James White - Double Contact

Prilicla began by surgically enlarging the entry wound to give Danalta and himself more space to work, since speed rather than minimal surgery was required here. Carefully he slid a fine laser knife with an angled blade focus along the spar to the point where it had fractured and bent. There was a brief puff of vapor as he cut it in two and the small quantity of wood, spider blood, and body fluid in the area dried up or boiled away

“Naydrad'” said Prilicla, “withdraw the spar smoothly along the original angle of entry and apply suction where I indicate. Danalta, be ready to help me control the bleeding and subsequent repairs. Murchison, remove foreign material from the lost blood and retain it for possible reuse…”

There were a large number of spiders around, he thought, but he was not in a position to ask for volunteer blood donors.

“… We will ignore any loose splinters for now,” he went on, “and tidy up later. But Murchison, keep track of them in case they find a way into the circulatory system. Gently, Naydrad, begin the withdrawal.”

Before the section of spar had been pulled free of the wound, Murchison’s scanner was showing copious bleeding from two of the major blood vessels that it had been compressing.

He said quickly, “Naydrad, suction, let’s see what we’re doing. Danalta, clamp off the bleeders while I go after the the torn section of bowel. Murchison, enlarge the image of the operative field by four, and hold it as steady as you can.”

Danalta was waiting with a blocky hand resting against one of the operating-frame supports to steady it, and with two long, pencil-thin fingers already extruded. When the digits reached the severed blood vessels they divided in half and each one grew two wide, wafer-thin spatulate tips which wrapped themselves gently around two veins above and below the tears and tightened until the blood diminished to a trickle and stopped. Prilicla inserted his own long, featherlike digits into the wound and isolated and tied off the torn length of bowel in a more orthodox fashion with running sutures.

“The tearing is too irregular and widespread for us to attempt a dependable, long-term repair,” he said, “so we’ll have to do a resection after completely removing the affected length. But not too much of it. The digestive and waste-elimination system in this species has a lesser redundancy of internal tubing than have our Earth-human and Kelgian friends. Naydrad, be ready with a sterile biodegradable sleeve with a fifty-day dissolution period. By that time, judging by our patient’s basal metabolism, healing should be complete. Friend Murchison?”

“I agree,” it said, radiating controlled concern. “But, sir, can I make a suggestion? Two, in fact. One is that we don’t spend too much time on the tidiness of the work. The patient’s vital signs, when compared with those of the spiders with minimal injures, are not good. Taking into consideration the severe trauma caused by it being transfixed by that wing spar, the other suggestion is that you do the remaining repair work from your present operating site rather than cutting open a flap of carapace, which would certainly increase the amount and duration of the trauma.”

“Very well,” he replied and felt her relief, “we’ll do it that way.”

Even though it was being performed for the first time on a member of a hitherto-unknown species, the procedure was in most respects routine. That was because the other-species Educator tapes that had been impressed on his Cinrusskin mind contained physiological and medical data as well as the surgical knowledge of five other intelligent life-forms — Kelgians, Melfans, Earth-humans, Tralthans, and the light-gravity Eurils — as well as his own. There were only so many ways, in spite of the wide variety of outward physical differences, that the internal plumbing of a warm-blooded oxygen breather could be put right, and he had good second-hand surgical knowledge of most of them. He was relieved to find that the spider physiology shared a few minor similarities with the Kelgian caterpillars and his own Cinrusskin species, but he had to keep searching for others.

Prilicla cringed mentally as he shuffled through the welter of other-species thoughts and impressions that filled his mind with apparently warring alien entities. Without the Educator tape system the practice of all but the simplest forms of other-species surgery and medicine would have been impossible, but the tapes had one serious, psychological disadvantage that barred their use to all but the most stable, adaptable, and, he suspected in his own case, the most cowardly and non-resistant of minds. That was because the tapes did not transfer only the clinical information possessed by the donor minds but their entire personalities, which included all of their pet peeves, phobias, short tempers, and greater or lesser psychological faults as well.

Many times the hospital’s diagnosticians as well as his fellow senior physicians had described the process as an experience of multiple schizophrenia viewed from the inside, as the donor entities apparently struggled with the tape recipient for possession of its mind. The effect was purely subjective, naturally, but where mental or physical discomfort was concerned there was no real difference so far as he was concerned. His own method of dealing with the problem, a solution which had sorely perplexed the hospital’s department of other-species psychology because most intelligent beings were incapable of acting in such cowardly fashion, had been to offer no resistance at all to the donor mind and to use its information no matter which of them thought they were boss of their mental world.

But in the physical world, while an other-species entity was occupying most of his mind, he had to remember to behave like a weak and incredibly fragile Cinrusskin and, if his donor entity should be a heavy-gravity Hudlar or Tralthan with a body-weight measured in tons, not to throw his non-existent weight around.

Like himself the spiders possessed six legs, but they were much more heavily muscled and he doubted if “cowardice” was in common usage in their vocabularies.

Even with Naydrad pressing down on the remainder of the spar where it projected through the carapace while Danalta and himself drew it out from underneath, the second half of the procedure took longer because the repair work to the lacerated blood vessels in the area, while operationally similar, was both more delicate and more awkwardly situated. But finally it was done, the operative field was cleared of foreign debris and the abdominal wound sutured and a small, sterile plate placed over the exit wound in the carapace. The repair work that remained was urgent and necessary but not life-threatening.

The glider impact had broken three of the patient’s limbs, with one of them sustaining a double fracture that had come close to being a traumatic amputation.

“We have already ascertained,” he said with a glance towards Murchison, “that the limbs on this species are exoskeletal and are composed of hardened, organic cylinders with no external sensors or muscle system apart from those serving the digits at the extremities. They use a proprioceptor system which enables the brain to know the exact, three-dimensional position of a limb with respect to the body at any given time, and movement is controlled hydraulically by the increase or reduction of internal fluid. Much of this fluid has been lost because of its injuries, but the supply should be replaced artificially with sterile fluid until it is replaced naturally in the manner of other species who automatically restore blood or other body fluids to the required volume.

“With this patient,” he went on, “we will use the accepted procedure for joining exoskeletal fractures and encase them in a rigid collar of the required length. We will begin with the left forward member and… I’m tired, Murchison, but still operational. Control your feelings, you are emoting like a nagging life-mate!”