by James White
If only the majority of Conway’s charges were not so small, defenseless and … tasty.
On the other hand a look at the elder being might suggest some method of dealing with the younger—his curiosity regarding the SRTT terminal case having nothing to do with it, of course …
He was maneuvering for a closer look at the patient inside the tank and at the same time trying not to jostle the Earth-human doctor who was blocking his view, when the man turned irritably and asked, “Why the blazes don’t you climb up my back? … Oh, hello, Conway. Here to contribute another uninformed wild guess, I suppose?”
It was Mannon, the doctor who had at one time been Conway’s superior and was now a Senior Physician well on the way to achieving Diagnostician status. He had befriended Conway on his arrival at the hospital, Mannon had several times explained within Conway’s hearing, because he had a soft spot for stray dogs, cats and interns. Currently he was allowed to retain permanently in his brain just three Educator tapes—that of a Tralthan specialist in micro-surgery and two belonging to surgeons of the low-gravity LSVO and MSVK species—so that for long periods of each day his reactions were quite human. At the moment he was eyeing Prilicla, who was skittering about on the fringe of the crowd, with raised eyebrows.
Conway began to give details regarding the character and accomplishments of his new assistant, but was interrupted by Mannon saying loudly, “That’s enough, lad, you’re beginning to sound like an unsolicited testimonial. A light touch and the empathic faculty will be a big help in your current line of work. I grant that. But then you always did pick odd associates; levitating balls of goo, insects, dinosaurs, and such like—all pretty peculiar people, you must admit. Except for that nurse on the twenty-third level, now I admire your taste there—”
“Are they making any headway with this case, sir?” Conway said, determinedly shunting the conversation back onto the main track again. Mannon was the best in the world, but he had the painful habit sometimes of pulling a person’s leg until it threatened to come off at the hip.
“None,” said Mannon. “And what I said about wild guesses is a fact. We’re all making them here, and getting nowhere—ordinary diagnostic techniques are completely useless. Just look at the thing!”
Mannon moved aside for Conway, and a sensation as of a pencil being laid across his shoulder told him that Prilicla was behind him craning to see, too.
VI
The being in the tank was indescribable for the simple reason that it had obviously been trying to become several different things at once when the dissolution had begun. There were appendages both jointed and tentacular, patches of scales, spines and leathery, wrinkled tegument together with the suggestion of mouth and gill openings, all thrown together in a gruesome hodge-podge. Yet none of the physiological details were clear because the whole flaccid mass was softened, eroded away, like a wax model left too long in the heat. Moisture oozed from the patient’s body continuously and trickled to the floor of the tank, where the water level was nearly six inches deep.
Conway swallowed and said, “Bearing in mind the adaptability of this species, its immunity to physical damage and so on, and considering the wildly mixed-up state of its body, I should say that there may be a strong possibility that the trouble stems from psychological causes.”
Mannon looked him up and down slowly with an expression of awe on his face, then said, witheringly, “Psychological causes, hey? Amazing! Well, what else could cause a being who is immune both to physical damage and bacterial infection to get into this state except something wrong with its think tank? But perhaps you were going to be more specific?”
Conway felt his neck and ears getting warm. He said nothing.
Mannon grunted, then went on, “The water that it is melting into is just that, plus a few harmless organisms which are suspended in it. We’ve tried every method of physical and psychological treatment that we could think of, without results. At the moment someone is suggesting that we quick-freeze the patient, both to halt the melting and to give us more time to think of something else. This has been vetoed because in its present state such a course might kill the patient outright. We’ve had a couple of our telepathic life-forms try to tune to its mind with a view to straightening it out that way, and O’Mara has gone back to the dark ages to such a point that he has tried crude electro-shock therapy, but nothing works. Altogether we have brought, singly and acting in concert, the viewpoints of very nearly every species in the Galaxy, and still we can’t get a line on what ails it …”
“If the trouble was psychological,” put in Conway, “I should have thought that the telepaths—”
“No,” said Mannon. “In this life-form the mind and memory function is evenly distributed throughout the whole body and not housed in a permanent brain casing, otherwise it could not accomplish such marked changes in its physical structure. At present the being’s mind is withdrawing, draining away, into smaller and smaller units—so small that the telepaths cannot work them.
“This SRTT is a real weirdie,” Mannon continued thoughtfully. “It evolved out of the sea, of course, but later its world saw outbreaks of volcanic activity, earthquakes—the surface being coated with sulfur and who knows what else—and finally a minor instability in their sun converted the planet into the desert which it now is. They had to be adaptable to survive all that. And their method of reproduction—a budding and splitting-off process which causes the loss of a sizable portion of the parent’s mass—is interesting, too, because it means that the embryo is born with part of the body-and-brain cell structure of the parent. No conscious memories are passed to the newly-born but it retains unconsciously the memories which enable it to adapt—”
“But that means,” Conway burst out, “that if the parent transfers a section of its body-and-mind to the offspring, then each individual’s unconscious memory must go back—”
“And it is the unconscious which is the seat of all psychoses,” interrupted O’Mara, who had come up behind them at that point. “Don’t say any more, I have nightmares at the very idea. Imagine trying to analyze a patient whose subconscious mind goes back fifty thousand years … !”
The conversation dried up quickly after that and Conway, still anxious about the younger SRTT’s activities, hurried back to the nursery section. The whole area was infested with maintenance men and green-uniformed Monitors, but the runaway had not been sighted again. Conway placed a DBDG nurse—the one Mannon was so fond of pulling his leg about, strangely enough—on duty in a diving suit at the AUGL ward, because he was expecting developments there at any time, and prepared with Prilicla to pay a call on the methane nursery.
Their work among the frigid-blooded beings in that ward was also routine, and during it Conway pestered Prilicla with questions about the emotional state of the elder SRTT they had just left. But the GLNO was very little help; all it would say was that it had detected an urge toward dissolution which it could not describe more fully to Conway because there was nothing in its own previous experience which it could relate the feeling to.
Outside again they discovered that Colinson had wasted no time. From the wall annunciators there poured out a staccato howl of static through which could be dimly heard an alien gobbling which was presumably the SRTT sound tape. Conway thought that if positions were reversed and he was a frightened small boy listening to a voice striving to speak to him through that incredible uproar, he would feel anything but reassured. And the atmosphere of the SRTT’s home planet would almost certainly be of a different density to this one, which would further increase the distortion of the voice. He did not say anything to Prilicla, but Conway thought that it would be nothing less than a miracle if this cacophony produced the result which O’Mara had intended.
The racket cut off suddenly, was replaced by a voice in English which droned out, “Would Dr. Conway please go to the intercom,” then it returned unabated. Conway hurried to the nearest set.
“This is Murchison in the AUGL loc
k, Doctor,” said a worried female voice. “Somebody—I mean something—just went past me into the main ward. I thought it was you at first until it began opening the inner seal without putting on a suit, then I knew it must be the runaway SRTT.” She hesitated, then said, “Considering the state of the patients inside I didn’t give the alarm until checking with you, but I can call—”
“No, you did quite right, Nurse,” Conway said quickly. “We’ll be down at once.”
When they arrived at the lock five minutes later, the nurse had a suit ready for Conway, and the combination of physiological features which made it impossible for the Earth-human members of the Staff to regard Murchison with anything like a clinical detachment were rendered slightly less distracting by her own protective suit. But Conway had eyes at the moment only for the inner inspection window and the thing which floated just inside it.
It was, or had been, very like Conway. The hair coloring was right, also the complexion, and it was in whites. But the features were out of proportion and ran together in a way that was quite horrible, and the neck and hands did not go into the tunic, they became the collar and sleeves of the garment. Conway was reminded of a lead figure that had been crudely fashioned and carelessly painted.
At the moment Conway knew that it was not a threat to the lives of the ward’s tiny patients, but it was changing. There was a slow growing together of the arms and legs, a lengthening out and the sprouting of long, narrow protuberences which could only be the beginnings of fins. The AUGL patients might be difficult for an Earth-human DBDG to catch, but the SRTT was adapting to water also, and speed.
“Inside!” said Conway urgently. “We’ve got to herd it out of here before it—”
But Prilicla was making no attempt to begin the bodily contortions which would bring it inside its protective envelope. “I have detected an interesting change in the quality of its emotional radiation,” the GLNO said suddenly. “There is still fear and confusion present, and an overriding hunger …”
“Hunger … !” Murchison had not realized until then just what deadly danger the patients were in.
“ … But there is something else,” Prilicla continued, disregarding the interruption. “I can only describe it as a background pleasure sensation coupled with that same urge toward dissolution which I detected a short time ago in its parent. But I am puzzled to account for this sudden change.”
Conway’s mind was on his three tiny patients, and the predatory form the SRTT was beginning to take. He said impatiently, “Probably because recent events have affected its sanity also, the pleasure trace being due possibly to a liking for the water—”
Abruptly he stopped, his mind racing too fast for words or even ordered logical thought. Rather it was a feverish jumble of facts, experiences and wild guesswork which boiled chaotically through his brain, then incredibly became still and cool and very, very clear as … the answer.
And yet none of the tremendous intellects in the observation ward could have found it, Conway was sure, because they were not present with an empathic assistant when a young SRTT close to insanity through fear and grief had been immersed suddenly in the tepid, yellow depths of the AUGL tank …
When an intelligent, mature and mentally complex being encounters unpleasant and hurtful facts of sufficient numbers and severity the result is a retreat from reality. First a striving to return to the simple, unworrisome days of childhood and then, when that period turns out to be not nearly so carefree and uncomplicated as remembered, the ultimate retreat into the womb and the motionless, mindless condition of the catatonic. But to a mature SRTT the fetal position of catatonia could not be simple to attain, because its reproductive system was such that instead of the unborn offspring being in a state of warm, mindless comfort, it found itself part of its parent’s mature adult body and called upon to share in the decisions and adjustments its parent had to make. Because the SRTT body, every single cell of it, was the mind and any sort of separation was impossible to a life-form whose every cell was interchangeable.
How divide a glass of water without pouring some off into another container?
The diseased intellect would be forced to retreat again and again, only to find that it had become involved in endless changes and adaptations in its efforts to return to this nonexistent womb. It would go back—far, far back—until it eventually did find the mindless state which it craved and its mind, which was inseparable from its body, became the warm water teeming with unicellular life from which it had originally evolved.
Now Conway knew the reason for the slow, melting dissolution of the terminal case upstairs. More, he thought he saw a way of solving the whole horrible mess. If he could only bank on the fact that, as was the case with most other species, a complex, mature mind tended to go insane faster than an undeveloped and youthful one …
He was only vaguely aware of going to the intercom again and calling O’Mara, and of Murchison and Prilicla drawing closer to him as he talked. Then he was waiting for what seemed like hours for the Chief Psychologist to absorb the information and react. Finally:
“An ingenious theory, Doctor,” said O’Mara warmly. “More than that—I would say that that is exactly what has happened here, and no theorizing about it. The only pity is the understanding what has happened does nothing to aid the patient—”
“I’ve been thinking about that, too,” Conway broke in eagerly, “and the way I see it the runaway is the most urgent problem now—if it isn’t caught and pacified soon there are going to be serious casualties among the Staff and patients, in my section anyway, if nowhere else. Unfortunately, for technical reasons, your idea of calming it by means of a sound tape in its own language is not very successful up to now …”
“That’s putting it kindly,” said O’Mara dryly.
“ … But,” went on Conway, “if this idea was modified so that the runaway was spoken to, reassured, by its parent upstairs. If we first cured the elder SRTT—”
“Cured the elder! What the blazes do you think we’ve been trying to do this past three weeks?” O’Mara demanded angrily. Then as the realization came that Conway was not trying to be funny or willfully stupid, that he sounded in deadly earnest, he said flatly, “Keep talking, Doctor.”
Conway kept talking. When he had finished the intercom speaker registered the sound of a great, explosive sigh, then; “I think you’ve got the answer all right, and we’ve certainly got to try it despite the risks you mentioned,” O’Mara said excitedly. Then abruptly his tones became clipped and efficient. “Take charge down there, Doctor. You know what you want done better than anyone else does. And use the DBLF recreation room on level fifty-nine—it’s close to your section and can be evacuated quickly. We’re going to tap in on the existing communications circuits so there will be no delay here, and the special equipment you want will be in the DBLF recreation room inside fifteen minutes. So you can start anytime, Conway …”
Before he was cut off he heard O’Mara begin issuing instructions to the effect that all Monitor Corps personnel and Staff in the nursery section were to be placed at the disposal of Doctors Conway and Prilicla, and he had barely turned away from the set before green-uniformed Monitors began crowding into the lock.
VII
The SRTT youth had somehow to be forced into the DBLF recreation room which was rapidly being booby-trapped for its benefit, and the first step was to get it out of the AUGL ward. This was accomplished by twelve Monitors swimming, sweating and cursing furiously in their heavy issue suits who chased awkwardly after it until they had it hemmed in at the point where the entry lock gave it the only avenue of escape.
Conway, Prilicla and another bunch of Monitors were waiting in the corridor outside when it came through, all garbed against any one of half a dozen environments through which the chase might lead them. Murchison had wanted to go, too—she had wanted to be in at the kill, she had stated—but Conway had told her sharply that her job was watching over the three AUGL patients and that she
had better do just that.
He had not meant to lose his temper with Murchison like that, but he was on edge. If the idea he had been so enthusiastic about to O’Mara did not pan out there was a very good chance that there would be two incurable SRTT patients instead of one, and “in at the kill” had been an unfortunate choice of words.
The runaway had changed again—a semi-involuntary defense mechanism triggered off by the shapes of its pursuers—into a vaguely Earth-human form. It ran soggily along the corridor on legs which were too rubbery and which bent in the wrong places, and the scaly, dun-colored tegument it had worn in the AUGL tank was twitching and writhing and smoothing out into the pink and white of flesh and medical tunic. Conway could look on the most alien beings imaginable suffering from the most horrible maladies without inward distress, but the sight of the SRTT trying to become a human being as it ran made him fight to retain his lunch.
A sudden sideways dash into an MSVK corridor took them unawares and resulted in a kicking, floundering pile-up of pursuers beyond the inner seal of the connecting lock. The MSVK life-forms were tri-pedal, vaguely stork-like beings who required an extremely low gravity pull, and the DBDGs like Conway could not adjust to it immediately. But while Conway was still slowly falling all over the place the Monitors’ space training enabled them to find their feet quickly. The SRTT was headed off into the oxygen section again.