Sector General Omnibus 2 - Alien Emergencies (36 page)

Major O’Mara indicated a piece of furniture designed for the comfort of a DBLF and said sourly, “No doubt you have been too busy in your professional capacity to contact me, Doctor, so don’t waste time apologizing. Tell me about Prilicla.”

Conway insinuated himself carefully into the Kelgian chair and began describing the Cinrusskin’s condition, from the symptoms at onset to their intensification to the degree where complete sedation was indicated, and the relevant circumstance pertaining at the time. While he was speaking, the Chief Psychologist’s craggy features were still and his eyes, which opened into a mind so keenly analytical that it gave O’Mara what amounted to a telepathic faculty, were likewise unreadable.

As Chief Psychologist of the Federation’s largest multienvironment hospital, he was responsible for the mental well-being of a staff of several thousand entities belonging to more than sixty different species. Even though his Monitor Corps rank of Major did not place him high in the hospital’s Service chain of command, and anyway had been given for purely administrative reasons, there was no clear limit to O’Mara’s authority. To him the medical staff were patients, too, regardless of seniority, and an important part of his job was to ensure that the right doctor was assigned to each of the weird and often wonderful variety of patients who turned up at the hospital, and that there was no xenophobic complications on either side.

He was also responsible for the hospital’s medical elite, the Diagnosticians. According to O’Mara himself, however, the real reason for the high level of mental stability among the diverse and often touchy medical staff was that they were all too frightened of him to risk his displeasure by going mad.

O’Mara watched him closely until Conway had finished, then he said, “A clear, concise, and apparently accurate report, Doctor, but you are a close friend of the patient. There is the possibility of clouded judgment, exaggeration. You are not a psychologist but an e-t physician and surgeon who has apparently already decided that the case is one which should be treated by my department. You appreciate my difficulty? Please describe for me your feelings during this mission from the rescue until now. But first, are
you
feeling all right?”

All that Conway could feel just then was his blood pressure rising.

“Be as objective as possible,” O’Mara added.

Conway took a deep breath and let it out again slowly through his nose. “After our very fast response to the distress signal there was a general feeling of disappointment at the rescue of just one survivor, a survivor who was barely alive. But you’re on the wrong track, Major. The feeling was shared by everyone on the ship, I believe, but it was not strong enough to explain the Cinrusskin’s hypersensitivity. Prilicla was picking up emotional radiation of distressing intensity from crew members stationed at the other end of the ship, a distance at which emoting would normally be barely detectable. And I am given neither to maudlin sentimentality nor exaggeration of symptoms. Right at this moment I feel the way I usually do in this blasted office and that is—”

“Objectively, remember,” O’Mara said dryly.

“I was not trying to do your diagnostic work for you,” Conway went on, bringing his voice back to a conversational level, “but the indications are that there
is
a psychological problem. The result, perhaps, of an as yet unidentified disease, or organic malfunction or an imbalance in the endocrine system. But a purely psychological reason for the condition is also a possibility which—”

“Anything is
possible
, Doctor,” O’Mara broke in impatiently. “Be specific. What are you going to do about your friend, and what exactly do you want me to do about it?”

“Two things,” Conway said. “I want you to check on Prilicla’s condition yourself—”

“Which you know I will do anyway,” O’Mara said.

“—and give me the GLNO physiology tape,” he went on, “so that I can confirm or eliminate the nonpsychological reasons for the trouble.”

For a moment O’Mara was silent. His face remained as expressionless as a lump of basalt, but the eyes showed concern. “You’ve carried Educator tapes before now and know what to expect. But the GLNO tape is…different. You will feel like a very unhappy Cinrusskin indeed. You are no Diagnostician, Conway—at least, not yet. Better think about it.”

The physiology tapes, Conway knew from personal experience,
fell somewhere between the categories of mixed blessing and necessary evil. While skill in e-t surgery came with aptitude, training, and experience, no single being could hope to hold in its brain the vast quantity of physiological data needed for the treatment of the variety of patients encountered in a hospital like Sector General. The incredible mass of clinical and anatomical information needed to take care of them had therefore to be furnished, usually on a temporary basis, by means of the Educator tapes, which were the brain recordings of the great medical specialists belonging to the species concerned. If an Earth-human doctor had to treat a Kelgian patient, he took one of the Kelgian physiology tapes until treatment was completed, after which he had it erased. But for the medic concerned, whether the tape was being carried for as long as it took to perform an other-species operation or for a teaching project lasting several months, the experience was not a pleasant one.

The only good thing about it from the medic’s point of view was that he was much better off than one of the Diagnosticians.

They were the hospital’s elite. A Diagnostician was one of those rare entities whose mind had proved itself stable enough to retain up to ten physiology tapes simultaneously. To their data-crammed minds was given the work of original research in xenological medicine and the diagnosis and treatment of disease and injury in hitherto unknown life-forms. There was a saying current in the hospital, reputed to have originated with O’Mara himself, that anyone sane enough to be a Diagnostician was mad.

For it was not only physiological data which the tapes imparted; the complete memory and personality of the entity who had possessed that knowledge was impressed on the receiving mind as well. In effect, a Diagnostician subjected himself or itself voluntarily to a form of multiple schizophrenia, with the alien personalities sharing its mind so utterly
different
that in many cases they did not have even a system of logic in common. And all too frequently the foremost medical authorities of a planet, despite their eminence in the field of healing, were very bad-tempered, aggressive, and unpleasant people indeed.

Such would not be the case with the GLNO tape, Conway knew, because Cinrusskins were the most timid, friendly, and likable beings imaginable.

“I’ve thought about it,” Conway said.

O’Mara nodded and spoke into his desk set. “Carrington? Senior Physician Conway is approved for the GLNO tape, with compulsory postimpression sedation of one hour. I’ll be in Emergency Admissions on Level One Six Three—” he grinned suddenly at Conway “—trying not to tell the medics their business.”

Conway woke to see a large, pink balloon of a face hanging over him. Instinctively he tried to scramble up the wall beside his couch in case the enormous, heavily muscled body supporting the face fell and crushed the life out of him. Then suddenly there was a mental shift in perspective as the features registered concern and withdrew and the slim, Earth-human body in Monitor Corps green straightened up.

Lieutenant Carrington, one of O’Mara’s assistants, said, “Easy, Doctor. Sit up slowly, then stand. Concentrate on putting your two feet onto the floor and don’t worry because they aren’t a Cinrusskin’s six.”

He made good time back to 163 in spite of having to walk around a large number of beings who were much smaller than himself just because the Cinrusskin component of his mind insisted that they were big and dangerous. From Murchison he learned that O’Mara was in Prilicla’s ward, having first called in to the OR to discuss the EGCL’s basic physiology and probable environmental and evolutionary influence with Thornnastor and Edanelt, both of whom had been too busy to speak to him.

They would not speak to Conway, either, and he could see why. The operation on the EGCL had become an emergency with an unknown but probably extremely short time limit.

When the splinters of depressed carapace had been removed from the brain over an hour earlier, Murchison explained quietly between rumbled instructions from Thornnastor, there had been a sudden and surprising deterioration in the EGCL’s condition. The change had been detected by Prilicla who, because of its condition, had been excluded from any part of the operation. But the Cinrusskin had continued to act like a doctor by making use of its abnormally heightened emotion-detection faculty. Prilicla had pulled
rank to send Ward Seven’s duty nurse to the operating theater with its empathic findings and a diffident suggestion that if they were to relay the operational proceedings to Seven’s viewscreen, it would be able to assist them.

The cause of the deterioration was a number of large blood vessels in the cerebral area which had ruptured when the pressure from the depressed fracture had been removed. The two surgeons had been forced to accede to Prilicla’s request because, without the empath’s monitoring of the patient’s level of consciousness, they had no way of knowing whether the delicate, dangerous, and perforce hurried repair work in the cerebral area was having a good or bad effect—if any.

“Prognosis?” Conway murmured. But before Murchison could reply, one of Thornnastor’s eyes curled backward over its head to glare down at him.

“If this patient does not succumb to a massive cerebral hemorrhage within the next thirty minutes,” the Diagnostician said crossly, “it is probable that it will perish, in time, from the degenerative diseases associated with extreme old age. Now stop distracting my assistant, Conway, and tend to your own patient.”

On the way to Seven Conway wondered briefly how the empath’s emotion sensitivity could detect the unconscious level of emoting of the EGCL without the signals beings swamped by the emotional radiation of dozens of fully conscious entities in the area. Maybe Prilicla’s recent hypersensitivity was responsible, but there was a niggling doubt at the back of his mind which suggested that there was another reason.

O’Mara was still in the ward, steadying himself in the close to zero-gravity conditions with a hand on an equipment rack while he and Prilicla watched the scene in the operating theater.

“Conway, stop that!” O’Mara said sharply.

He had tried not to react when he had seen the empath’s condition. But half his mind belonged to a Cinrusskin, a member of a species acknowledged to be the most sensitive and sympathetic intelligent life-form known to the Federation who was regarding a brother in extreme distress while the Earth-human half was feeling for a friend in the same condition, and it was difficult to be cool and clinical for both of them.

“I’m sorry,” he said inadequately.

“I know you are, friend Conway,” Prilicla said, turning toward him. “You should not have taken that tape.”

“He was warned,” O’Mara said gruffly, but his expression showed concern.

Conway was a member of an empathic race. All the memories and experience of his GLNO life were those of a normally healthy and happy empath, but now he was no longer an empath. He could see, hear, and touch Prilicla, but the faculty was missing which enabled him to share the other’s emotions and which subtly colored every word, gesture, and expression so that for two Cinrusskins to be within visual range was unalloyed pleasure for both. He could remember experiencing empathic contact, remember having the ability all his life, but now he was little more than a deaf-mute. What he was feeling from Prilicla so strongly was a product of his imagination: It was sympathy, not empathy.

His human brain did not possess the empathic faculty, and it was not bestowed by filling his mind with memories of having had it. But there were other memories as well, covering a lifetime’s experience of Cinrusskin clinical physiology, and these he could use.

“If you don’t mind, Doctor Prilicla,” Conway said with cool formality, “I would like to examine you.”

“Of course, friend Conway.” Prilicla’s uncontrollable shaking had diminished to a steady, continuous trembling, an indication that Conway’s emotional radiation was under control. “There are more symptoms, Doctor, which are causing severe discomfort.”

“I can see that,” Conway said as he gently moved aside one of the incredibly fragile wings to place his scanner against the empath’s thorax. “Describe them, please.”

In the two hours since Conway had last seen it, Prilicla had changed in ways which were individually subtle but cumulatively marked. There was a strange lack of animation and concentration in the large, triple-lidded eyes; the delicate structure which supported the wing membranes had softened and warped so that the translucent and iridescent membrane had fallen into unsightly folds and wrinkles; its four tiny, wonderfully precise manipulators, which should one day make it one of the finest surgeons in the hospital, were quivering in spite of being gripped tightly together, and the
overall aspect was of a GLNO who was old and grievously ill.