White, James – Sector General 06 – Star Healer

The Gogleskan was still not taking any interest in the screen.

“If this test were to cause pain,” Khone asked, “what would be the procedure then? And would it be preferable, in the present circumstances, for the blood sample to be taken by and from oneself?”

A helpful but cautious entity, this Khone, Conway thought, trying not to laugh. He said, “If a procedure is expected to cause discomfort, a quantity of the material contained in one of the phials colored in yellow and black diagonal bands is withdrawn and injected into the site. The quantity required is dependent on the period and degree of discomfort which one is expecting to cause.

“The material concerned is a painkiller for my species,” he went on, “as well as a muscle relaxant. But it is not required in this instance . .

While he continued to give the directions for withdrawing the blood sample, he told Khone that it was much easier to perform such work on a subject other than oneself. He did not, at that time, make any mention of the fact that if he was to obtain a specimen of FOKT blood from Khone, the first thing he would have wanted to discover was if the yellow and black marked medication, or one of the other similar preparations in his supply, was suited to the Gogleskan metabolism. If one of them was suitable and there was an opportunity of injecting it, Khone would be left in such a painfree, relaxed, and massively tranquilized state that subsequent and more revealing tests would have been no problem at all.

A muscle relaxed, he thought, his eyes going back to Wainright’s display, as opposed to a muscle in spasm!…

The large object centering the screen lacked the symmetry and structural repetition of a vegetable-it looked like a sheet of paper which had been crushed and twisted into a loose ball. But if that idea was correct, the predator must have pulled itself into that shape. Conway shivered in spite of himself.

That Gogleskan venom was potent stuff.

To Wainright, he said quickly, “How does this sound? The FOKT fossils were those beings who did not survive the initial attack of the creature, and some of them are linked, indicating that they were part of a larger group. This FOKT group-entity attacked or defended itself against the predator with its stings, all of them. The quantity of venom injected must have sent the beastie into multiple muscular spasm, and it must have literally tied itself into a knot as it died. Can you get your computer to unravel that knot?”

Wainright nodded, and soon the twisted, convoluted shape at the center of the screen was surrounded by a fainter image of itself which was slowly unfolding. This had to be the answer for that weird shape, Conway thought, because nothing else made sense. Occasionally he asked for expanded views of the enormous fossil’s skeletal structure, and each one supported his theory. But the Lieutenant was forced to reduce the size several times as the ghostly, unfolding image overran the edges of the screen.

“It’s beginning to look like a bird,” Wainright said. “Parts of the wing are very fragile. In fact, it seems to be all wing.”

“That’s because the fossil remains are of the skeleton and skin only,” Conway replied. “There must have been almost total wastage of muscle and soft tissue which was attached to that bone structure. In the areas where you are indicating the wing. . . Now you’ve got me thinking of it as a bird. . . The wing thickness should be increased by a factor of five or six. But with that bone structure the wing could not have been rigid. I’d say that it undulated rapidly rather than flapping, and propelled the beastie forward at great speed. And that lateral split in the wing inboard leading edges is interesting. It reminds me of the engine intakes of the old jet aircraft, except that these intakes have teeth . .

He broke off because Khone was jabbing hesitantly at the back of his hand with the hypo. For the first time Conway understood what a patient had to go through at the hands of a trainee medical technician.