‘ ‘I will be pleased to help you in whatever way I can,” Lioren said, controlling his excitement and the volume of his voice with difficulty. “A—a Groalterri, here in the hospital? I have never seen one, and had doubts about their existence . . . Thank you.”
“Lioren, you should take more time to consider,” the Nallajim said. “As with Mannen, the process of recollection will be distressing for you. But it seems to me that you accept this distress willingly, as a just punishment that you must not avoid. I think this is wrong and unnecessary. At the same time I must accept these feelings, and use you and them as I would any other surgical tool, for the good of my patient. Nevertheless, I am sorry for inflicting this added punishment on you.”
There was a little of the psychologist in every being, Lioren thought, and tried to change the subject. “May I also continue my visits to Doctor Mannen?”
“As often as you wish,” Seldal replied.
“And discuss this new case with it?” Lioren asked.
“Could I stop you?” Seldal asked in return. “I will not discuss the case further lest my ideas influence your own. The Groalterri patient’s medical file will be opened to you, including what little information there is on the species’ home world.”
It was very strange, Lioren thought as he left the Nallajim lounge, that the Senior Physician should be using him as a tool in the treatment of a difficult patient while he was using the other’s patients as tools in his investigation of Seldal itself—not that he was making much progress with that.
He called briefly on Mannen to tell it about this new development and give its too-empty mind something more to think about before returning to the department. Chief Psychologist O’Mara was still absent, and Lieutenant Braithwaite and Cha Thrat were behaving as if they were about to perform a slightly premature Rite for the Dead over him. Lioren told them that he was not in any trouble, that Senior Physician Seldal had asked him for a favor which he was, of course, granting, and as a result of which he would have to copy some material for later study in his quarters.
“The Groalterri patient!” Braithwaite said suddenly, and Lioren turned to see that Cha Thrat and the lieutenant were standing behind him reading his display. “We aren’t supposed to know that it is even in the hospital, and now you’re involved with it. What is Major O’Mara going to think about this?”
Lioren decided that it was what Earth-humans called a rhetorical question and continued with his work.
Chapter 13
SlNCE its formation by the original four star-traveling cultures of Traltha, Orligia, Nidia, and Earth, who had formed as its executive and law-enforcement arm the multispecies Monitor Corps, the Galactic Federation had expanded to include the members of sixty-five intelligent species and in population and area of influence had begun to live up to its original and somewhat grandiose name. But not all of the planetary cultures discovered by the Corps survey vessels were opened to full contact, because a few of them would not benefit from it.
These were the worlds whose technical and philosophical development were such that the sudden appearance among them of great ships from the sky, and the strange, all-powerful beings armed with wondrous devices that they contained, would have given the emerging cultures such a racial inferiority complex that their potential for future development would have been seriously inhibited. And there was one world on which the decision for making full contact was not the Galactic Federation’s to make.
As befitted a culture that had been old and wise when the natives of Earth and Orligia and Traltha had still been wriggling through their primeval slime, the Groalterri had been very diplomatic about it. But they had let it be known without ambiguity that they would not tolerate the Federation’s presence in their adult domain nor allow the maturity and delicacy of their thinking to be upset by a horde of chattering, moronic, other-species children. Both individually and as a race the Groalterri carried enough philosophical and physiological weight to make it so.