“None,” said Mannon. “And what I said about wild guesses is a fact. We’re all making them here, and getting nowhere-ordinary diagnostic techniques are completely useless. Just look at the thing!”
Mannon moved aside for Conway, and a sensation as of a pencil being laid across his shoulder told him that Prilicla was behind him craning to see, too.
VI
The being in the tank was indescribable for the simple reason that it had obviously been trying to become several different things at once when the dissolution had begun. There were appendages both jointed and tentacular, patches of scales, spines and leathery, wrinkled tegument together with the suggestion of mouth and gill openings, all thrown together in a gruesome hodge-podge. Yet none of the physiological details were clear because the whole flaccid mass was softened, eroded away, like a wax model left too long in the heat. Moisture oozed from the patient’s body continuously and trickled to the floor of the tank, where the water level was nearly six inches deep.
Conway swallowed and said, “Bearing in mind the adaptability of this species, its immunity to physical damage and so on, and considering the wildly mixed-up state of its body, I should say that there may be a strong possibility that the trouble stems from psychological causes.”
Mannon looked him up and down slowly with an expression of awe on his face, then said, witheringly, “Psychological causes, hey? Amazing! Well, what else could cause a being who is immune both to physical damage and bacterial infection to get into this state except something wrong with its think tank? But perhaps you were going to be more specific?”
Conway felt his neck and ears getting warm. He said nothing.
Mannon grunted, then went on, “The water that it is melting into is just that, plus a few harmless organisms which are suspended in it. We’ve tried every method of physical and psychological treatment that we could think of, without results. At the moment someone is suggesting that we quick-freeze the patient, both to halt the melting and to give us more time to think of something else. This has been vetoed because in its present state such a course might kill the patient outright. We’ve had a couple of our telepathic life-forms try to tune to its mind with a view to straightening it out that way, and O’Mara has gone back to the dark ages to such a point that he has tried crude electro-shock therapy, but nothing works. Altogether we have brought, singly and acting in concert, the viewpoints of very nearly every species in the Galaxy, and still we can’t get a line on what ails it.
“If the trouble was psychological,” put in Conway, “I should have thought that the telepaths-”
“No,” said Mannon. “In this life-form the mind and memory function is evenly distributed throughout the whole body and not housed in a permanent brain casing, otherwise it could not accomplish such marked changes in its physical structure. At present the being’s mind is withdrawing, draining away, into smaller and smaller units-so small that the telepaths cannot work them.
“This SRTT is a real weirdie,” Mannon continued thoughtfully. “It evolved out of the sea, of course, but later its world saw outbreaks of volcanic activity, earthquakes-the surface being coated with sulfur and who knows what else-and finally a minor instability in their sun converted the planet into the desert which it now is. They had to be adaptable to survive all that. And their method of reproduction-a budding and splitting-off process which causes the loss of a sizable portion of the parent’s mass-is interesting, too, because it means that the embryo is born with part of the body-and-brain cell structure of the parent. No conscious memories are passed to the newly-born but it retains unconsciously the memories which enable it to adapt-”
“But that means,” Conway burst out, “that if the parent transfers a section of its body-and-mind to the offspring, then each individual’s unconscious memory must go back-”
“And it is the unconscious which is the seat of all psychoses,” interrupted O’Mara, who had come up behind them at that point. “Don’t say any more, I have nightmares at the very idea. Imagine trying to analyze a patient whose subconscious mind goes back fifty thousand years. . .