He rubbed his bald, tanned crown anxiously, then gave himself a mental shake and stood, remembering a lesson he'd learned long ago. If he couldn't see how to solve his whole problem, the thing to do was to start by solving the parts of it that he could.
The first thing was to get her out of her blood-stained, filthy flight suit. He still couldn't see any closures, but he'd already ruined her tailoring. He found a pair of huge sail-maker's scissors and went to work.
His patient-if such she was-was a sturdily built girl, he discovered, rather pleased with himself for managing to maintain an almost clinical attitude. She had the appropriate numbers of fingers and toes and perfect teeth without a single filling. As far as he could determine, there were absolutely no external differences between her and any other woman, except, perhaps, for how extraordinarily well developed her muscles were. They had a sleek, flowing vitality-the strength of conditioned endurance, not just brute power. He'd seen enough hard-trained people in his life to know the difference.
He peeled her out of the suit, discovering along the way that it had comprehensive and ingenious plumbing connections-which, however, apparently led nowhere-and that the flat case on her right hip was a snap-down holster. He thought of it as snapping down, anyway, although the exact nature of the closure evaded him. He saw no sign of any fastening, but when he pressed the flap down, it stayed there until he tugged it loose. In a strange way, that prosaic little trick impressed him even more than aerobatic streaks of light and nuclear explosions in the heavens.
The weapon itself was completely baffling. He knew it was a weapon-he'd handled enough of them to feel its lethality-yet he had no inkling of how it functioned. The barrel was a massive piece of alloy suspiciously like stainless steel, except that a check with a magnet showed that it was nonferrous. It was some sort of projectile weapon ... he thought. But the bore was tiny, certainly no more than a millimeter in diameter, and there was no sign of a slide or ejector port. Hair-thin, almost invisible lines formed a square on the bottom of the pistol butt, and a pocket in the back of the holster held half a dozen blocky, featureless rectangular cubes of what appeared to be solid plastic which would have fitted perfectly inside the square and just about filled the "pistol's" grip-assuming the butt was hollow and there was some way to eject the cube already in it.
He handled the thing with extreme care. It undoubtedly made his .45 look like a big, noisy cap pistol, but he felt no particular desire to squeeze the button inside its trigger guard. There were three more small buttons or sliding switches recessed into the side of the barrel, and he kept his hands carefully away from them, as well. He was fairly certain any weaponeer would have the sense to build in a safety, but he had no intention of finding out the hard way which one wasn't it.
She wore a thin metal necklet of some sort, as well, and he scrutinized it with almost equal curiosity. It supported a plastic cube a half-inch square and a quarter-inch thick. Study it as he might, he could discern no apparent closures, readouts, or features of any sort, but it certainly didn't look like an ornament! He was a bit worried by its snug fit, wondering if it might interfere with her breathing, but then his probing fingertip touched a nearly invisible stud and the supporting band sprang open so suddenly he almost dropped it in surprise. He held it up for one last, close look, then shrugged and admitted defeat.
He slid the weapon back into the holster and tucked everything away in a locker, then turned back to his passenger. That was the best word, he decided: "passenger." Or perhaps he should think of her as a distressed mariner? The thought won a wry snort of amusement from him-the first levity he'd felt since she fell out of the sky at him.
One thing he could do was clean her up. Whatever her activities for the past few weeks, bathing hadn't been one of them. His supply of fresh water was limited, but he could spare enough for a sponge bath, and did, trying to ignore her firm softness without a great deal of success ... until he discovered a second, larger pucker just below her left shoulder blade and barely half an inch from her spine.
He froze for only a moment, then made his hands continue their gentle cleansing, but his discovery had shocked him into remembering her alien nature. Those two marks were an entry and an exit wound-which meant something had passed entirely through her body, ripping its way through her lung and God knew what else at high velocity. And she'd survived it.
He laid her back down and did what he could with her hair (not much) as he tried to envision how anything, human or not, could survive that kind of traumatic damage. Unfortunately, his imagination was unequal to the task, and that scared him in a distant sort of way, for he was unused to questions he couldn't even begin to answer, and this shipwrecked girl was a mass of those. The sheer vitality her survival implied was frightening enough without wounds which, he noticed suddenly, had not only closed but were already beginning to heal.
He peered closely at the fading rawness of her damaged flesh, and the puckered marks already looked less livid and new. Moved by a sudden impulse to gather proof, he found his camera and snapped pictures of the wounds, resolving to take more at regular intervals. Not that he expected anyone to believe him even with photos.
He sighed and tucked the sheet over her, wondering what he should do next. With a comparably wounded human, he could just have buried her at sea; as it was, he had to assume she would live ... unless he did something stupid and finished her off out of sheer ignorance. The ironic thought was less humorous than he'd expected, and his grin died stillborn. Damn it, it was important that she live! Whoever or whatever she was, she must be a treasure trove of data just waiting to be discovered-and she was a damned good-looking kid, too.
But how to keep her alive? He didn't even know her dietary requirements! What should he think about feeding her? Could she metabolize terrestrial food? Did she need vitamins he couldn't provide? Trace minerals? What about-?
He reined in his imagination before it did any damage. Manifestly, he thought, watching her breathe, she could handle terrestrial air, which was probably a good sign. Now. If she were a human, she would need lots of protein and liquids after losing so much blood. And while it looked like she was healing completely and with indecent speed, he couldn't know she was. There might be internal damage he didn't know about, too, though the fact that her abdomen showed no sign of distension encouraged him to believe that at least there was no major internal bleeding. But until he knew what shape her plumbing was in, solid food was out. Besides, how could he get anything solid down an unconscious patient in the first place?
Soup, he decided. Soup was the best bet, and he had literally cases of canned soup among his provisions.
He fired up his old-fashioned bottled-gas stove and put on a kettle of cream of chicken soup. He supposed something with vegetables might be better for her, but until she was able to chew on her own, he wasn't going to risk anything with solids. Actually, broth of some sort probably would have been best of all, but Aston had always hated broth and flatly refused to keep any in his galley.
He brought the soup to a simmer, stirring occasionally and checking his patient at frequent intervals. She showed no sign of waking, and before settling in to feed her-which he guessed might be a lengthy business-he took himself back topside and got Amanda back under sail. He waited long enough to be certain the self-steering was working properly (he hadn't done that once, and the results still made him shudder), then went back below, mentally rolling up his sleeves as he faced the daunting task of nursing an alien from God knew where while sailing single-handed across the Atlantic.