistory had not healed.