The various feet, tentacles, and pincers were beginning to shuffle, slither, and scrape along the floor as they turned toward the gallery exit. Conway held up his hand.
“Let me remind you once again,” he said very seriously. “The purpose of this operation is not simply to assist at the FSOJ’s birth, which will take place with or without our assistance, believe me. It is to ensure that the Unborn and soon-to-be new Protector retains the same level of intelligence and the telepathic ability it now possesses within the womb.”
Thornnastor made a quiet sound which to the Tralthan component of Conway’s mind signified pessimism and anxiety. Following two days of consultations with the Diagnostician, the precise details of the forthcoming operative procedure had still to be finalized. Radiating a confidence which he did not feel, he discussed the functioning of the combination operating frame and gimbalmounted cage which accommodated the Protector before taking them through to the side-ward designed to receive its offspring.
Nicknamed the Rumpus Room by the maintenance engineers responsible for its construction, the ward was more than half-filled by a hollow, cylindrical structure, wide enough to allow unrestricted passage of the FSOJ infant, which curved and twisted back on itself so that the occupant would be able to use all of the available floor area of the ward in which to exercise. The entry point into this continuous cylinder was a heavily reinforced door in the side-wall, which was otherwise composed of an immensely strong open latticework of metal. The cylinder floor was shaped to reproduce the uneven ground and natural obstacles, such as the mobile and voracious trip-roots found on the Protector’s home planet, and the open sections gave the occupant a continuous view of the screens positioned around the outer surface of the cylinder. Onto these screens were projected moving tri-di pictures of indigenous plant and animal life which the occupant would normally encounter.
The open structure also enabled the medical team to bring to bear on their patient the more positive aspects of life-support system-the fearsome-looking mechanisms positioned between the projection screens which were designed to beat, tear, and jab at the occupant with any desired degree of frequency or force.
Everything possible had been done to make the new arrival feel at home.
“As you are already aware,” Conway went on, “the Unborn, by virtue of its telepathic faculty, is constantly aware of the events taking place outside its parent. We are not telepaths and may not be capable of receiving its thoughts, even during the period of intense mental stress which occurs just prior to birth, when it is transmitting at maximum power because it knows that its mind and personality are about to be obliterated.
“There are several telepathic races known to the Federation,” he continued, his mind returning to its one and only contact with a telepathic Unborn. “These are usually species who have evolved this faculty so that their common organic receiver/transmitters are automatically in tune. For this reason telepathic contact between the members of different telepathic races is not always possible. When mental contact occurs between one of these entities and a nontelepath, it usually means that the faculty in the nontelepath is either dormant or atrophied. When such contact occurs the experience can be highly uncomfortable, but there are no physical changes in the brain affected, nor is there any lasting psychological damage.”
As he switched on the Rumpus Room’s screens and began projecting the visual record of that first, incredibly violent birth, his mind was adding the extra-sensory dimension of his own, minuteslong telepathic contact with the Unborn so soon to be born.
Conway was aware that his fists were clenched, and that beside him Murchison’s face was pale as she watched the screen. Once again the rampaging Protector tried to get at them by battering at the partly open inner seal of the air lock. The opening was five or six inches wide, just enough for the pathologist, Rhabwar’s injured Captain, and Conway to see and hear and record everything which was happening. But their position was not a secure one. The Protector’s hard-tipped tentacles had already wreaked havoc in the lock antechamber, tearing out sections of metal plating and deforming the underlying structure, and the lock’s inner seal was not all that thick.