CHAPTER 1 MEDIC The alien occupying O’Mara’s sleeping compartment weighed roughly half a ton, possessed six short, thick appendages which served both as arms or legs and had a hide like a flexible armor plate. Coming as it did from Hudlar, a four-G world with an atmospheric pressure nearly seven times Earth normal, such ruggedness of physique was to be expected. But despite its enormous strength the being was helpless, O’Mara knew, because it was barely six months old, it had just seen its parents die in a construction accident, and its brain was sufficiently well developed for the sight to have frightened it badly.
“I’ve b-b-brought the kid,” said Waring, one of the section’s tractor-beam operators. He hated O’Mara, and with good reason, but he was trying not to gloat. “C-C-Caxton sent me. He says your leg makes you unfit for normal duty, so you can look after the young one until somebody arrives from its home planet. He’s on his way over n-now…”
Waring trailed off. He began checking the seals of his spacesuit, obviously in a hur ...
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