“Get ready for action,” he bellowed. “We have a VILF coming.”
A very important life form? This was what Dr. Mann had been waiting for. Then the bad news: The vessel had been transporting the Rigellian ambassador. This was bad news on multiple fronts. Dr. Mann had never treated a Rigellian, though he’d seen a lot of them incinerated during the war. They were allies—at least for now.
Dr. Mann called Jeeves over, and they reviewed what information there was about these enormous creatures. The Rigellian races evolved in a low gravity environment and were huge—often 24 meters or longer. They were aquatic and had two lower limbs and four upper. They had a circulatory system with a carbon monoxide-based metabolism and some strange religious beliefs about modern medicine.
The damaged ship’s lifeboat landed with two passengers—the captain and the Rigellian ambassador himself—as well as an entourage of support, translator, and protocol robots. Talk about extreme VILFs!
The captain’s injury seemed minor. An Iogan, his thick outer cortex had been lacerated. Iogans tend to have an unpleasant personality, and the captain was no exception. His rigid mouth worked to form Lingua words Dr. Mann could understand: “Don’t worry about me you fool, see to the ambassador.” Good advice, coming from a creature that looked like a giant lima bean.
The ambassador lay floating in a large, rapidly improvised tub of clear oil, supporting its large body in the higher artificial gravity of the asteroid. It would take hours to decrease the radial spin of the mine to diminish the gravitational pull to more tolerable levels. The left lower appendage was out of alignment. Donning a somewhat snug space suit, Dr. Mann climbed into the tub. With great difficulty he manipulated the injured limb. To his credit, the ambassador never winced. Dr. Mann had no way to image the limb with its tough cartilage. It would not fit into the mine’s limited scanner facility, and the portable unit would not function in liquid. Using an elastic waterproof wrap he managed to put the limb back into alignment. He hoped it would be sufficient.
Dr. Mann wanted to give the ambassador something for pain. The protocol robot came forward. “Rigellians will accept no medicine that is not derived from their home world.” Dr. Mann never liked to have a patient of any life form in pain, but if the ambassador could stand it, so could he.
Dr. Mann climbed out of the tank and checked on the captain. Jeeves had finished the dressing and had administered Iogian pain medication from stock. “I hope you are not allergic,” Dr. Mann quipped to the captain, who glared in response.
It looked like the emergency was over. Dr. Mann was pleased with himself.
Suddenly, though, things got ugly. It started with the captain. His normally green skin became spotted with blue wheals. It looked like an allergic reaction to the pain medication. Dr. Mann had Jeeves administer Moruvian pineal extract. It usually did the trick on these sentient legumes.
Dr. Mann thought he’d better check the ambassador. When he walked over to the tank something seemed wrong. The injured limb had grown to twice its normal size, and the ambassador seemed to be struggling to respire. A grim realization hit Dr. Mann: A clot had formed in the limb and embolized to the ambassador’s breathing apparatus.
Dr. Mann ran to Jeeves and accessed the medical data banks. There was nothing about the Rigellian coagulation cascade. Jeeves’ bank had only a few vague references to Rigellian physiology. The species refusal to use medication only made things worse. If he did not act quickly his patient might die. And Dr. Mann did not want to be responsible for a resumption of interstellar conflict.