“Gee,” Eddie said. “I just…you know. The whole syringe.”
“What is that? Ten cc’s?”
“I think. Maybe twenty.”
Malcolm looked at Harding. “How long before it wears off?”
“I have no idea,” she said. “I’ve sedated lions and jackals in the field, when I tagged them. With those animals, there’s a rough correlation between dose and body weight. But with young animals, it’s unpredictable. Maybe a few minutes, maybe a few hours. And I don’t know a thing about baby tyrannosaurs. Basically, it’s a function of metabolism, and this one seems to be rapid, bird-like. The heart’s pumping very fast. All I can say is, let’s get him out of here as quickly as possible.”
Harding picked up the small ultrasound transducer and held it to the baby’s leg. She looked over her shoulder at the monitor. Kelly and Arby were blocking the view. “Please, give us a little room here,” she said, and they moved away. “We don’t have much time. Please.”
As they moved away, Sarah saw the green-and-white outlines of the leg and its bones. Surprisingly like a large bird, she thought. A vulture or a stork. She moved the transducer. “Okay…there’s the metatarsals…and there’s the tibia and fibula, the two bones of the lower leg….”
Arby said, “Why are the bones different shades like that?” The legs had some dense white sections within paler-green outlines.
“Because it’s an infant,” Harding said. “His legs are still mostly cartilage, with very little calcified bone. I’d guess this baby probably can’t walk yet – at least, not very well. There. Look at the patella….You can see the blood supply to the joint capsule….”
“How come you know all this anatomy?” Kelly said.
“I have to. I spend a lot of time looking through the seat of predators, she said. “Examining pieces of bones that are left behind, and figuring out which animals have been eaten. To do that, you have to know comparative anatomy very well.” She moved the transducer along the baby’s leg. “And my father was a vet.”
Malcolm looked up sharply. “Your father was a vet?”
“Yes. At the San Diego Zoo. He was a bird specialist. But I don’t see…Can you magnify this?”
Arby flicked a switch. The image doubled in size.
“Ah. Okay. All right. There it is. You see it?”
“No.”
“It’s mid-fibula. See it? A thin black line. That’s a fracture, just above the epiphysis.”
“That little black line there?” Arby said.
“That little black line means death for this infant,” Sarah said. “The fibula won’t heal straight, so the ankle joint can’t pivot when he stands on his hind feet. The baby won’t be able to run, and probably can’t even walk. It’ll be crippled, and a predator will pick it off before it gets more than a few weeks old.”
Eddie said, “But we can set it.”
“Okay,” Sarah said. “What were you going to use for a cast?”
“Diesterase,” Eddie said. “I brought a kilo of it, in hundred-cc tubes. I packed lots, for glue. The stuff’s polymer resin, it solidifies hard as steel.”
“Great,” Harding said. “That’ll kill him, too.”
“It will?”
“He’s growing, Eddie. In a few weeks he’ll be much larger. We need something that’s rigid, but biodegradeable,” she said. “Something that will wear off, or break off, in three to five weeks, when his leg’s healed. What have you got?”
Eddie frowned. “I don’t know.”
“Well, we haven’t got much time,” Harding said.
Eddie said, “Doc? This is like one of your famous test questions. How to make a dinosaur cast with only Q-tips and superglue.”
“I know,” Thorne said. The irony of the situation was not lost on him. He had given problems such as these to his engineering students for three decades. Now he was faced with one himself.
Eddie said, “Maybe we could degrade the resin – mix it with something like table sugar.”
Thorne shook his head. “Hydroxy groups in the sucrose will make the resin friable. It’ll harden okay, but it’ll shatter like glass as soon as the animal moves.”
“What if we mix it with cloth that’s been soaked in sugar?”
“You mean, to get bacteria to decay the cloth?”