He was not just there for the ride, that was certain.
Being delivered somewhere? No, the room beyond the bars looked little like a storage hold. Of course, these fur-faces might have alien ideas about the way a storage hold should look. Still, they seemed to be bosses of some kind. There was no mistaking the dressy look of their uniforms. A high-ranking officer might go into a storage hold, but it would be for an inspection only, and these creatures were busily doing something in the center of the room.
There were three of them, discounting the bare-to-the-waist man working on that odd-looking machine. They stood by some waist-high object—two with their backs to Jerry, one in profile—very intently absorbed in something on that surface.
Jerry twisted his head about, but could make out no relevant details on that surface. "They could be studying a map laid out on a table," he pondered, curiously. "Or maybe they are shooting dice at a crap table, or—"
Further conjecture was suddenly, and horribly, obviated.
The man at the wall straightened up from his labors and announced something, unintelligible to Jerry (the voice was an unbroken hum that rose and fell in pitch, unarticulated into consonants or vowels), which undoubtedly meant, "She's all fixed." The fur-face in profile turned with quick attention and stepped to the machine. He pulled from its slot a thing like the cable-supported arm of a small crane terminating in a cone-shaped flexible surface, and arranged it over the thing on the table which his movement to the machine had exposed to Jerry's gaze.
The thing on the table was the face of another of the white-furred men, and Jerry suddenly knew that this was an operating room. These men were doctors, involved in surgery.
The machine, so hastily repaired, was some sort of anesthetizing gadget. They'd had to wait for it before proceeding. All this information Jerry worked out with only a small part of his mind; the majority of his concentration was focused upon the other thing he'd seen upon the table, strapped wide-eyed into position beside the patient.
It had scales, sharp orange teeth, and might have been a rabbit-sized cross between a raccoon and a pangolin, and the wide eyes were tightly irised into discs of coppery red, with no visible pupils, under the light that overhung the operating table.