The Lost World - Michael Crichton [112]
Eddie said, “But we can set it.”
“Okay,” Sarah said. “What were you going to use for a cast?”
“Diesterase,” Eddie said. “I brought a kilo of it, in hundred-cc tubes. I packed lots, for glue. The stuff’s polymer resin, it solidifies hard as steel.”
“Great,” Harding said. “That’ll kill him, too.”
“It will?”
“He’s growing, Eddie. In a few weeks he’ll be much larger. We need something that’s rigid, but biodegradable,” she said. “Something that will wear off, or break off, in three to five weeks, when his leg’s healed. What have you got?”
Eddie frowned. “I don’t know.”
“Well, we haven’t got much time,” Harding said.
Eddie said, “Doc? This is like one of your famous test questions. How to make a dinosaur cast with only Q-tips and superglue.”
“I know,” Thorne said. The irony of the situation was not lost on him. He had given problems such as these to his engineering students for three decades. Now he was faced with one himself.
Eddie said, “Maybe we could degrade the resin—mix it with something like table sugar.”
Thorne shook his head. “Hydroxy groups in the sucrose will make the resin friable. It’ll harden okay, but it’ll shatter like glass as soon as the animal moves.”
“What if we mix it with cloth that’s been soaked in sugar?”
“You mean, to get bacteria to decay the cloth?”
“Yeah.”
“And then the cast breaks?”
“Yeah.”
Thorne shrugged. “That might work, “ he said. “But without testing, we can’t know how long the cast will last. Might be a few days, it might be a few months.”
“That’s too long,” Sarah said. “This animal is growing rapidly. If growth is constricted, it’ll end up being crippled by the cast.”
“What we need,” Eddie said, “is an organic resin that will form a decaying binder. Like a gum of some kind.”
“Chewing gum?” Arby said. “Because I have plenty of—”
“No, I was thinking of a different kind of gum. Chemically speaking, the diesterase resin—”
“We’ll never solve it chemically,” Thorne said. “We don’t have the supplies.”
“What else can we do? There’s no choice but—”
“What if you make something that’s different in different directions?” Arby said. “Strong one way and weak in another?”
“You can’t,” Eddie said. “It’s a homogeneous resin. It’s all the same stuff, goopy glue that turns rock-hard when it dries, and—”
“No, wait a minute,” Thorne said, turning to the boy. “What do you mean, Arby?”
“Well,” Arby said, “Sarah said the leg is growing. That means it’s going to grow longer, which doesn’t matter for a cast, and wider, which does, because it’ll start to squeeze the leg. But if you made it weak in the diameter—”
“He’s right,” Thorne said. “We can solve it structurally.”
“How?” Eddie said.
“Just build in a split-line. Maybe using aluminum foil. We have some for cooking.”
“That’d be much too weak,” Eddie said.
“Not if we coat it with a layer of resin.” Thorne turned to Sarah. “What we can do is make a cast that is very strong for vertical stresses, but weak for lateral stresses. It’s a simple engineering problem. The baby can walk around on its cuff, and everything is fine, as long as the stresses are vertical. But when its leg grows, it will pop the split-line open, and the cuff will fall away.”
“Yes,” Arby said, nodding.
“Is that hard to do?” she said.
“No. It should be pretty easy. You just build a cuff of aluminum foil, and coat it with resin.”
Eddie said, “And what’ll hold the cuff together while you coat it?”
“How about chewing gum?” Arby said.
“You got it,” Thorne said, smiling.
At that moment, the baby rex stirred, its legs twitching. It raised its head, the oxygen mask dropping away, and gave a low, weak squeak.
“Quickly,” Sarah said, grabbing the head. “More morphine.”
Malcolm had a syringe ready. He jabbed it into the animal’s neck.
“Just five cc’s now,” Sarah said.
“What’s wrong with more? Keep him out longer?”
“He’s in shock from the injury, Ian. You can kill him with too much morphine. You’ll put him into respiratory arrest. His adrenal