As the weeks and months passed into years, O’Mara grew accustomed to his new rank, mostly by completely ignoring it and treating the higher and lower ranks as if they were the same. He saved the increased salary and duly took all of the leave to which a major was entitled, although sometimes he returned saddened and angry rather than relaxed. But Iron Man O’Mara, as rumor had it, was capable of suffering nothing less than metal fatigue, so he was not supposed to have emotional problems. If anyone out of polite curiosity asked where he had been or whether or not he had enjoyed himself there, he told them nothing in such a way that they never asked him again.
But there were times when he could not be impolite even with those people he admired and thought of as the closest thing he had to friends. Thornnastor – who had been appointed diagnostician-in-charge of Pathology, although it preferred to keep its subjects alive and advise on their cure rather than dissect them postmortem – had many problems. They were not its own because, in spite of its mind carrying six different other-species Educator tapes, it was the most intelligent and emotionally stable entity in the hospital. But it had to discuss the emotional upsets, inter-staff conflicts, and possible xenophobic reactions within its department’s widening sphere of influence, as well as requesting psychiatric support with patients whose conditions included a psychological component. And there was Senior Tutor Mannen (whose other-species students insisted that he and his dog had a symbiotic relationship), who worried continually about the mental health and professional future of his charges. Mannen was especially concerned, as was O’Mara himself, about a male and a female Earth-human, both of whom were exemplary students with bright futures in other-species medicine ahead of them. It was small consolation that the trouble they might cause themselves, their colleagues, and the succession of less brilliant superiors they would encounter on their climb to medical eminence would not be their own fault.
Mannen did not want him to tinker with two such strong, healthy, and well-integrated minds even if he’d had the right to do so, and when, at the senior tutor’s insistence, O’Mara interviewed them in depth, neither did he. Some personalities were better left as they were. But the situation with them would have to be closely monitored and, indirectly, controlled.
He had few ethical qualms about exerting influence of a non-psychological type on them through the deliberate manipulation of their duty schedules. It was, after all, for their own good.
With the best will in the world – and he would admit only to himself that he liked and admired both of them very much – he would have to see to it that for the time being trainees Murchison and Conway were kept apart.
CHAPTER 26
Murchison had created a precedent and delighted Senior Tutor Mannen by being appointed charge nurse of Ward Thirty-Nine, the mixed Melfan, Kelgian, and Nidian surgical recovery unit, immediately upon graduation from trainee status. There she asked nothing of her nursing staff that she wasn’t able and willing to do herself, and she led her team politely, firmly, and with absolute fairness from in front. On O’Mara’s recommendation, delivered via Mannen, she was given increased responsibility for certain problem patients who were not responding to orthodox lines of treatment. As a result, her ability to observe, analyze, synthesize, and diagnose from the often sparse available data brought her work, as O’Mara knew it would, to the attention of Thornnastor, who said that she was performing original work of a quality not expected of a member of the nursing staff and, if she was willing, her talents could be more gainfully employed in its own department as a junior pathologist. Murchison, as her psych file said she would, was happy to transfer up and across the ladder of promotion, because original xenobiological research was the kind of work she had always wanted to do.
She allowed herself no distractions because, she had told Mannen pleasantly but firmly, she had no time to waste on socializing with its risk of her becoming emotionally involved with a male member of her species. This complete dedication to her career pleased the senior tutor very much, but not her Earth-human male colleagues, who were fond of admitting to everyone including O’Mara that, so far as they were concerned, she was the only person in the hospital that they found impossible to regard with anything resembling clinical detachment. Every one of them had attempted vainly to conquer and exploit what they considered to be one of the hospital’s most desirable natural resources, only to be rejected firmly and with such good humor that their feelings of desire never turned to dislike.