“I couldn’t just leave him,” Eddie said. “And I figured we can fix his leg. . . .”
“But Eddie,” Malcolm said, shaking his head.
“So I shot him full of morphine from the first-aid kit, and brought him back. You see? The oxygen mask almost fits him.”
“Eddie,” Malcolm said, “this was the wrong thing to do.”
“Why? He’s okay. We just fix him and take him back.”
“But you’re interfering with the system,” Malcolm said.
The radio clicked. “This is extremely unwise,” Levine said, over the radio. “Extremely.”
“Thank you, Richard,” Thorne said.
“I am entirely opposed to bringing any animal back to the trailer.”
“Too late to worry about that now,” Sarah Harding said. She had moved forward alongside the baby, and began strapping cardiac leads to the animal’s chest; they heard the thump of the heartbeat. It was very fast, over a hundred and fifty beats a minute. “How much morphine did you give him?”
“Gee,” Eddie said. “I just . . . you know. The whole syringe.”
“What is that? Ten cc’s?”
“I think. Maybe twenty.”
Malcolm looked at Harding. “How long before it wears off?”
“I have no idea,” she said. “I’ve sedated lions and jackals in the field, when I tagged them. With those animals, there’s a rough correlation between dose and body weight. But with young animals, it’s unpredictable. Maybe a few minutes, maybe a few hours. And I don’t know a thing about baby tyrannosaurs. Basically, it’s a function of metabolism, and this one seems to be rapid, bird-like. The heart’s pumping very fast. All I can say is, let’s get him out of here as quickly as possible.”
Harding picked up the small ultrasound transducer and held it to the baby’s leg. She looked over her shoulder at the monitor. Kelly and Arby were blocking the view. “Please, give us a little room here,” she said, and they moved away. “We don’t have much time. Please.”
As they moved away, Sarah saw the green-and-white outlines of the leg and its bones. Surprisingly like a large bird, she thought. A vulture or a stork. She moved the transducer. “Okay . . . there’s the metatarsals . . . and there’s the tibia and fibula, the two bones of the lower leg. . . .”
Arby said, “Why are the bones different shades like that?” The legs had some dense white sections within paler-green outlines.
“Because it’s an infant,” Harding said. “His legs are still mostly cartilage, with very little calcified bone. I’d guess this baby probably can’t walk yet—at least, not very well. There. Look at the patella. . . . You can see the blood supply to the joint capsule. . . .”
“How come you know all this anatomy?” Kelly said.
“I have to. I spend a lot of time looking through the scat of predators,” she said. “Examining pieces of bones that are left behind, and figuring out which animals have been eaten. To do that, you have to know comparative anatomy very well.” She moved the transducer along the baby’s leg. “And my father was a vet.”
Malcolm looked up sharply. “Your father was a vet?”
“Yes. At the San Diego Zoo. He was a bird specialist. But I don’t see . . . Can you magnify this?”
Arby flicked a switch. The image doubled in size.
“Ah. Okay. All right. There it is. You see it?”
“No.”
“It’s mid-fibula. See it? A thin black line. That’s a fracture, just above the epiphysis.”
“That little black line there?” Arby said.
“That little black line means death for this infant,” Sarah said. “The fibula won’t heal straight, so the ankle joint can’t pivot when he stands on his hind feet. The baby won’t be able to run, and probably can’t even walk. It’ll be crippled, and a predator will pick it off before it gets more than a few weeks old.”
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.