“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 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 Q'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.