Free Big Book of Science Fiction by Groff Conklin

yelled; and then, very gently, he asked, “What’s the matter, darling?”
     
    “He’s scared. Mewhu’s terrible,
terrible scared,” she said brokenly.
     
    Jack looked up at the plane. It
yawed, fell away on one wing.
     
    Zinsser shouted, his voice
cracking, “Gun her! Gun her! Throttle up, you idiot!”
     
    Mewhu cut the gun.
     
    Dead stick, the plane winged over
and plunged to the ground. The impact was crushing.
     
    Molly said, quite calmly, “All
Mewhu’s pictures have gone out now,” and slumped unconscious to the ground.
     
    ~ * ~
     
    They
got him to the hospital. It was messy—all of it; picking him up, carrying him
to the ambulance—
     
    Jack wished fervently that Molly
had not seen; but she had sat up and cried as they carried him past. He thought
worriedly as he and Zinsser crossed and recrossed in their pacing of the
waiting room, that he would have his hands full with the child when this thing
was all over.
     
    The resident physician came in,
wiping his hands. He was a small man with a nose like a walnut meat. “Who
brought that plane-crash case in here—you?”
     
    “Both of us,” said Zinsser.
     
    “What... who is he?”
     
    “A friend of mine. Is he…will he
live?”
     
    “How should I know?” snapped the
doctor impatiently. “I have never in my experience—” He exhaled through his
nostrils. “The man has two circulatory systems. Two closed circulatory
systems, and a heart for each. All his arterial blood looks veinous—it’s
purple. How’d he happen to get hurt?”
     
    “He ate half a box of aspirin out
of my car,” said Jack. “Aspirin makes him drunk. He swiped a plane and piled it
up.”
     
    “Aspirin makes him—” The doctor
looked at each of them in turn. “I won’t ask if you’re kidding me. Just to see
that . .. that thing in there is enough to kid any doctor. How long has that
splint been on his arm?”
     
    Zinsser looked at Jack and Jack
said “About eighteen hours.”
     
    “Eighteen hours?” The
doctor shook his head. “It’s so well knitted that I’d say eighteen days.”
Before Jack could say anything he added, “He needs a transfusion.”
     
    “But you can’t! I mean…his blood—”
     
    “I know. Took a sample to type
it. I have two technicians trying to blend chemicals into plasma so we can
approximate it. Both of ‘em called me a liar. But he’s got to have the
transfusion. I’ll let you know.” He strode out of the room.
     
    “There goes one bewildered medico.”
     
    “He’s O.K.,” said Zinsser. “I
know him well. Can you blame him?” 
     
    “For feeling that way? Gosh now.
Harry, I don t know what I’ll do if Mewhu checks out.”
     
    “That fond of him?”
     
    “Oh, if isn’t only that. But to
come so close to meeting a new culture, and then have it slip from our fingers
like this—it’s too much.”
     
    “That jet . . . Jack, without
Mewhu to explain it, I don’t think any scientist will be able to build another.
It would be like . . . like giving a Damascus sword-smith some tungsten and asking
him to draw it into filaments. There the jet would be, hissing when you shove
it toward the ground, sneering at you.”
     
    “And that telepathy—what J. B.
Rhine wouldn’t give to be able to study it!”
     
    “Yeah, and what about his origin?”
Zinsser asked excitedly. “He isn’t from this system. It means that he used an
interstellar drive of some kind, or even that space-time warp the boys write
about.”
     
    “He’s got to live,” said Jack. “He’s
got to, or there ain’t no justice. There are too many things we’ve got to know,
Harry! Look—he’s here. That must mean that some more of his people will come
some day.”
     
    “Yeah. Why haven’t they come
before now?”
     
    “Maybe they have. Charles Fort—”
     
    “Aw, look,” said Zinsser, “don’t
let’s get this thing out of hand.”
     
    The doctor came back. “I think he’ll
make it.”
     
    “Really?”
     
    “Not