Read "Star Surgeon" by Alan Edward Nourse online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
In the control room the interstellar radio and teletype-translator were silent. The red light on the call board was still blinking; Tiger turned it off with a snap. "Here's the message that just came in, as near as I can make out," he said, "and if you can make sense of it, you're way ahead of me."
The message was a single word, teletyped in the center of a blue dispatch sheet: