“I don’t think it does any of us any harm,” Ravi said gently. “Come on, Peake, we’re finished here. Let’s go down to the main cabin…”
He broke off, for the intercom had leaped into sudden life.
“Peake, Peake,” it said, “Peake, Peake, anybody, anybody down here — Peake, Fontana, somebody, come quick, there’s been an accident, oh, come help, somebody—”
“Teague!” It was like an expletive; Peake was out of his seat within seconds. Ravi said urgently into the intercom, “Teague, where are you? Are you hurt?”
“In the gym. Damn DeMags…”
Peake cut him off. “I’m on my way. Ravi, go back to the main cabin and get my medical kit — I’ll go straight there, I could save some time—”
But in the entry to the free-fall corridor outside the gym he bumped into Fontana, and she had his medical bag in her hand, “I heard Teague on the intercom and I knew you’d need this,” she said. “Hurry, Peake!”
He pushed through the sphincter lock ahead of her: took in Teague, kneeling over Ghing; noted the limp dangle of one hand, dismissed it to fumble quickly for a pulse in Ching’s limp wrist. Yes, it was there, feeble but definite. There was a small blue bruise on her temple, bloodless.
“Fontana,” Peake said tersely, “you fix up Teague’s wrist, or hand, while I find out what’s wrong with Ching. Teague, tell me what happened? Did the gravity go off?” In his mind was a clear memory of the time when he had nearly crashed into a wall while running; luck and superb co-ordination had saved him at least a concussion, perhaps a skull fracture. Ching had not been so lucky.
“The gravity was off,” Teague said. “It went on.” He was sobbing, covering his face with his good hand. “She wanted to learn to handle herself in free-fall, I talked her into it, oh, God, it’s my fault — I promised I wouldn’t let her fall, I promised I wouldn’t let her get hurt, she trusted me, oh. she trusted me and I let her fall—”
He was clearly hysterical; Fontana snapped, “Shut up and let me get this wrist bandaged! You can’t do any good by blubbering!” She chose the word deliberately, and it shut him up with a gasp.
“Now try and tell us coherently,” she said, “exactly what happened.”
Teague took a deep breath; cried out in sharp pain as Fontana manipulated his wrist.
“Broken finger here,” she said to Peake, “fourth finger, left hand. Probably need a splint. Possible damaged tendons or ligaments. Those damned, infernal DeMags!” She set her mouth tightly, and continued manipulating Teague’s hand. “Wriggle that ringer. Here, does that hurt? Good, that’s all right. What did you do, come down hard on it?”
“Ravi,” Peake said, “try and find ammonia in the bag. Small vial, glass ampoule — yes, that’s it.” He broke it under Ching’s nose, wondering if the glass fragments would scatter and be dangerous in the case of another DeMag failure. He wanted to get her out of there, but he didn’t dare to move her until he was certain there were no spinal injuries; and he couldn’t tell that until she was conscious.
Ching stirred fractionally and opened her eyes.
“Teague—” she whispered.
“I’m here, darling. Don’t move.”
“What happened? Teague, move out of the way, please—” Peake said, bothered by the intrusion, but watching Ching’s hands groping for him, he was relieved. No gross damage to the spinal cord, at least, if she could move her hands. He slipped off the thin fiber sandals she was wearing.
“Ching, can you wriggle your toes?” But she had shut her eyes again and drifted off into unconsciousness.
He had to know. Quickly he selected a probe from the bag, ran it quickly along the sole of her foot, was rewarded by a strong flinching and twitching of the toes. He felt immensely relieved; no paralysis. Concussion, certainly, and in view of her stuporous state, they could not even rule out a skull fracture; but there was no spinal cord damage and, at least, it was safe to move her. Not that there was any absolute safety anywhere. There had been DeMag failures in the main cabin and in the living quarters, which meant that the trouble with the DeMags was not confined to the unit in the gyro: it had to be in the computer tie-ins, or else some major design flaw in the units themselves, or the controls on the units.
In shock, Peake remembered: Ching was their only access to the computer! Damn the people at the Academy who had let them go out with only a single computer technician! Remembering his conversation with Ravi, he damned them further.
If Ching was badly hurt, or worse — he flinched away from remembering that head injuries were the most commonly fatal of all injuries — the computer might never be wholly trustworthy again.
In which case, they were probably all doomed….
Rising to his full height, he angrily brushed that thought aside. It was more than probable that Ching’s injury was only a minor concussion; most head injuries, after all, were no more. He said, “We’ve got to rig a stretcher. There’s no way we can get her through that free-fall corridor without one.”
“It’s not going to be any too easy even with one,” Fontana said. “Ravi, you’re able-bodied, go and find Moira and get her to help you rig something to carry Ching; she’s about the best mechanic aboard.”
Even with Ching’s unconscious body firmly strapped to a stretcher and a safety net stretched over her to immobilize her, it was not at all easy; Peake, weighing danger against danger — in head injuries any kind of depressant was dangerous — finally took out a pressure-spray hypo and gave her a shot. He explained tersely, to Fontana’s raised eyebrows — she had had a secondary specialization in medicine, enough to make her a competent technician or assistant — “If she vomits in free-fall while she’s unconscious, she could aspirate vomit, and you know as well as I do what that would do to her lungs. It would be safer not to move her at all. But I don’t trust the DeMags in here even as much as I trust the ones in the main cabin.”
But Ching did not stir or show the slightest sign of distress as the stretcher, guided by Peake at one end and Fontana at the other, was floated carefully down the corridor and maneuvered through the sphincter locks. They swept music hastily to one side and laid her on the table in the main cabin.
Paradoxically, though he did not wish Ching any distress and was glad she was spared the ordeal of vomiting in free-fall, her very failure to do so troubled Peake. Interfering with that reflex action, necessary as it was, would make it even harder to diagnose accurately what, if any, damage she had sustained; nausea was a good and accurate gauge of the depth of concussion. Grimly he recalled a hospital tenet from his training; better complaining than comatose! The more miserably sick Ching had been, the better he would have felt about her.
He folded back an eyelid to check the pupils of her eyes; flashed a light, and set his teeth, knowing there was trouble. The two pupils were unequally dilated; and ammonia failed, this time, to rouse her to consciousness. He got out a set of probes and started pricking her feet with them,
“You’re hurting her,” Teague protested, as he slid the probe under a toenail; Teague could feel his own toes shrink in sympathy, but Peake looked alien, grim, distant. “I wish I could hurt her,” he said. “Damn it, Teague, I’m not being brutal, I have to check how much she’s responding to painful stimuli!”
“Oh. Right.” Teague shut up, looking miserably at the stranger Peake had suddenly become; distant, frighteningly efficient, not at all the good-natured, soft-spoken crew member, but vested with all the charisma, power and authority of Medicine. Ching too had become wholly strange, limp and apparently lifeless, her face without expression as if cast in marble, the bland meaningless features in cold and chiselled silence. Her small blue-veined foot was like a baby’s foot, the sole soft and pink as if it had never been walked on. There was a small spot of blood where Peake had driven the probe under the nail.