Futures Past (3 page)

  
"Conway, you arranged to see me here seven and one half minutes ago," said the chief psychologist. "No doubt you were just leaving."

  
"I'm sorry, sir," said Conway, "the preliminary investigation is taking longer than I estimated, and I wanted to have something concrete to report before seeing you."

  
There was a faint rustling sound as O'Mara breathed heavily through his nose. The chief psychologist's face was about as readable as a piece of weathered basalt, which in some respects it resembled, but the eyes which studied Conway opened into a mind so keenly analytical that it gave the major what amounted to a telepathic faculty.

  
As chief psychologist of a multi-environment hospital he was responsible for the mental well-being of a staff of several thousand entities belonging to more than sixty different species. Even though his Monitor Corps rank of Major did not place him high in the chain of command, there was no clear limit to his authority. To O'Mara, the medical staff were patients, too, and part of his job was to assign the right kind of doctor—whether Earth-humans or e-t—to a given patient.

  
Given even the highest qualities of tolerance and mutual respect, potentially dangerous situations could still arise through ignorance or misunderstanding, or a being could develop xenophobia to a degree which threatened to affect its professional competence, mental stability, or both. An Earth-human doctor, for instance, who had a subconscious fear of spiders would not be able to bring to bear on a Cinrusskin patient the proper degree of clinical detachment necessary for its treatment. And if someone like Prilicla were to treat such an Earth-human patient. . . A large part of O'Mara's job was to detect and eradicate such trouble among the medical staff while other members of his department saw to it that the problem did not arise where the patients were concerned. According to O'Mara himself, however, the true reason for the high degree of mental stability among the variegated and often touchy medical staff was that they were all too frightened of him to risk going mad.

  
Caustically, he said, "Doctor Conway, I freely admit that this patient is unusual even by our standards, but you must have discovered a few simple facts about it and its condition. Is it alive? Is it diseased or injured? Does it possess intelligence? Are you wasting your time on an outsize, space-frozen turkey?"

  
Conway ignored the rhetoric and tried to answer the questions. He said, "The patient is alive, just barely, and the indications are that it is both diseased—the exact nature of the disease is not yet known—and suffering from gross physical injury, specifically a punctured wound made by a large, high-velocity projectile or a tightly focused heat beam which passed through the base of the neck and the upper chest area. The wound entrance and exit is sealed by the black covering or growth—we still don't know which—encasing the body. Regarding the possibility of intelligence, the cranial capacity is large enough not to rule this out, but again, the head is not disproportionately large for the mass of the being, which is too deeply unconscious to radiate detectable emotion. The manipulatory appendages, whose degree of specialization or other- wise can give a strong indication of the presence or absence of intelligence, have been removed.

  
"Not by us," Conway added.

  
O'Mara was silent for a moment then he said, "I see. Another one of your deceptively simple cases. No doubt you will have deceptively simple special requirements. Accommodation? Physiology tapes? Information on planet of origin?"

  
Conway shook his head. "I don't believe that you have a physiology tape that will cover this patient's type—all the winged species we know are light-gravity beings, and this one has muscles for about four Gs. The present accommodation is fine, although we'll have to be careful in case of contamination of or from the chlorine level above us—the seals to storage compartments like this are not designed for constant traffic, unlike the ward airlocks—"

  
"I didn't know that, of course."

  
"Sorry, sir," said Conway. "I was thinking aloud, and partly for the benefit of Surgeon-Lieutenant Brenner, who is visiting this madhouse for the first time. Regarding information on its planet of origin, I would like you to approach Colonel Skempton to ask him if it would be possible for Torrance to return to that area to investigate the two nearer star systems, to look for beings with a similar physiological classification."

  
"In other words," said O'Mara dryly, "you have a difficult medical problem and think that the best solution is to find the patient's own doctor."

  
Conway smiled and said, "We don't need full cultural contact—just a quick look, atmosphere samples and specimens of local plant and animal life, if Torrance wouldn't mind soft-landing a probe—"

  
O'Mara broke the connection at that point with a sound which was untranslatable and Conway, now that they had gone as far as they could with the patient without the path reports, suddenly realized how hungry he was.

  
Three To reach the dining hall reserved for warm-bodied oxygen breathers they had to travel through two levels, none Of which required protective suits, and a network of corridors crowded with entities which flapped, crawled, undulated and occasionally walked past them. They were met at the entrance by Prilicla who was carrying a folder of green path reports.

  
As they entered, the last Earth-human table was being taken by a bunch of crab-like Melfans and a Tralthan— Melfans could adapt themselves to the low stools and the Tralthans did everything including sleep on their six elephantine feet. Prilicla spotted an empty table in the Kelgian area and flew across to claim it before the party of Corps maintenance men could get there. Luckily it was beyond the range of their emotional radiation.

  
Conway began eagerly leafing through the reports once he saw that the Lieutenant was being shown by Murchison how to balance on the edge of a Kelgian chair within reach of the food he had ordered. But for once Brenner's attention was not on the shapely pathologist. He was staring at Prilicla, his eyebrows almost lost in his hair-line.

  
"Cinrusskins prefer to eat while hovering—they say it aids the digestion," explained Murchison, and added, "The slipstream helps cool the soup, too."

  
Prilicla maintained a stable hover while they concentrated on refueling, breaking off only to pass around the reports. Finally Conway, feeling pleasantly distended, turned to the Cinrusskin.

  
"I don't know how you managed it," he said warmly. "When 2 want a fast report from Thornnastor the most he will let me do is jump two places in the line."

  
Prilicla trembled at the compliment as it replied, "I insisted, quite truthfully, that our patient was at the point of death."

  
"But not," said Murchison dryly, "that it has been in that condition for a very long time." "You're sure of that?" asked Conway. "I am now," she answered seriously, tapping one of the reports as she spoke. "The indications are that the large puncture wound was inflicted by a meteorite collision some time after the disease, that is the barnacles and coating material were in position. The coating, which flowed into and across the wound, effectively sealed it.

  
"As well," she continued, "these tests show that a very complex chemical form of suspended animation—not just hypothermia—was used and that it was applied organ by organ, almost cell by cell, by micro-injections of the required specifics. In a way you could think of it as if the creature had been embalmed before it was quite dead in an effort to prolong its life."

  
"What about the missing legs or claws?" said Conway, "and the evidence of charring under the coating in the areas behind the wings? And the pieces of what seems to be a different kind of barnacle in those areas?"

  
"It is possible," Murchison replied, "that the disease initially affected the being's legs or claws, perhaps during its equivalent of nesting. The removal of the limbs and the evidence of charring you mention might have been early and unsuccessful attempts at curing the patient's condition. Remember that virtually all of the creature's body wastes were eliminated before the coating was applied. That is standard procedure before hibernation, anesthesia or major surgery."

  
The silence which followed was broken by the lieutenant, who said, "Excuse me, I'm getting lost. This disease or growth, what exactly do we know about it?"

  
"They knew that the outward symptoms of the disease were the barnacle-like growths," Murchison told him, "which covered the patient's tegument so completely that It could have been a suit of chain mail. It was still open to argument whether the barnacles were skin conditions which had sprouted rootlets or a subcutaneous condition with a barnacle-like eruption on the surface, but in either event they were held by a thick pencil's width of fine rootlets extending and subdividing to an unknown depth within the patient. They penetrated not only the subcutaneous (issue and underlying musculature, but practically all of the vital organs and central nervous system. And the rootlets were hungry. There could be no doubt from the condition of the tissue underlying the barnacles that this was n severely wasting disease which was far advanced."

  
"It seems to me that you should have been called in earlier," said Brenner, "and that the patient was sealed up just before it was due to die."

  
Conway nodded and said, "But it isn't hopeless. Some Of our e-ts practice microsurgery techniques that would enable them to excise the rootlets, even the ones that are tangled up in the nerve bundles. It is a very slow procedure, however, and there is the danger that when we re- vive the patient the disease will also be revived and that it might progress faster than the microsurgery. I think the answer is to learn as much as we possibly can about the disease before we do anything else."

  
When they returned to the patient there was a message waiting from O'Mara to say that Torrance had left with the promise of preliminary reports on the two solar systems nearest to the find within three days. During those three days Conway expected to devise procedures that would remove the coating and barnacles from the patient, arrest the diseases and initiate curative surgery so that the scoutship's reports would be needed only to prepare proper accommodation for the patient's convalescence.

  
During those three days, however, they got precisely nowhere.

  
The material that encased barnacles and patient alike could be drilled and chipped away with great difficulty and an enormous waste of time—the process resembled that of chipping out a fossil without inflicting damage, and this particular fossil was fifty feet long and over eighty feet from tip to tip of its partially folded wings. When Conway insisted that Pathology produce a faster method of stripping the patient he was told that the coating was a complex organic, that the specifics they had devised for dissolving it would produce large quantities of toxic gases-— toxic to the patient as well as the attending physicians— and that the shell material of the barnacles would be instantly dissolved by this solvent and that it would not be good for the patient's skin and underlying tissue, either. They went back to drilling and chipping.

  
Murchison, who was continually withdrawing micro-specimens from the areas affected by the rootlets, was informative but unhelpful.

  
"I'm not suggesting that you should abandon this one," she said sympathetically, "but you should start thinking about it. In addition to the widespread tissue wastage, there is evidence of structural damage to the wing muscles—damage which may well have been self-inflicted— and I think the heart has ruptured. This will mean major surgical repairs as well as—"

  
"This muscle and heart damage," said Conway sharply. "Could it have been caused by the patient trying to get out of its casing?"

  
"It is possible but not likely," she replied in a voice that reminded him that he was not talking to a junior intern and that past and present relationships could change with very little notice. "That coating is hard, but it is relatively thin and the leverage of the patient's wings is considerable. I would say that the heart and muscle damage occurred before the patient was encased."