Mannon indicated the blurred picture in the scanner and said vehemently, “It wasn’t scratching to relieve an itch. Those teeth are really locked on, it has practically bitten its tail off! Definitely an epileptic condition, I’d say. Or such self-inflicted punishment could mean mental unbalance
“Oh, great!” said O’Mara disgustedly from behind them.
Skempton’s equipment arrived then, and Prilicla and the Colonel began calibrating a Translator for the patient. Being practically unconscious, the test sounds had to be of a mind-wrecking intensity to get through to it, and Mannon and Conway were driven out to the main ward to finish their discussion.
Half an hour later Prilicla came out to tell them that they could talk to the patient, but that the being’s mind still seemed to be only partly conscious. They hurried in.
O’Mara was saying that they were all friends, that they liked and felt sympathy for the patient, and that they would do everything in their power to help it. He spoke quietly into his own Translator, and a series of alien clicks and gobbles roared out from the other which had been placed near the patient’s head. In the pauses between sentences Prilicla reported on the being’s mental state.
“Confusion, anger, great fear,” the GLNO’s voice came tonelessly through its own Translator. And for several minutes the intensity and type of emotional radiation remained constant. Conway decided to take the next step.
“Tell it I am going to make physical contact,” he said to O’Mara. “That I apologize for any discomfort this may cause, but that I intend no harm.”
He took a long, needle-pointed probe and gently touched the area where the growth was thickest. The GLNO reported no reaction. Apparently it was only on an area unaffected by the growth where a touch could send the patient wild. Conway felt that at least he was beginning to get somewhere.
Switching off the patient’s Translator, he said, “I was hoping for this. If the affected areas are dead to pain we should be able, with the patient’s cooperation, to cut the mouth free without using an anesthetic. As yet we don’t know enough about its metabolism to anesthetize without risk of killing the patient. Are you sure,” he asked Prilicla suddenly, “that it hears and understands what we’re saying?”
“Yes, Doctor,” the GLNO replied, “so long as you speak slowly and without ambiguity.”
Conway switched the Translator on again and said quietly. “We are going to help you. First we will enable you to resume your natural posture by freeing your mouth, and then we will remove this growth…”
Abruptly the restraining net bulged as five pairs of tentacles whipped furiously back and forward. Conway jumped away cursing, angry with the patient and angrier with himself for having rushed things too much.
“Fear and anger,” said Prilicla, and added: “The being.., it seems to have reasons for these emotions.”
“But why? I’m trying to help it. . .
The patient’s struggles increased to a violence that was incredible. Prilicla’s fragile, pipe stem body trembled under the impact of the emotional gale from the survivor’s mind. One of its tentacles, a member which projected from the growth area, became entangled in a fold of net and was torn off.
Such blind, unreasoning panic, Conway thought sickly. But Prilicla had said that there were reasons for this reaction on the alien’s part. Conway swore: even the workings of the survivor’s mind were contradictory.
“Well!” said Mannon explosively, when the patient had quietened down again.
“Fear, anger, hatred,” the GLNO reported. “I would say, most definitely, that it does not want your help.”
“We have here,” O’Mara put in grimly, “a very sick beastie indeed.”
The words seemed to echo back and forth in Conway’s brain, growing louder and more insistent every time. They had significance. O’Mara had, of course, been alluding to the mental condition of the patient, but that didn’t matter. A very sick beastie-that was the key-piece of the puzzle, and the picture was beginning to fall into place around it. As yet it was incomplete, but there was enough of it there to make Conway feel more horribly afraid than he had ever been before in his life.