James White - Double Contact

The other was radiating concern rather than irritation but it did not reply.

“I’m sorry, friend Murchison,” he apologized a moment later, “for my lack of concentration and mental confusion. Certain aspects of the procedure brought my Earth-human and Kelgian tape-donor personalities to the forefront of my mind, and that is not a polite combination.”

Murchison laughed quietly and said, “I guessed as much. But look out of the window, it’s morning already. This has been a long op and you must be close to the limits of your endurance. With the experience we’ve already gained on this one, treating its limb fractures and the superficial injuries of the other spider casualties will be simple by comparison. The rest of the cases are non-urgent so that if we do encounter problems, they can wait until you waken. But I’m sure the rest of us can handle them.”

“I’m sure you can,” said Prilicla, looking at it through a thickening fog of fatigue that was becoming opaque to coherent thought. “But there is something about this one that concerns me, subtle differences in the external and internal body structure from that of your benchmark patient in recovery. This is a new species to us. The pilot may have sustained impact injuries that at first were not as obvious as physical trauma, deformation, and internal-organ displacement, perhaps, which…”

He broke off as Murchison laughed, louder this time, and there was an explosion of amusement from it and the other members of the team that momentarily hid their feelings of concern for himself.

“Perhaps you were concentrating so much on the surgical details,” Murchison said, “that you were too busy to notice or identify the differences you mentioned. They are due to the fact that our benchmark patient is a female and this one isn’t.”

“You are right, I must be tired,” he said, joining and adding to their waves of amusement as he flew unsteadily to the large, flat top of an instrument cabinet in a corner of the room and settled onto it. “But I shall observe and try to stay awake until all of our spiders are treated.”

He surprised himself by doing just that before his increasing physical and mental fatigue rendered sentience and sapience next to impossible. With all of the spider patients treated and transferred to the recovery room, his last conscious impression was of Murchison standing before the communicator and speaking to the captain.

“I’ve already tried to talk to one of them,” it was saying, “and I’d like to try again using simplified first contact procedure. These people aren’t space-travelers so I won’t need the complicated Federation historical material used during the Trolanni contact. There’s nothing else to do here at the moment except brood about the nasty things that could happen to us. So I want to try talking to them again. What do you think?”

“I think yes, ma’am,” Fletcher replied. “Give me half an hour to modify the program, then I’ll stand by to advise on its usage. There are eight more spider ships hull-up on the horizon and another twenty on the radar screens but still no activity on the beach. That situation will certainly change before long and the result will be a lot of people, possibly including ourselves, being killed.

“Talking our way out of this trouble,” it ended, “is the preferred option.”

Prilicla wakened suddenly with the feeling that he had been caught up in a riot. Many strident, other-species word sounds and waves of angry emotional radiation were beating into his mind. Suddenly terrified and still befuddled with sleep, he wondered if the meteorite shield had failed and the spiders were overrunning the station. But then his slowly clearing mind and empathic faculty made him aware that the loudest sounds and strongest feelings were emanating from two principle sources, one of which was long-familiar to him, and both of them were in the adjoining recovery ward.

Not trusting his trembling wings to fly, he walked unsteadily into the other room to find out what was happening.

With the exception of the recently treated and still-unconscious spider pilot and Captain Fletcher, who was staring at the proceedings from the ward communicator screen, everyone in the ward was trying to talk at the same time, so much so that parts of the conversations were lost in the derisive beeping of the ward translator going into overload. Farther down the ward the Terragar casualties and Keet were arguing, heatedly but in tones low enough for them to hear the quiet voice of Jasam, who was postoperatively debilitated but recovering well, making a contribution. But most of the vocal and emotional noise was coming from the argument between Murchison and the glider pilot’s uninjured passenger.

The spider passenger was arguing…?

Surprised but not yet knowing if he should be pleased, he turned up the output volume of his own translator unit and, borrowing a phrase from his Earth-human mind partner that seemed appropriate in the circumstances, said, “Will everyone please shut the hell up?” When the arguments tapered off into silence, he added, “Except you, friend Murchison. The spider passenger’s words are being translated. We can talk to and understand each other now, and make peace before anyone else is hurt. This should be the best possible news, but instead it feels as if a war is starting. Explain.”

The pathologist inhaled and exhaled slowly as it strove to regain its customary emotional equilibrium before speaking; then it said, “As you know, I’d already learned a few words of their language when I was captured, and with the help of the captain’s first-contact material and a lot of sign language, we were able to make ourselves understood to the point where the translation computer could take over and finish the job. We can now talk to each other, and that includes talking with the other patients and staff, but we aren’t communicating. It won’t believe a damn thing I or anyone else says to it.” Murchison spread her arms out horizontally to full extension with the palms of its hands facing each other. “There’s a credibility gap this wide.”

“I understand,” said Prilicla. He began walking towards the disbelieving spider, slowly in case his appearance might frighten it, to stop beside its litter. It was capable of ambulation but was being firmly restrained by webbing for its own as well as for the other patients’ protection. Then spreading his wings he took off to maintain a stable hover close to the ceiling where he was sure of getting everyone’s attention.

“What the hell are you,” said the spider, its chittering speech serving as a background to the accurately translated words, “some kind of performing bloody pet?”

He ignored Naydrad’s agitated fur and the choking sounds Murchison was making and replied, “No, I am the entity in charge of the people here.” Because the members of his medical team already knew what was required, it was to the Trolanni and Earth-human patients that he went on. “Everyone, please be quiet and, so far as you are able, stop emoting for the next few minutes. I must be free of extraneous emotional interference if I am to obtain an accurate reading of this patient’s feelings and the reasons for the hostility the spiders show towards us…”

“I’m not a spider,” the patient broke in, “I am Irisik, a Crextic, and a free and intelligent member of the floating clan Sitikis, who will shortly join the other clans in wiping you off the face of our world. And if you don’t know the reason for our hostility, then in spite of the strange and wondrous magic you have used against us, you are very stupid.”

“Not stupid, just ignorant,” said Prilicla, trying to maintain his stable hover in spite of the gale of strong emotion blowing up at him; “but ignorance is a temporary condition that can be relieved by the acquisition of knowledge. You have feelings of fear, anger, intense hatred, and loathing towards us. If you will tell me why you feel this way, I will tell you why there is no reason for the Sitikis to have these feelings. A simple exchange of knowledge about ourselves will solve the problem.”