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.
He had not meant to lose his temper with Murchison like that, but he was on edge. If the idea he had been so enthusiastic about to O’Mara did not pan out there was a very good chance that there would be two incurable SRTT patients instead of one, and “in at the kill” had been an unfortunate choice of words.
The runaway had changed again-a semi-involuntary defense mechanism triggered off by the shapes of its pursuers-into a vaguely Earth human form. It ran soggily along the corridor on legs which were too rubbery and which bent in the wrong places, and the scaly, dun-colored tegument it had worn in the AUGL tank was twitching and writhing and smoothing out into the pink and white of flesh and medical tunic. Conway could look on the most alien beings imaginable suffering from the most horrible maladies without inward distress, but the sight of the SRTT trying to become a human being as it ran made him fight to retain his lunch.
A sudden sideways dash into an MSVK corridor took them unawares and resulted in a kicking, floundering pile-up of pursuers beyond the inner seal of the connecting lock. The MSVK life-forms were bi-pedal, vaguely stork-like beings who required an extremely low gravity pull, and the DBDGs like Conway could not adjust to it immediately. But while Conway was still slowly falling all over the place the Monitors’ space training enabled them to find their feet quickly. The SRTT was headed off into the oxygen section again.
It had been a bad few minutes while it lasted, Conway thought with relief, because the dim lighting and the opacity of the fog which the MSVKs called an atmosphere would have made the SRTT difficult to find if it had been lost to sight. If that had happened at this stage. . . Well, Conway preferred not to think about that.
But the DBLF recreation room was only minutes away now, and the SRTT was heading straight for it. The being was changing again, into something low and heavy which was moving on all fours. It seemed to be drawing itself in, condensing, and there was a suggestion of a carapace forming. It was still in that condition when two Monitors, yelling and waving their arms wildly, dashed suddenly out of an intersection and stampeded it into the corridor which contained the recreation room .