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 lock, 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 protuberances 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
