"What the hell is going on here?" Jerry thought, with dismay. "Surgery? In the same room with cages full of animals? What about sanitation? What about infection? The doctors are maskless. The room is only passably clean—certainly not scoured with green soap, alcohol or live steam. And that repairman is standing beside the table scratching his stomach!"
Bewildered, yet drawn to watch with morbid fascination, Jerry ignored the pain that staring into the room brought to his eyes, and gave full attention to the proceedings.
They were—from a raccoon/pangolin's viewpoint—pretty ghastly. The men, muttering to each other as medics the universe over must while engaged in surgery, started snipping and plucking and sawing and clamping with lackadaisical facility upon the two bodies strapped to the table. One medic concentrated upon the man, the other upon the animal, while the anesthetist merely held the cone lightly upon the patient's face, and glanced now and then at dials upon the machine proper, as if for reassurance, or possibly to show that they were efficient and well-trained.
They did not trouble to anesthetize the animal.
As they shifted about in their work, Jerry got a better look at the patient. All along his chest and belly, the white fur was gone. From the edges of the empty region, Jerry could see that the fur had been scorched away. The surviving fur in the periphery was stunted and slightly carbonized. The "flesh" beneath that exposed region was smooth, excepting a few blistered spots near the center. It resembled thin, flexible green plastic, of the sort that seems to be translucent, but is actually transparent, the darkness of the color tending to make it seem opaque unless light could be placed directly behind it. Into this surface went the scalpels and clamps and pins of the medics, until they had a triangular flap lying back to expose the organs within.
Jerry, well-versed in all the metabolisms available to the scientists of Earth, was completely baffled by this one. None of the internal organs was fastened to anything.
The abdominal hollow of the creature was filled with a clear lemon-colored liquid. The organs just floated within the liquid. They were, Jerry noticed with amazement, not even juxtaposed with any sort of permanence. Even as the medic reached for them, they bobbed and moved about each other in the yellow fluid, as impermanent of locale as apples in a rainbarrel.
Then Jerry had it.
"They're colloidal!" he gasped within his mind. "A tough, flexible outer shell! The whole thing hollow from cranium to fingertip to toe, containing a liquid that acts as reagent, catalyst, suspensor and electrolyte for the mineral crystals, cell globules and chemical coagulates. These fur-faced creatures are nothing more than ambulant, intelligent hunks of protein! The whole setup's there. The lemon-colored fluid is the dispersion medium, and those 'organs' they're lifting out are the disperse-phase. But ... what do they need the raccoon/pangolin for?"