Transplant Read Online Free PDF Page A

reply.
    ‘What has happened to him?’ came back loud and clear.
    ‘He fell against a steel post and gashed his suit, he also cut his arm on it and now he’s unconscious, what should we do?’ Arki was getting irritated at having to repeat himself.
    ‘There is nothing anyone can do for him. The spray from the canister must have got into his blood stream. He will die very soon and his body will disintegrate. Please place his body on the side of the pathway and it will be disposed of along with the vegetation.’
    They looked at one another in sheer disbelief that the Captain could be so callous and uncaring towards one of them, it was his duty to look after them, or so they thought.
    ‘We can’t just leave him here.’ Brendon said, his voice sounding lumpy and strained over the radio link.
    ‘It looks as if we shall have to. We don’t know what’s wrong with him, and I doubt if anyone else does. If the spray has killed him, and that’s what the Captain implied, then he will be carrying whatever it is in his body, and that could then spread to the rest of us if we take him out of his suit.’
    Glyn was having trouble making his voice sound level and normal due to the lump in his throat.
    Arki lifted the unfortunate man’s arm to look at the wound, and a thin stream of brown fluid poured out causing him to drop it and jump back quickly.
    ‘Whatever that stuff is, it certainly works quickly.’ he said, and then they looked at the forest of vegetation down through the length of the huge chamber.
    It had crumbled into a limp mass of soggy twisted branches with hardly a leaf in sight, both sides of the pathway seemed to be alive as the few remaining weakened branches bent under their own weight, wriggling and twisting against each other as they slumped downwards to join the writhing mass of slush on the floor of the chamber.
    ‘I think we had better get out of here as soon as possible, we’ve done our job, at some cost, so I’ll check with the Captain to see if we can go.’ Glyn said, but before anyone could agree or otherwise, the Captain’s voice boomed back,
    ‘You must all leave the chamber now and go to the decontamination room, I will direct you there. This chamber will be flushed out as soon as the last few branches have been turned into liquid form, and you would not be able to survive that.’
    Bolin’s head was lying at an awkward angle and Arki bent to straighten it out, at least it would look better, he thought.  As he lifted the head, several litres of brown fluid poured out of the split in the arm rent and all three nearly lost the remains of their breakfast.
    That was enough, and they struggled to pick up their equipment along with Bolin’s, and headed for the exit as quickly as was decently possible.
    ‘Please enter the lift. You will be taken to a decontamination point. Please make sure you have all your issued equipment with you, nothing must be left behind.’
    ‘What about Bolin?’ asked Brendon.
    ‘There is nothing we can do for Bolin, as the Captain said. He is dead. And now his body will be returned to the recycling unit.’
    ‘I can’t see the Captain going in there to fish his body out, so that must mean that everything in there will be turned into a liquid and then recycled. I don’t like the sound of that somehow.’
    ‘It’s normal procedure Arki, if you think about it. All our unwanted materials go to the recycling unit, including us, if the truth were known.’ said Glyn, trying to add a note of calm to the situation.
    ‘When people die, they go to the room of rest.’ Brendon interjected, a nervous tone to his voice as if a long held myth was about to be exposed for what it was.
    ‘Of course they do,’ Glyn replied, ‘but where do you think they go after that? Everything has to be recycled, or there wouldn’t be anything left after a few years.’
    They all really knew what happened, it was just that some didn’t want to think about it in any detail.
    The lift door