“I will leave you now,” it ended, “before I use language not befitting a ship’s officer.”
The sickbay door hissed shut behind it and the clicking sound of its feet diminished as it moved down the corridor. Joan looked at Kledenth’s agitated fur and then at its face.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “All I can do is talk to you, but I won’t know what to say because I don’t know what I’m talking about. Lieutenant, as an other-species psychologist can you think of anything appropriate to say or do?”
O’Mara was walking quickly around the room, staring through transparent doors into the medicine and instrument cabinets. A few of them were locked, but the fastenings were less than robust and were easy to force open. He didn’t answer until he had rejoined them.
“I have a lot to say and more to do,” he replied briskly, “but I’ll need the agreement and help of both of you. First I want you to pay close attention to what I’m saying, and while I’m talking I want you” – he looked intently at Joan – “to run that scanner over the affected area so I can explain what you will be seeing….”
O’Mara described a condition that was encountered rarely among Kelgians, and then usually in the very young, and a procedure to relieve it that was simple, radical, and not without risk The alternative to not having the operation was progressive and irreversible paralysis of the medial body fur. It was his own voice he was using, but the calm authority and certainty of his manner was based on the specialist knowledge and clinical experience of the donor of his mind tape. As he finished his step-by-step description of the indicated procedure, he knew from the way Kledenth’s fur was reacting and Joan was looking at him that there was a yawning credibility gap opening between them. Even before she spoke he knew that he would have to end by telling them the truth. All of it.
“Lieutenant,” she said, “you certainly sound as if you know what you’re talking about, but how do you know? This, as I’ve told you before, isn’t the kind of stuff you picked up in a first-aid lecture.”
“You don’t know what this means, O’Mara,” Kledenth said, its fur rising in stiff, agitated spikes, “because you are not a Kelgian.”
“Believe me, I do know,” said O’Mara. He took a few seconds to remind himself of how stupid he was being, because if either of them told anyone else of what he was about to say and do, he would be out of Sector General and the Monitor Corps within days and probably find himself sentenced to an indefinite stay in one of the Federation’s psychiatric-adjustment facilities. But that was a risk that neither he nor his mind partner considered important compared with the fate that might lie ahead for Kledenth. He took a deep breath and began to speak.
He told them briefly about his work in Sector General and, without mentioning Thornnastor or the tape donor by name, the psychological investigation that had led to him Impressing himself with the Marrasarah tape, which, although it was completely against regulations, he still carried. The memory-transfer technique was not widely known, he explained, because single-species, planet-based hospitals had no interest in it unless one of their senior staff became so eminent in the field that it was invited by the Galactic Medical Council to be a mind donor.
“… It is the complete memories and experience of just such a person that I carry in my mind now,” O’Mara went on. “In its time it was reputed to be the most able specialist in thoracic surgery on Kelgia. That is why you have to trust and accept everything I tell you.”
Joan was staring at him intently, her expression reflecting a strange mixture of wonder, excitement, and concern, while Kledenth’s fur was a mass of silvery spikes. It was the Kelgian who spoke first.
“So your mind is partly Kelgian,” it said. “I wondered why you talked straight like one of us. But if half my fur is going to lose mobility like you say, what are you going to do about it?”