The Long Result by John Brunner

lay prostrate. When he did glance at us, his face showed no pleasure.
    ‘You got here, did you?’ he snapped. ‘Not before time! And who the hell may you be, incidentally?’ he added to Helga.
    ‘Helga Micallef. Bureau biochemist. I thought I’d be useful.’
    ‘Damned right. We need twice the staff we have on hand – with these creatures we’re just guessing! That’s not so much an operation’ – with a gesture at the vision screen – ‘as an experiment! Go down the corridor. The analysis lab is third on the right. They’re working on a haemoglobin equivalent in there, so we can give these poor beasts a transfusion. That sound like your line?’
    Helga nodded and went out. As the door slid to, a face appeared on the phone, said something excited and incomprehensible about the interpreter, Shvast, and retreated out of range again.
    ‘That’s
something,’
bin Ishmael said, and heaved a deep sigh. ‘But we’ll need more than that before the night’s out.’
    ‘What actually happened?’ I demanded.
    ‘Somebody smashed one of the ventilator pipes on the outside of Vroazh’s room. Oxygen got in, and the poor devils were half burnt alive. You heard Gobind just now, saying they’ve managed to get Shvast back on his feet – he was farthest from the leak and got off lightest. Apparently he knows something about their first-aid, at least.’
    On the screen connected to the chlorine ward appeared a familiar figure, moving weakly but able to stand: Shvast, aspromised. He began to indicate with gestures what the suited surgeons should do.
    Gobind’s face reappeared on the phone and unemotionally reported that if the surgeons could keep the casualties alive another hour, they should be able to synthesize the haemoglobin equivalent by then. And vanished as before.
    ‘Another hour,’ bin Ishmael muttered. ‘Allah, what a job! It’ll be a miracle if it happens. I tell you, Vincent!’ he added fiercely to me. ‘I’m going to have an inquiry into this business. I’m going to raise such a stink as there hasn’t been in fifty years. I want to know who in your damned Bureau landed us in this mess, handing us a group of aliens with no biological data, no medicine, no doctor in charge from their own planet… Some heads are going to roll, believe
me.’
    ‘I’m not on the alien contact side,’ I protested. ‘Don’t start taking it out on me!’
    ‘No, you’re at least here – though what help that is I don’t really know. I can’t find your boss, I can’t find the head of alien contact, the woman with the impossible name —’
    ‘Indowegiatuk,’ Jacky supplied. It meant something in an Eskimo dialect, they said; I’d never found out what.
    ‘That’s her,’ bin Ishmael agreed. He gazed at the vision screen again, then burst out, ‘Do you realize we’re having to guess the function of the organs in those bodies? If they die under the knife through even an honest mistake, what do you give for the chance of friendly relations with the Tau Cetians? They—’
    A booming noise came from the speaker under the screen, making the objects on bin Ishmael’s desk rattle. He snapped his eyes shut, wincing.
    ‘That’s a scream. We have no anaesthetic for them yet, of course – we’ve just been praying they’d stay unconscious till we patched them up. Gobind! Gobind!’
    But it was Helga who came to the phone in the analysis lab, holding up a flask of something blue and sluggish.
    ‘Anaesthetic,’ she said. ‘We think. Have it tried on the worst hurt one first in case there’s an allergic reaction or something.’
    Jacky leaned close to me to whisper, as bin Ishmael issued orders about this new development. ‘Roald, did he only want someone from BuCult here so he could snap at us?’
    ‘Use your head,’ I whispered back. ‘Suppose one of the aliens recovers enough to complain, and there’s no one here to make the official apologies!’
    ‘I thought of that. But how are we going to tackle it?