Free Thirteen Specimens by Jeffrey Thomas

their planet for a year as an intern, and while there had seen some ugly sights in emergency wards, but nothing on the scale of Punktown, here on planet Oasis. He had thought the Tikkihottos’ world had been hellish, compared to the sedate colony he called home...but Punktown made that seem like a utopia.
         Up until Punktown, his skills as a reconstructive surgeon had been mostly honed by repairing hovercar and industrial injuries, congenital deformities, mutations. By reconfiguring the countenances and bodies of the vain. He had secretly, self-consciously thought of himself as an artist...and he did, in fact, like to paint, though he had seldom showed friends or family his work and displayed none of it openly, even in his own apartment. But here, in Punktown, there was little time for delicacy or finesse. He had had to step up his preferred pace...so as to move one patient out and bring in the next. Assembly line work...
         “I hate this,” he said. “All of this. The gang killings. The serial killings. The killings without even a reason of insanity to explain them...”
         “Your talents are best served here, Fleck,” Midas said. “This is where you’re needed...exactly because it’s so ugly.”
         “How can you stand it, sometimes? Sometimes it must...it has to...horrify you.”
         “Well...I worked for a time as an intern in a burn unit for children. We called them – away from the parents, of course – toasty tots.”
         “What?”
         “We had to, my boy.” Midas lowered his gaze to his patient. “We had to make jokes. We had to go in there every day, have a coffee, and get to work. We had to get past the burnt flesh of children...”
         “But you can’t get past it. You can’t. It’s the very thing you’re working on...”
         “Well, I guess you can’t get past the burnt flesh,” Midas amended. “It was that they were children, we had to get past.”
    *     *     *
         The next time they shared an operating room, it was Midas who observed while Fleck worked – rather self-consciously, as if he were at his easel. But Midas assured him, “You’re doing great, on her. Just great. I knew you’d be fine with it...”
         The saddle-like tapestry was unbuckled, set aside. While he infused one of the patched-up but still shocking wounds with a solution to engender localized cloning, Fleck raised his eyes to the half-dozen shiny brown nodes along the back and said, “Too sexy, huh?”
         “Ohhh, yeah. Please cover them up again, before I dampen my undies.”
         “I’d like to see their mouths, that can inflict injuries like these,” Fleck groused, waving a gloved hand over the circular pit.
         “No you wouldn’t. Ugly buggers. Small, though, not like our lady. Their mouths are like hers, except she doesn’t have the retractable teeth.”
         “Born that way? Or pulled out?”
         Midas smiled inside his helmet. “Which do you think?”
         “Can’t bite back,” Fleck mumbled.
    *     *     *
         “I’m sorry,” he said, withdrawing his hand sharply. “Please forgive me if I’m touching you in a way you find inappropriate.”
         She occupied a room, Room 40, alone – both beds removed, gym mats placed on the floor for her. It was two days since he had labored over the somnolent monster, and Fleck was checking the progress of his work. Upon awakening the previous day, the alien had begun emitting her multiple hawk cries again until attendants realized it was because her tapestry saddle was removed; several female nurses had then rushed in to replace it. Presently, in running his hands over her glazed, translucent hide, Fleck had found himself stroking one of the wound sites – now only a slightly concave depression – as if to test its soundness. As he had done so, a low but weighty rumble had traveled through the turgid mass that was her