He had to see a doctor.
It would have to be a friendly, approachable, closemouthed doctor, he decided, who was neither a Tralthan nor a Melfan but who knew a lot about the behavior of other-species staff under stress.
CHAPTER 12
Senior Tutor Mannen was an Earth-human male DBDG whose age was indeterminate because his wrinkled, balding scalp was completely at odds with the fresh, youthful features visible from his eyebrows down. On the desk before him lay a neat pile of opened lecture folders and tapes, and frolicking around his feet there was a small, brown and white and very well house-trained puppy. The puppy went everywhere with him, except into OR, and there was a rumor, never officially denied by Mannen himself, that they slept together. The senior tutor looked up from his work, pointed to a chair, inclined his head in recognition, and waited.
O’Mara hesitated, then said, “Is your pup settling in okay, Doctor?”
Mannen nodded. “If you’re sucking up to me through my dog,” he said, grinning, “you must want a favor, right? You were lucky to catch me between lectures. What can I do for you…” He looked at his watch. “… during the next nine and a half minutes?”
“These days,” said O’Mara sadly, “everybody is a psychologist. Sir, it’s just that I need a little physiological or perhaps medical information on the Tralthan and Melfan life-forms. And, in confidence, your advice on how best to use it. My problem is this…”
Quickly he described the serious interpersonal situation that was developing on Level One-Eleven, including the close to xenophobic reactions of the innocent-bystander life-forms. Suddenly Mannen held up one hand and with the other began tapping keys on his communicator.
“This is going to take more than nine minutes,” he said briskly. “Lecture Room Eighteen? I will be unavoidably delayed. Tell trainee Yursedth to take over the class until I arrive. Off.” To O’Mara he went on wryly, “The trouble with this place is that it accepts only the highest grade of applicants. Yursedth thinks it knows more about Kelgian obstetrics than I do, and it could well be right. Taking over the class for a while and making the senior tutor feel redundant is something it will enjoy, although its classmates certainly won’t. But enough of my troubles. Let us move to your problem.”
Mannen paused and a rueful expression passed briefly over his face as he went on, “As yet nobody has fallen asleep during lectures. A few of the normally boisterous ones have been quieter than usual but mistakenly, I now realize, I thought that they were paying more attention, although I couldn’t understand why the marks of these attentive ones were hitting the deck. So you see, the problem is mine as well as yours in that it can seriously affect future student training. Do you have a solution in mind for it, Lieutenant?”
O’Mara shook his head, then nodded uncertainly. He said, “Sir, only if there is a way to treat snoring, psychologically, medically, or surgically.”
“Snoring, and its other-species equivalents, afflicts around five percent of the galaxy’s sapient life-forms,” said Mannen. “It is in no way an abnormal or a life-threatening condition, except possibly when the sound drives a sleep-deprived partner to acts of physical violence. It isn’t due to a psychological disturbance; most snorers are quite sane, so that it cannot, so far as I know, be treated with psychotherapy. Every planet has its traditional cures, none of which are effective, or those which do work only by waking the person when he, she, or it begins snoring, which means the subject is deprived of sleep. That it not what we want here.”
“Regarding the mechanics of snoring,” Mannen went on, slipping into his lecturing mode, “in Earth-humans it is due to the palate relaxing and dropping during unconsciousness while lying on the back. With Tralthans, who do everything including sleep on their feet, there is a similar relaxation of the muscles which intermittently short-circuits the expelled air from the four breathing passages into the airway used for speech; they call it ‘night-talking without words.’ The physiological cause of the Melfan sleep rattle is much more complex and very interesting. Sorry, Lieutenant, your only interest here is in stopping the condition, not studying how it works. Has anything I’ve said been helpful?”
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