by Various
"I drained off a tank and got a good look at it before it crawled over into the next one," Bowman said. "Ugly bastard. But from a strictly anatomical standpoint I can't help you a bit."
Green Doctor Stone glowered over Jenkins' shoulder at the man. "But surely you can give us something."
Bowman shrugged. "You want it technical?"
"Any way you like."
"Your hlorg is an ideal anamorph. A nothing. Protoplasm, just protoplasm."
Jenkins looked up sharply. "What about his cellular organization?"
"No cells," said Bowman. "Unless they're sub-microscopic, and I'd need an electron-peeker to tell you that."
"No organ systems?"
"Not even an integument. You saw how slippery he looked? That's why. There's nothing holding him in but energy."
"Now, look," said Stone. "He eats, doesn't he? He must have waste materials of some sort."
Bowman shook his head unhappily. "Sorry. No urates. No nitrates. No CO{2}. Anyway, he doesn't eat because he has nothing to eat with. He absorbs. And that includes the lining of the tanks, which he seems to like as much as the contents. He doesn't bore those holes he makes--he dissolves them."
They sent Bowman back to quarters for a hot bath and a shot of Happy-O and looked up Hrunta, the biochemist.
Hrunta was glaring at paper electrophoretic patterns and pulling out chunks of hair around his bald spot. He gave them a snarl and shoved a sheaf of papers into their hands.
"Metabolic survey?" Jenkins asked.
"Plus," said Hrunta. "You're not going to like it, either."
"Why not? If it grows, it metabolizes. If it metabolizes, we can kill it. Axiom number seventeen, paragraph number four."
"Oh, it metabolizes, all right, but you'd better find yourself another axiom, pretty quick."
"Why?"
"Because it not only metabolizes, it consumes. There's no sign of the usual protein-carbohydrate-fat metabolism going on here. This baby has an enzyme system that's straight from hell. It bypasses the usual metabolic activities that produce heat and energy and gets right down to basic-basic."
Jenkins swallowed. "What do you mean?"
"It attacks the nuclear structure of whatever matter the creature comes in contact with. There's a partial mass-energy conversion in its rawest form. The creature goes after carbon-bearing substances first, since the C seems to break down more easily than anything else--hence its preference for plant and animal material over non-C stuff. But it can use anything if it has to--"
Jenkins stared at the little biochemist, an image in his mind of the pink creature in the hold, growing larger by the minute as it ate its way through the hydroponics, through the dry stores, through--
"Is there anything it can't use?"
"If there is, I haven't found it," Hrunta said sadly. "In fact, I can't see any reason why it couldn't consume this ship and everything in it, right down to the last rivet--"
* * * * *
They walked down to the hold for another look at their uninvited guest, and almost wished they hadn't.
It had reached the size of a small hippopotamus, although the resemblance ended there. Twenty hours had elapsed since the survey had begun. The hlorg had used every minute of it, draining the tanks, engulfing dry stores, devouring walls and floors as it spread out in search of food, leaving trails of eroded metal wherever it went.
It was ugly--ugly in its pink shapelessness, ugly in its slimy half-sentient movements, in its very purposefulness. But its ugliness went even deeper, stirring primordial feelings of revulsion and loathing in their minds as they watched it oozing implacably across the hold to another dry-storage bin.
Wally Stone shuddered. "It's grown."
"Too fast. Bowman charts it as geometric progression."
Stone scratched his jaw as a lone pink pseudopod pushed out on the floor toward him. Then he leaped forward and stamped on it, severing the strand from the body.
The severed member quivered and lay still for a moment. Then it flowed back to rejoin the body with a wet gurgle.
Stone looked at his half-dissolved shoe.
"Egotropism," Jenkins said. "Bowman played around with that, too. A severed piece will rejoin if it can. If it can't it just takes up independent residence and we have two hlorgs."
"What happens to it outside the ship?" Stone wanted to know.
"It falls dormant for several hours, and then splits up into a thousand independent chunks. One of the boys spent half of yesterday out there gathering them up. I tell you, this thing is equipped to survive."
"So are we," said Green Doctor Stone grimly. "If we can't outwit this free-flowing gob of obscenity, we deserve anything we get. Let's have a conference."
They met in the pilot room. The Black Doctor was there; so were Bowman and Hrunta. Chambers, the physiologist, was glumly clasping and unclasping his hands in a corner. The geneticist, Piccione, drew symbols on a scratch pad and stared blankly at the wall.
Jenkins was saying: "Of course, these are only preliminary reports, but they serve to outline the problem. This is not just an annoyance any longer, it's a crisis. We'd all better understand that."
The Black Doctor cut him off with a wave of his hand, and glowered at the papers as he read them through minutely. As he sat hunched at the desk with the black cowl of his office hanging down from his shoulders he looked like a squat black judge, Jenkins thought, a shadow from the Inquisition, a Passer of Spells. But there was no medievalism in Black Doctor Neelsen. In fact, it was for that reason, and only that reason, that the Black Service had come to be the leaders and the whips, the executors and directors of all the manifold operations of Hospital Earth.
* * * * *
The physicians of the General Practice Patrol were fledglings, newly trained in their specialties, inexperienced in the rigorous discipline of medicine that was required of the directors of permanent Planetary Dispensaries in the heavily populated systems of the Galaxy. On outlying worlds where little was known of the ways of medicine, the temptation was great to substitute faith for knowledge, cant for investigation, nonsense rituals for hard work. But the physicians of the Black Service were always waiting to jerk wandering neophytes back to the scientific disciplines that made the service of Hospital Earth so effective. The Black Doctors would not tolerate sloppiness. "Show me the tissue, Doctor," they would say. "Prove to me that what you say is so. Prove that what you did was valid medicine...." Their laboratories were the morgues and autopsy rooms of a thousand planets, the Temples of Truth from which no physician since the days of Pasteur and Lister could escape for long and retain his position.
The Black Doctors were the pragmatists, the gadflies of Hospital Earth.
For this reason it was surprising to hear Black Doctor Neelsen saying, "Perhaps we are being too scientific, just now. When the creature has exhausted our food stores, it will look elsewhere for food. Perhaps we must cut at the tree and not at the root."
"A frontal attack?" said Jenkins.
"Just so. Its enzyme system is its vulnerability. Enzyme systems operate under specific optimum conditions, right? And every known enzyme system can be inactivated by adverse conditions of one sort or another. A physical approach may tell us how in this case. Meanwhile we will be on emergency rations, and hope that we don't starve to death finding out." The Black Doctor paused, looking at the men around him. "And in case you are thinking of enlisting help from outside, forget it. I've sent plague-warnings out for Galactic relay. We have this thing isolated, and we're going to keep it that way as long as I command this ship."
They went gloomily back to their laboratories to plan their frontal attack.
That was the night that Hrunta disappeared.
* * * * *
He was gone when they came to wake him from his sleep period. His bunk had been slept in, but he wasn't in it. In fact, he wasn't anywhere on the ship.
"But he couldn't just vanish!" the Black Doctor burst out when they told him the news. "Maybe he
's hiding somewhere. Maybe this business was working on his mind."
Green Doctor Stone took a crew of men to search the ship again, even though he considered it a waste of precious time. He had his private convictions about where Hrunta had gone.
So did every other man on the ship, including Jenkins.
The hlorg had stopped eating. Huge and round and wet and ugly, it squatted in the after-hold, quivering gently, without any other sign of life.
Surfeited. Like a fat man after a turkey dinner.
Jenkins reviewed progress with the others. No stone had been left unturned. They had sliced the hlorg, and squeezed it. They had boiled it and frozen it. They had dropped chunks of it in acid vats and covered other chunks with desiccants and alkalis. Nothing seemed to bother it.
A cold environment slowed down its activity, true, but it also stimulated the process of fission. Warmed up again, the portions sucked back together again and resumed eating.
Heat was a little more effective, but not much. It stunned the creature for a brief period, but it would not burn. It hissed frightfully and gave off an overpowering stench, and curled up at the edges, but as soon as the heat was turned off it began to recover.
In Hrunta's lab chunks of the hlorg sat in a dozen vats on tables and in sinks. Some contained antibiotics, some concentrated acids, some desiccants. In each vat a blob of pink protoplasm wiggled happily, showing no sign of discomfiture. On another table were the remains of Hrunta's (unsuccessful) attempt to prepare an anti-hlorg serum.
But no Hrunta.
"He was down there with the thing all day," Bowman said sadly. "He felt it was his responsibility, really. Hrunta thought biochemistry was the answer to all things, of course. Very conscientious man."
"But he was in bed."
"He claimed he did his best thinking in bed. Maybe he had a brainstorm and went down to try it out, and--"
"Yes." Jenkins nodded sourly. "And." He walked down the row of vats. "You'd think that at least concentrated sulphuric would dessicate it a little. But it's just formed a crust of coagulated protein around itself, and sits there--"
Bowman peered over his shoulder, his mustache twitching. "But it does dessicate."
"If you use enough long enough."
"How about concentrated hydrochloric?"
"Same thing. Maybe a little more effective, but not enough to count."
"Okay. Next we try combinations. There's got to be something the wretched beast can't tolerate--"
There was, of course.
* * * * *
Green Doctor Stone brought it to Jenkins as he was getting ready to turn in for a sleep period. Jenkins had checked to make sure double guards were posted in the hlorg's vicinity, and jolted them with Sleep-Not to keep them on their toes. All the same, he tied a length of stout cord around his ankle just to make sure he didn't do any sleepwalking. He was tying it to the bunk when Stone came in with a pan in his hand and a peculiar look on his face.
"Take a look at this," he said.
Jenkins looked at the sickly brown mass in the tray, and then up at Stone. "Where did you find it?"
"Down in the hold. Our hlorg has broken precedent. It's rejected something that it ate."
"Yeah. What is it?"
"I don't know. I'm taking it to Neelsen for paraffin sections. But I know what it looks like to me."
"Mm. I know." Jenkins felt sick. Stone headed up to the path lab, leaving the Red Doctor settled in his bunk.
Ten minutes later Jenkins sat bolt upright in the darkness. Frantically he untied himself and slid into his clothes. "Idiot!" he growled to himself. "Seventh son of a seventh son--"
Five minutes later he was staring at the vats in Hrunta's laboratory. He found the one he was looking for. A pink blob of hlorg wiggled slowly around the bottom.
Jenkins drew a beaker of distilled water and added it to the fluid in the vat. It hissed and sputtered and sent up quantities of acrid steam. When the steam had cleared away, Jenkins peered in eagerly.
The pink thing in the bottom was turning a sickly violet. It had quit wiggling. As Jenkins watched, the violet color changed to mud grey, then to black. He prodded it with a stirring rod. There was no response.
With a whoop Jenkins buzzed Bowman and Stone. "We've got it!" he shouted to them when they appeared. "Look! Look at it!"
Bowman poked and probed and broke into a wide grin. The piece of hlorg was truly and sincerely dead. "It inactivates the enzyme system, and renders the base protoplasm vulnerable to anything that normally attacks it. What are we waiting for?"
They began tearing the laboratory apart, searching for the right bottles. The supply was discouragingly small, but there was some in stock. The three of them raced down the corridor for the hold where the hlorg was.
It took them three hours of angry work to exhaust the supply. They whittled chunks off the hlorg, tossed them in pans of the deadly fluid. With each slice they stopped momentarily to watch it turn violet, then black, as it died. The hlorg, dwindling in size, sensed the attack and slapped frantically at their ankles, sending out angry plumes of wet jelly, but they ducked and dodged and whittled some more. The hlorg quivered and gurgled and wept pinkish goo all over the floor, but it grew smaller and weaker with every whack.
"Hrunta must have spotted it and come down here alone," Jenkins panted between slices. "Maybe he slipped, lost his footing, I don't know--"
They continued to work until the supply was exhausted. They had reduced the hlorg to a quarter its previous size. "Check the other labs, see if they have some more," said Stone.
"I already have," Bowman said. "They don't. This is it."
"But we haven't got it all killed. There's still--" He pointed to the thing quailing in the corner.
"I know. We're licked, that's all. There isn't any more of the stuff on the ship."
They stopped and looked at each other suddenly. Then Jenkins said: "Oh, yes there is."
There was silence. Bowman looked at Stone, and Stone looked at Bowman. They both looked at Jenkins. "Oh, no. Sorry. I decline." Stone shook his head slowly.
"But we have to! There's no other way. If the enzyme system is inactivated, it's just protoplasm--there's no physiological or biochemical reason--"
"You know what you can do with your physiology and biochemistry," Bowman said succinctly. "You can also count me out." He left them and the hatchway clanged after him.
"Wally?"
"Yeah."
"It'll be months before we get back to Hospital Earth. We know how we can hold it in check until we get there."
"Yeah."
"Well?"
Green Doctor Wally Stone sighed. "Greater love hath no man," he said wearily. "We'd better go tell Neelsen, I guess."
* * * * *
Black Doctor Turvold Neelsen's answer was a flat, unequivocal no. "It's monstrous and preposterous. I won't stand for it. Nobody will stand for it."
"But you have the proof in your own hands," Jenkins said. "You saw the specimen that the Green Doctor brought you."
Neelsen hunched back angrily. "I saw it."
"And your impression of it? As a pathologist?"
"I fail to see how my impression applies one way or the other--"
"Doctor, sometimes we have to face facts. Remember?"
"All right." Neelsen seemed to curl up into himself still further. "The specimen was stomach."
"Human stomach?"
"Human stomach."
"But the only human on this ship that doesn't have a stomach is Hrunta," said Jenkins.
"So the hlorg ate him."
"Most of him. Not quite all. It threw out the one part of him it couldn't eat. The part containing a substance that inactivated its enzyme system. Dilute hydrochloric acid, to be specific. We used the entire ship's supply, and cut the hlorg down to three-quarters size, but we need a continuous supply to keep it whittled down until we get home. And there's only one good, permanent, reliable source of dilute hydrochloric acid on board this ship--"
The Black Doctor's face was purple. "I said no," he choked. "My answer stands."
The Red Doctor sighed and turned to Green Doctor Stone. "All right, Wally," he said.
* * * * *
(From the files of the Medical Disciplinary Board, Hospital Earth, op. cit.)
I am certain that you can see from the foregoing that a reasonable effort was made by Green Doctor Stone and myself to put the plan in effect peaceably and with full approval of our commander. It was our conviction, however, that the emergency nature of the circumstances required that it be done with or without his approval. Our subsequent success in containing the hlorg to at least reasonable and manageable proportions should bear out the wisdom of our decision.
Actually, it has not been as bad as one might think. It has been necessary to confine the crew to their quarters, and to restrain the Black Doctor forcibly, but with liberal use of Happy-O we can occasionally convince ourselves that it is rare beefsteak, and the Green Doctor, our pro-tem cook has concocted several very tasty sauces, such as mushroom, onion, etc. We reduce the hlorg to half its size each day, and if thoroughly heated the chunks lie still on the plate for quite some time.
No physical ill effects have been noted, and the period of quarantine is recommended solely to allow the men an adequate period for psychological recovery.
I have only one further recommendation: that the work team from the Grey Service be recalled at once from their assignment on Mauki IV. The problem is decidedly not psychiatric, and it would be one of the tragedies of the ages if our excellent psychiatric service were to succeed in persuading the Maukivi out of their 'delusion'.
After all, Hospital Earth cannot afford to jeopardize a Contract--
(Signed) Samuel B. Jenkins, Physician Grade VI Red Service GPP Ship Lancet (Attached GSS Mercy pro tem)
* * *
Contents
DERELICT
By Alan E. Nourse
