by James White
Conway surveyed the distance to the lake and the quality of the terrain between it and himself. He said, “It’s a long way to walk, I’ll get an antigravity belt …”
“That will not be necessary,” said Arretapec. The ground abruptly flung itself away from them and they were hurtling toward the distant lake.
Classification VUXG, Conway reminded himself when he got his breath back; possessing certain psi faculties …
II
They landed gently near the edge of the lake. Arretapec told Conway that it wanted to concentrate its thinking processes for a few minutes and requested him to keep both quiet and still. A few seconds later an itching started deep inside his ear somewhere. Conway manfully refrained from poking at it with his finger and instead kept all his attention on the surface of the lake.
Suddenly a great gray-brown, mountainous body broke the surface, a long tapering neck and tail slapping the water with explosive violence. For an instant Conway thought that the great beast had simply bobbed to the surface like a rubber ball but then he told himself that the bed of the lake must have shelved suddenly under the monster, giving an optically similar effect. Still threshing madly with neck, tail and four massive columnar legs the giant reptile gained the lake’s edge and floundered onto, or rather into, the mud, because it sank over its knee joints. Conway estimated that the said knee-joints were at least ten feet from ground level, that the thickest diameter of the great body was about eighteen feet and that from head to tail the brute measured well over one hundred feet. He guessed its weight at about 80,000 pounds. It possessed no natural body armor but the extreme end of its tail, which showed surprising mobility for such a heavy member, had an osseous bulge from which spouted two wicked, forward-curving bony spikes.
As Conway watched, the great reptile continued to churn up the mud in obvious agitation. Then abruptly it fell onto its knees and its great neck curved around and inward until its head muzzled underneath its own underbelly. It was a ridiculous but oddly pathetic posture.
“It is badly frightened,” said Arretapec. “These conditions do not adequately simulate its true environment.”
Conway could understand and sympathize with the beast. The ingredients of its environment were no doubt accurately reproduced but rather than being arranged in a lifelike manner they had just been thrown together into a large muddy stew. Probably not deliberately, he thought, there must have been some trouble with the artificial gravity grids on the way out to account for this jumbled landscape. He said:
“Is the mental state of the patient of importance to the purpose of your work?”
“Very much so,” said Arretapec.
“Then the first step is to make it a little more happy with its lot,” said Conway, and went down on his haunches. He took a sample of the lake water, the mud and several of the varieties of vegetation nearby. Finally he straightened up and said, “Is there anything else we have to do here?”
“I can do nothing at present,” Arretapec replied. The Translated voice was toneless and utterly without emotion, naturally, but from the spacing of the words Conway thought that the other sounded deeply disappointed.
Back at the entry lock Conway made determined tracks toward the dining hall reserved for warm-blooded, oxygen-breathing life-forms. He was hungry.
Many of his colleagues were in the hall—DBLF caterpillars who were slow everywhere but in the operating theater, Earth-human DBDGs like himself and the great, elephantine Tralthan—classification FGLI—who, with the little OTSB life-form who lived in symbiosis with it, was well on the way to joining the ranks of the lordly Diagnosticians. But instead of engaging in conversation all around, Conway concentrated on gaining all the data possible on the planet of origin of the reptilian patient.
For greater ease of conversation he had taken Arretapec out of its plastic container and placed it on the table in a space between the potatoes and gravy dish. At the end of the meal Conway was startled to find that the being had dissolved—ingested—a two inch hole in the table!
“When in deep cogitation,” Arretapec replied when Conway rather exasperatedly wanted to know why, “the process of food-gathering and ingestion is automatic and unconscious with us. We do not indulge in eating as a pleasure as you obviously do, it dilutes the quality of our thinking. However, if I have caused damage … ?”
Conway hastily reassured him that a plastic tablecloth was relatively valueless in the present circumstances, and beat a quick retreat from the place. He did not try to explain how catering officers could feel rather peeved over their relatively valueless property.
After lunch Conway picked up the analysis of his test samples, then headed for the Maintenance Chief’s office. This was occupied by one of the Nidian teddy bears wearing an armband with gold edging, and an Earth-human in Monitor green whose collar bore a Colonel’s insignia over an Engineering flash. Conway described the situation and what he wanted done, if such a thing was possible.
“It is possible,” said the red teddy bear after they had gone into a huddle of Conway’s data sheets, “but—”
“O’Mara told me expense is no object,” Conway interrupted, nodding toward the tiny being on his shoulder. “Maximum cooperation, he said.”
“In that case we can do it,” the Monitor Colonel put in briskly. He was regarding Arretapec with an expression close to awe. “Let’s see, transports to bring the stuff from its home planet—quicker and cheaper in the long run than synthesizing its food here. And we’ll need two full companies of the Engineers’ Division with their robots to make its house a happy home, instead of the twenty-odd men responsible for bringing it here.” His eyes became unfocused as rapid calculations went on behind them, then: “Three days.”
Even allowing for the fact that hyper-drive travel was instantaneous, Conway thought that that was very fast indeed. He said so.
The Colonel acknowledged the compliment with the thinnest of smiles. He said, “What is all this in aid of, you haven’t told us yet?”
Conway waited for a full minute to give Arretapec plenty of time to answer the question, but the VUXG kept silent. He could only mumble “I don’t know” and leave quickly.
The next door they entered was boldly labeled “Dietitian-in-Chief—Species DBDG, DBLF and FGLI. Dr. K. W. HARDIN.” Inside, the white-haired and distinguished head of Dr. Hardin raised itself from some charts he was studying and bawled, “And what’s biting you … ?”
While Conway was impressed by and greatly respected Dr. Hardin, he was no longer afraid of him. The Chief Dietitian was a man who was quite charming to strangers, Conway had learned; with acquaintances he tended to be a little on the abrupt side, and toward his friends he was downright rude. As briefly as possible Conway tried to explain what was biting him.
“You mean I have to go around replanting the stuff it’s eaten, so that it doesn’t know but that it grew naturally?” Hardin interrupted at one point. “Who the blazes do you think I am? And how much does this dirty great cow eat, anyway?”
Conway gave him the figures he had worked out.
“Three and a half tons of palm fronds a day!” Hardin roared, practically climbing his desk. “And tender green shoots of … Ye Gods! And they tell me dietetics is an exact science. Three and a half tons of shrubbery, exact! Hah … !”
They left Hardin at that point. Conway knew that everything would be all right because the dietitian had shown no signs of becoming charming.
To the VUXG Conway explained that Hardin had not been noncooperative, but had just sounded that way. He was keen to help as had been the other two. Arretapec replied to the effect that members of such immature and short-lived races could not help behaving in an insane fashion.
A second visit to their patient followed. Conway brought a G-belt along with him this time and so was independent of Arretapec’s teleportive ability. They drifted around and above the great, ambulating mountain of flesh and bone, but not once did Arretapec so much as touch the creature. Nothing wh
atever happened except that the patient once again showed signs of agitation and Conway suffered a periodic itch deep inside his ear. He sneaked a quick look at the tell-tale which was surgically embedded in his forearm to see if there was anything foreign in his bloodstream, but everything was normal. Maybe he was just allergic to dinosaurs.
Back in the hospital proper Conway found that the frequency and violence of his yawns was threatening to dislocate his jaw, and he realized that he had had a hard day. The concept of sleep was completely strange to Arretapec, but the being raised no objections to Conway indulging in it if it was necessary to his physical well-being. Conway gravely assured it that it was, and headed for his room by the shortest route.
What to do with Dr. Arretapec bothered him for a while. The VUXG was an important personage; he could not very well leave it in a storage closet or in a corner somewhere, even though the being was tough enough to be comfortable in much more rugged surroundings. Nor could he simply put it out for the night without gravely hurting its feelings—at least, if the positions had been reversed his feelings would have been hurt. He wished O’Mara had given instructions to cover this contingency. Finally he placed the being on top of his writing desk and forgot about it.
Arretapec must have thought deeply during the night, because there was a three inch hole in the desktop next morning.
III
During the afternoon of the second day a row started between the two doctors. At least Conway considered it a row; what an entirely alien mind like Arretapec’s chose to think of it was anybody’s guess.
It started when the VUXG requested Conway to be quiet and still while it went into one of its silences. The being had gone back to the old position on Conway’s shoulder, explaining that it could concentrate more effectively while at rest rather than with part of its mind engaged in levitating. Conway had done as he was told without comment though there were several things he would have liked to say: What was wrong with the patient? What was Arretapec doing about it? And how was it being done when neither of them so much as touched the creature? Conway was in the intensely frustrating position of a doctor confronted with a patient on whom he is not allowed to practice his craft: he was eaten up with curiosity and it was bothering him. Yet he did his best to stand still.
But the itching started inside his ear again, worse than ever before. He barely noticed the geysers of mud and water flung up by the dinosaur as it threshed its way out of the shallows and onto the bank. The gnawing, unlocalized itch built up remorselessly until with a sudden yell of fright he slapped at the side of his head and began poking frantically at his ear. The action brought immediate and blessed relief, but …
“I cannot work if you fidget,” said Arretapec, the rapidity of the words the only indication of their emotional content. “You will therefore leave me at once.”
“I wasn’t fidgeting,” Conway protested angrily. “My ear itched and I—”
“An itch, especially one capable of making you move as this one has done, is a symptom of a physical disorder which should be treated,” the VUXG interrupted. “Or it is caused by a parasitic or symbiotic life-form dwelling, perhaps unknown to you, on your body.
“Now, I expressly stated that my assistant should be in perfect physical health and not a member of a species who either consciously or unconsciously harbored parasites—a type, you must understand, which are particularly prone to fidget—so that you can understand my displeasure. Had it not been for your sudden movement I might have accomplished something, therefore go.”
“Why you supercilious—”
The dinosaur chose that moment to stagger into the shallow water again, lose its footing and come the great grand-daddy of all bellyflops. Falling mud and spray drenched Conway and a small tidal wave surged over his feet. The distraction was enough to make him pause, and the pause gave him time to realize that he had not been personally insulted. There were many intelligent species who harbored parasites—some of them actually necessary to the health of the host body, so that in their case the slang expression being lousy also meant being in tiptop condition. Maybe Arretapec had meant to be insulting, but he could not be sure. And the VUXG was, after all, a very important person …
“What exactly might you have accomplished?” Conway asked sarcastically. He was still angry, but had decided to fight on the professional rather than the personal level. Besides, he knew that the Translator would take the insulting edge off his words. “What are you trying to accomplish, and how do you expect to do it merely by—from what I can see, anyway—just looking at the patient?”
“I cannot tell you,” Arretapec replied after a few seconds. “My purpose is … is vast. It is for the future. You would not understand.”
“How do you know? If you told me what you were doing maybe I could help.”
“You cannot help.”
“Look,” said Conway exasperated, “you haven’t even tried to use the full facilities of the hospital yet. No matter what you are trying to do for your patient, the first step should have been a thorough examination—immobilisation, followed by X rays, biopsies, the lot. This would have given you valuable physiological data upon which to work—”
“To state the matter simply,” Arretapec broke in, “you are saying that in order to understand a complicated organism or mechanism, one must first be broken down into its component parts that they might be understood individually. My race does not believe that an object must be destroyed—even in part—before it can be understood. Your crude methods of investigation are therefore worthless to me. I suggest that you leave.”
Seething, Conway left.
His first impulse was to storm into O‘Mara’s office and tell the Chief Psychologist to find somebody else to run errands for the VUXG. But O’Mara had told him that his present assignment was important, and O’Mara would have unkind things to say if he thought that Conway was throwing his hand in simply out of pique because his curiosity had not been satisfied or his pride hurt. There were lots of doctors—the assistants to Diagnosticians, particularly—who were not allowed to touch their superior’s patients, or was it just that Conway resented a being like Arretapec being his superior … ?
If Conway went to O‘Mara in his present frame of mind there was real danger of the psychologist deciding that he was temperamentally unsuited for his position. Quite apart from the prestige attached to a post at Sector General, the work performed in it was both stimulating and very much worthwhile. Should O’Mara decide that he was unfit to remain here and pack him off to some planetary hospital, it would be the greatest tragedy of Conway’s life.
But if he could not go to O’Mara, where could he go? Ordered off one job and not having another, Conway was at loose ends. He stood at a corridor intersection for several minutes thinking, while beings representing a cross-section of all the intelligent races of the galaxy strode undulated or skittered past him, then suddenly he had it. There was something he could do, something which he would have done anyway if everything had not happened with such a rush.
The hospital library had several items on the prehistoric periods of Earth, both taped and in the old-fashioned and more cumbersome book form. Conway heaped them on a reading desk and prepared to make an attempt to satisfy his professional curiosity about the patient in this roundabout fashion.
The time passed very quickly.
Dinosaur, Conway discovered at once, was simply a general term applied to the giant reptiles. The patient, except for its larger size and bony enlargement of the tip of the tail, was identical in outward physical characteristics to the brontosaurus which lived among the swamps of the Jurassic Period. It also was herbiverous, but unlike their patient had no means of defense against the carnivorous reptiles of its time. There was a surprising amount of physiological data available as well, which Conway absorbed greedily.
The spinal column was composed of huge vertebrae, and with the exception of the caudal vertebrae all were hollow—this saving of osseous material maki
ng possible a relatively low body weight in comparison with its tremendous size. It was oviparous. The head was small, the brain case one of the smallest found among the vertebrates. But in addition to this brain there was a well-developed nerve center in the region of the sacral vertebrae which was several times as large as the brain proper. It was thought that the brontosaur grew slowly, their great size being explained by the fact that they could live two hundred or more years.
Their only defense against contemporary rivals was to take to and remain in the water—they could pasture under water and required only brief mouthfuls of air, apparently. They became extinct when geologic changes caused their swampy habitats to dry up and leave them at the mercy of their natural enemies.
One authority stated that these saurians were nature’s biggest failure. Yet they had flourished, said another, through three geologic periods—the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous—which totalled 140 million years, a long time indeed for a “failure” to be around, considering the fact that Man had existed only for approximately half a million years … !
Conway left the library with the conviction that he had discovered something important, but what exactly it was he could not say; it was an intensely frustrated feeling. Over a hurried meal he decided that he badly needed more information and there was only one person who might be able to give it to him. He would see O’Mara again.
“Where is our small friend?” said the psychologist sharply when Conway entered his office a few minutes later. “Have you had a fight or something?”