It was Stubbs, or rather the sight of him, that got Mancini moving. Getting his own shattered leg disentangled from the chair was a distracting task, but not distracting enough to let him take his eyes from the boy a few meters away. Arterial bleeding is a sight that tends to focus attention.
He felt sick, over and above the pain of his leg; whether it was the sight of Rick or incipient shock he couldn't tell. He did his best to ignore the leg as he inched across the deck, though the limb itself seemed to have other ideas. Unfortunately these weren't very consistent; sometimes it wanted — demanded his whole mind, at others it seemed to have gone off somewhere on its own and hidden. He did not look back to see whether it was still with him; what was in front was more important.
The boy still had blood when Mancini reached him, as well as a functioning heart to pump it. He was not losing the fluid as fast as had appeared from a distance, but something would obviously have to be done about what was left of his right hand — the thumb and about half of the palm. The mechanic had been raised during one of the periods when first-aiders were taught to abjure the tourniquet, but had reached an age where judgment stands a chance against rules. He had a belt and used it.
A close look at the boy's other injuries showed that nothing could be done about them on the spot; they were bleeding slowly, but any sort of first aid would be complicated by the slivers of glass protruding from most of them. Face, chest, and even legs were slashed freely, but the rate of bleeding was not — Mancini hoped — really serious. The smaller ones were clotting already.
Dandridge was on his feet by now, badly bruised but apparently in the best shape of the six.
“What can I do, Marco?” he asked. “Everyone else is out cold. Should I use…"
“Don't use anything on them until we're sure there are no broken necks or backs; they may be better off unconscious. I know I would be.”
“Isn't there dope in the first-aid kit? I could give you a shot of painkiller.”
“Not yet, anyway. Anything that would stop this leg from hurting would knock me out, and I've got to stay awake if at all possible until help comes. The lab equipment isn't really meant for repair work, but if anything needs to be improvised from it. I'll have to be the one to do it.
I could move around better, though, if this leg were splinted. Use the raft foam from the handling locker.”
Five minutes later Mancini's leg, from mid-thigh down, was encased in a bulky, light, but reasonably rigid block of foamed resin whose original purpose was to provide on-the-spot flotation for objects which were inconvenient or impossible to bring aboard. It still hurt, but he could move around without much fear of doing the limb further damage.
“Good. Now you'd better see what communication gear, if any, stood up under this bump. I'll do what I can for the others. Don't move Ishi or the captain; work around them until I've done what I can.”
Dandridge went forward to the conning section and began to manipulate switches. He was not a trained radioman — the Shark didn't carry one — but like any competent crew member he could operate all the vessel's equipment under routine conditions. He found quickly that no receivers were working, but that the regular transmitter drew current when its switches were closed. An emergency low-frequency beacon, entirely separate from the other communication equipment, also seemed intact; so he set this operating and began to broadcast the plight of the Shark on the regular transmitter. He had no way of telling whether either signal was getting out, but was not particularly worried for himself. The Shark was theoretically unsinkable — enough of her volume was filled with resin foam to buoy her entire weight even in fresh water. The main question was whether help would arrive before some of the injured men were beyond it.
After ten minutes of steady broadcasting — he hoped — Dandridge turned back to the mechanic, to find him lying motionless on the deck. For a moment the winchman thought he might have lost consciousness; then Mancini spoke.
“I've done all I can for the time being. I've splinted Joe's arms and pretty well stopped Rick's bleeding. Ishi has a skull fracture and the captain at least a concussion; don't move either one. If you've managed to get in touch with the Guppy, tell them about the injuries. We'll need gene records from Denver for Rick, probably for Ishi, and possibly for the captain. They should start making blood for Rick right away, the second enough gene data is through; he's lost quite a bit.”
“I don't know whether I'm getting out or not, but I'll say it all anyway,” replied Dandridge, turning back to the board. “Won't you need some pretty extensive repair work yourself, though?”
“Not unless these bone fragments do more nerve damage than I think they have,” replied Mancini. “Just tell them that I have a multiple leg fracture. If I know Bert Jellinge, he'll have gene blocks on all six of us growing into the machines before we get back to the Guppy anyway.”
Dandridge eyed him more closely. “Hadn't I better give you a shot now?” he asked. “You said you'd done all you could, and it might be better to pass out from a sleepy shot than from pain. How about it?”
“Get that message out first. I can hold on, and what I've done is the flimsiest of patchwork. With the deck tossing as it is any of those splints may be inadequate. We can't strap any of the fellows down, and if the wave motion rolls one of them over I'll have the patching to do all over again. When you get that call off, look at Rick once more; I think his bleeding has stopped, but until he's on a repair table I won't be happy about him.”
“So you'd rather stay awake.”
“Not exactly, but if you were in the kid's place, wouldn't you prefer me to?” Dandridge had no answer to that one; he talked into the transmitter instead.
His words, as it happened, were getting out. The Conger, the nearest of the Shark's sister fish-tenders, had already started toward them; she had about forty kilometers to come. On the Guppy the senior mechanic had fulfilled Mancini's prediction; he had already made contract with Denver, and Rick Stubbs' gene code was about to start through the multiple-redundant communication channels used for the purpose — channels which, fortunately, had just been freed of the saturation caused by a serious explosion in Pittsburgh, which had left over five hundred people in need of major repair. The full transmission would take over an hour at the highest safe scanning rate; but the first ten minutes would give enough information, when combined with the basic human data already in the Guppy's computers, to permit the synthesis of replacement blood.
The big mother-ship was heading toward the site of the accident so as to shorten the Conger's journey with the victims, The operations center at Cape Farewell had offered a “mastodon” — one of the gigantic helicopters capable of lifting the entire weight of a ship like the Shark. After a little slide-rule work, the Guppy's commander had declined; no time would have been saved, and the elimination of one ship-to-ship transfer for the injured men was probably less important than economy of minutes.
Mancini would have agreed with this, had he been able to join in the discussion. By the time Dandridge had finished his second transmission, however, the mechanic had fainted from the pain of his leg.
Objectively, the winchman supposed that it was probably good for his friend to be unconscious. He was not too happy, though, at being the only one aboard who could take responsibility for anything. The half hour it took for the Conger to arrive was not a restful one for him, though it could not have been less eventful. Even sixty years later, when the story as his grandchildren heard it included complications like a North Atlantic winter gale, he was never able to paint an adequate word picture of his feelings during those thirty minutes — much less an exaggerated one.