Alien Emergencies - James White [164]
Conway wondered if it was possible for a mobile omnivorous vegetable to get food poisoning, and if it would take effect in time to save them from the thorns. He rather doubted it.
“Thank you, ma’am,” Fletcher said, and went on, “About the missing limbs?”
“There are no missing limbs, Captain,” she replied. “Or perhaps the crew are all missing the same organ, their head. The large number of the other injuries concealed the truth at first, but there are no missing limbs, and there is no criminal.”
Fletcher looked at Conway, too polite to express his disbelief to the pathologist in words, and the Doctor took over the explanation. But he had to work as he talked because he and Murchison were faced with the long, difficult job of transferring the big alien from its cupola to the litter.
It was hard to imagine the set of environmental circumstances which had caused such an essentially helpless life-form to evolve, become dominant, and in time achieve a culture capable of star travel, Conway said, but these gross, limbless, and all too obviously immobile creatures had done just that. It was a host-symbiote, they now knew, who had developed multiple symbiotes specialized so as to act as short- and long-range manipulators and sensors. Its stumps and the areas which on the casualties had been mistaken for amputation sites were the interfaces which joined the host creature to its symbiotes when physical activity became necessary or the host required sustenance.
It was likely that a strong mental as well as physical bond existed between the host Captain and its crew, but continuous contact was not needed because in and around the wreck there had been three times the number of crew members as there were organic connectors on the host. It was also probable that the host entity did not sleep and provided continual, nonphysical support to its symbiotes. This was borne out by the type of emotional radiation being picked up on Rhabwar by Prilicla—confusion and feelings of loss. The host Captain’s telepathic or empathic faculty did not reach as far as the ambulance ship’s orbit.
“The smallest, DCLG life-form is independently intelligent and performs the finer, more intricate manipulative operations,” Murchison joined in, clarifying the situation in her own mind as well as for the Captain, who had disappeared briefly into the corridor to check on the position of the thorns. “As is the slightly larger DCMH. But the function of the big DCOJ is purely that of eating and supplying predigested food to the host. There is evidence, however, that all three of these life-forms have their own ingestion, digestion, and reproductive systems, but one of them must figure in the transfer of sperm or ova between immobile host creatures—”
She broke off as the Captain returned, his cutter in one hand and what looked like a short, tangled piece of barbed wire in the other. He said, “The thorns have grown out of the food storage deck and are halfway along the corridor. I brought you a sample, ma’am.”
She took it from him carefully and Conway joined her for a closer look. It was like a dark-brown, three-dimensional zigzag with fine green thorns growing out of every angle, except one which sprouted a long, tapering hollow tube like the vegetable equivalent of a hypodermic needle, and which was probably a root. She snipped off the thorns with surgical scissors and let them drop into her analyzer.
“Why did we have to wear lightweight suits?” she said a few minutes later. “A scratch from a thorn won’t kill you, but three or four would. What are you doing, Captain?”
Fletcher was unclipping the signal flare from his backpack. He said, “You can see from the charring on the stem that they