“No!” Khone said urgently. “There is no danger! It is a healer, a friend’But the irregular hissing and whistling grew louder, and Conway was aware that the circle of onlookers, no longer distant, had joined in. He could scarcely hear himself think. Khone was stumbling around the casualty, sometimes approaching to within a few inches, then moving away again, as if it was performing an intricate ritual dance.
“Yes,” Conway said reassuringly, “I’m not an enemy. I pulled you out.”
“You stupid, stupid healer!” Khone said, sounding angry as well as personal. “You ignorant off-worlder! Go away! …
What happened then was one of the strangest sights Conway had ever witnessed, and at Sector General he had seen many of those. The casualty rolled and jerked itself to its feet, still emitting the undulating whistling noises. Khone had begun to make the same sound, and the long, stiff body hair on both beings was standing out straight, so that the plaid effect caused by the different colors lying at right angles to each other was lost. Suddenly Khone and the casualty touched and were instantly welded or, more accurately, tightly woven together where they had made contact.
The stiff hairs covering their sides had insinuated into and through each other, like the warp and weft of an old-time woven rug, and it was plain that no outside agency would be able to separate them without removing the hair of both creatures and probably the underlying tegument as well.
“Let’s get out of here, Doctor,” Wainright said from the top of the groundcar, pointing at the Gogleskans who were closing in from all sides.
Conway hesitated, watching a third FOKT join itself in the same incredible fashion to Khone and the casualty. The long spikes whose purpose he had not known were projecting stiffly from the cranium of every Gogleskan, and there was a bright yellow secretion oozing from the tips. As he climbed into the vehicle, one of the spikes tore the fabric of his coveralls, but without penetrating the underlying clothing or skin.
While the Lieutenant moved the vehicle to higher ground for a better view of what was going on, Conway used his analyzer on the traces of yellow secretion which had been left along the edges of the tear in his suit. He was able to calculate that the contents of one of those stings introduced directly into the bloodstream would be instantly disabling, and that three or more of them would be fatal.
The Gogleskans were joining themselves into a group-entity which was growing larger by the minute. Individual FOKTs were hurrying from nearby buildings, moored ships, and even from the surrounding trees to add themselves to this great, mobile, spiky carpet which crawled around large buildings and over small ones as if it did not know or care what it was doing. In its wake it left a trail of smashed equipment, vehicles, dead animals, and even one capsized ship. The vessel had been tied up, and when the periphery of the group-entity has stumbled on board it had flipped onto its side, smashing the masts and superstructure against the jetty.
But the Gogleskans who had fallen into the water did not seem to be inconvenienced, Conway saw, and the movement of the landbased constituents of the group-entity pulled them out again within a few minutes.
“They’re not blind,” Conway said, aghast at the wholesale destruction. He stood on his bucket seat to get a better view and went on. “There are enough unobscured eyes around the periphery for them to see where they’re going, but they seem to have great difficulty making up their mind. Oh, man, they’re fairly wrecking that settlement. Can you put up the flyer and get me a detailed, highlevel record of this?”
“Can do,” the Lieutenant said. He spoke briefly into his communicator, then went on. “It isn’t making straight for us, Doctor, but it’s trying to get nearer. We’d better change position.”
“No, wait,” Conway said, gripping the edge of the open canopy and leaning out, the better to see the edge of the group-entity which had stumbled to within six meters’ distance. Dozens of eyes regarded him coldly, and the long, yellow-tipped stings were like a thinly stubbled hayfield. “They are hostile, yet Khone itself was friendly. Why?”
His voice was almost drowned by the rushing, whistling sound made by the group, a sound which their translators did not register. But somewhere in that unintelligible mush there was a whisper of intelligence trying to fight its way out, the voice of the Gogleskan healer.
“Go away,” it said. “Go away.”
Conway had to drop quickly into his seat before Wainright closed the canopy on him and they moved away. Angrily, the Lieutenant said, “You can’t do anything!”
CHAPTER 6
There was no need for the memory-enhancing medication I which Conway had been taking since leaving Sector General to recall the incident-it was there in his mind, complete in every detail. And there was no arguing against the evidence, no escaping the damning conclusion that he alone was responsible for the whole sorry mess.
The vision tapes from the flyer had shown an immediate decrease in the destructive activity of the rampaging Gogleskans as soon as the groundcar carrying Wainright and Conway had left the scene. And within an hour the group-entity had fragmented into its individual members, who had stood immobile, widely separated from each other and giving the impression that they were suffering from extreme exhaustion.
He had gone over the visual material again and again, together with his scanner’s playback of the self-examination by Khone and the later material on the FOKT whose rescue had precipitated the fusion of all the Gogleskans in the area. He tried to find a clue, a mere indication, the most tenuous of hints which would explain the reason for the FOKTs’ incredible reaction to his touching one of their number, but without success.
At one stage the thought came that he was here to rest, to clear his mind so that he could make important decisions regarding his future. The Gogleskan situation was a nonurgent problem which, according to O’Mara, he could think about or ignore. But he could not ignore it, because, apart from making it fractionally worse, he had been presented with a puzzle so alien that even his long experience of extraterrestrial behavior and thought processes at the hospital was not of much help.
As an individual, Khone had been so normal.
Irritably he dropped into his bunk, still holding his scanner at eye level and trying to squeeze some meaning out of the FOKT recordings. In theory it was impossible to feel discomfort in a bunk with gravity controls set to a tiny fraction of one Earth-C, but Conway wriggled and tossed and managed to feel very uncomfortable indeed.
He was able to trace the shallow roots of the four FOKT stings, which at the time Khone had been examining itself had been lying flat against the upper cranium and partially concealed by the surrounding hair, and chart the positions of the fine ducts which connected the spikes to the poison sac which supplied them. There was also a nerve linkage between the base of the brain and the muscles for erecting the stings and for compressing the reservoir of venom, but he had no idea of the kind of stimulus which would trigger this activity. Neither had he any ideas regarding the function of the long, silvery strands which lay among the coarser cranial hair.
His first thought, that they were simply an indication of advancing age, had to be revised when closer study showed that the follicle structure was completely unlike that of the surrounding hair and that they, like the stings, had underlying muscle and nerve connections which gave them the capability of independent movement. Unlike the stings, they were much larger, finer, and more flexible.
Unfortunately he could not trace the subdermal nerve connections, if such were present, because his scanner had not been set for such fine work. His intention had been simply to impress the Cogleskan healer by showing it pictures of its own major organs operating, and no amount of magnification during playback could bring up details which were not already there.