The SRTT was really frightened now, so frightened that even non empaths could feel it. The shapes it was taking were going to give Conway nightmares for many weeks to come.
Conway lifted a hand mike to his lips and flicked the switch. “Any reaction up there yet?”
“Nothing yet,” O’Mara’s voice boomed from the speakers which had been set up around the room. “Whatever you’re doing at the moment you’ll have to step it up.”
“But the being is in a condition of extreme distress. . .” began Priicla.
Conway rounded on his assistant. “If you can’t take it, leave!” he snapped.
“Steady, Conway,” O’Mara’s voice came sharply. “I know how you must feel, but remember that the end result will cancel all this out. .
“But if it doesn’t work.” Conway protested, then: “Oh never mind.” To Prilicla he said, “I’m sorry.” To the officer beside him he asked, “Can you think of any way of putting on more pressure?”
“I’d hate anything like that being done to me,” said the Monitor tightly, “but I would suggest adding spin. Some species are utterly demoralized by spin when they can take practically anything else. .
Spin was added to the pummeling which the SRTT was already undergoing with the pressors-not a simple spin, but a wild, rolling, pitching movement which made Conway’s stomach feel queasy just by looking at it, and the flares dived and swooped around it like insane moons around their primary. Quite a few of the men had lost their first enthusiasm, and Prilicla swayed and shook on its six pipe-stem legs, in the grip of an emotional gale which threatened to blow it away.
It had been wrong to bring Prilicla in on this, Conway told himself angrily; no empath should have to go through this sort of hell by proxy. He had made a mistake from the very first, because the whole idea was cruel and sadistic and wrong. He was worse than a monster.
High in the center of the room the twisting, spinning blur that was the younger SRTT began to emit a high-pitched and terrified gobbling noise.
A crashing bedlam erupted from the wall speakers; shouts, cries, breaking noises and the sounds of running feet over-laying that of something slower and infinitely heavier. They could hear O’Mara’s voice shouting out some sort of explanation to somebody at the top of his lungs, then an unidentified voice yelled at them, “For Pete’s sake stop it down there! Buster’s papa has woke up and is wrecking the joint…
Quickly but gently they checked the spinning SRTT and lowered it to the floor, then they waited tensely while the shouting and crashing being relayed to them from Observation Ward Three reached a crescendo and began gradually to die down. Around the room men stood motionless watching each other, or the whimpering being on the floor, or the wall speakers, waiting. And then it came.
The sound was similar to the alien gobbling which had been relayed through the annunciators some hours previously, but without the accompanying roar of static, and because everyone had their Translators switched on the words also came through as English.
It was the elder SRTT, incurable no longer because it was physically whole again, speaking both reassuringly and chidingly to its erring offspring. In effect it was saying that junior had been a bad boy, that he must cease forthwith running around and getting himself and everyone else into a state, and that nothing else unpleasant would happen to him if he did as he was told by the beings now surrounding him. The sooner it did these things, the elder SRTT ended, the sooner they could both go home.
Mentally, the runaway had taken a terrible beating, Conway knew. Maybe it had taken too much. Tense with anxiety he watched it-still in a shape that was neither fish, flesh or fowl-begin humping its way across the floor. When it began gently and submissively to butt one of the watching Monitors in the knees, the cheer that went up very nearly gave it a relapse.
“When Prilicla here gave me the clue to what was troubling the elder SRTT, I was sure that the cure would have to be drastic,” Conway said to the Diagnosticians and Senior Physicians ranged around and behind O’Mara’s desk.