Alien Emergencies - James White [205]
“Third,” Conway said, raising his voice slightly to discourage further interruptions, “there are these four flaps of muscle which terminate at their apexes in osseous hooks which locate in these four bone-reinforced orifices in the second creature. This is the primary mechanism by which the individual segments are held together nose to tail, and in this instance—”
“It is also the method by which the CRLT female at the end of the line held onto its developing offspring,” Murchison broke in again. “At that stage the offspring had no choice in the matter. But as it matured, produced its own offspring, and moved farther up the line I feel sure that voluntary separation became possible. In fact, separation would be necessary during activities which did not require the entire group entity for their performance.”
“That is most interesting, friend Murchison,” Prilicla said. “I should think that the first time such a voluntary separation took place a certain amount of psychological trauma would be present. It would be analogous to a coming-of-age ceremony, perhaps, even though the separation might not be permanent—”
Before Conway could speak, Prilicla fell silent and began trembling in reaction to the Doctor’s feelings of irritation and impatience. He said, “This is all very interesting, friends, but we do not have the time just now for a general discussion. In any case, following the type of temporary separation you mentioned, the young adult would rejoin its original parent segment and not a—I suppose you could describe it as an ancestor seventeen times removed, which is the problem currently facing us. And now, if you don’t mind, we will concentrate on this problem and on the surgical procedures necessary to solve it.
“Feel free to interrupt at any time,” he added dryly.
But the interruptions were few and pertinent, and very soon it became obvious even to the watching tractor beamers, Descartes’s commanding officer, and Fleet Commander Dermod, whose face appeared briefly but with increasing frequency on the overhead screen, that the medical team was also working hard.
Because Sector General was the Federation’s foremost emergency hospital, the kind of surgery performed there, whether the patient was Earth-human or extraterrestrial, tended to be curative rather than cosmetic. It felt very strange to Conway, and he knew that his feelings were being shared by the other members of the team, to be operating on a perfectly healthy e-t with the purpose of simply modifying the size and contours of certain physiological features. But the operation itself was far from simple.
The greater proportion of the surgical work had to be performed on the second alien whose forward nerve coupling cone was too wide at its base to be retained by the sphincter muscle surrounding the corresponding orifice in the first CRLT. With the semiflexible tongue and groove connection which joined the two beings’ locomotor nerve networks, the solution was much simpler. The deep recess in the first alien was surgically widened until measurement showed that it would accommodate the tongue comfortably, after which reinforcing sutures were inserted to prevent further accidental widening. But the four triangular flaps with their bony, hooklike extensions posed a completely different and more difficult problem.
Together the four members formed the principal organic coupling which held the considerable mass of the second e-t against the first, and they did not fit because the hooks did not quite reach the apertures meant to receive them.
Elongating the four triangular members was contraindicated since this would have entailed surgical interference and consequent serious weakening of the muscle systems concerned, and they could not foresee the effect on the network of blood vessels which became engorged and extended the members to quadruple their size when the being returned to consciousness. Instead they made molds of the four hooks and made artificial ones using a hard, biologically neutral plastic at the tips and a wide