Two Monitors passed him while he was on the way, both armed. Conway knew that he should feel his usual hostility toward them, also shock that they were armed inside a hospital, and he did, but he also wanted to slap their backs or even hug them: he desperately wanted to have people around, talking and exchanging ideas and impressions so that he would not feel so terribly alone. As they drew level with him Conway managed to get out a shaky “Hello.” It was the first time he had spoken to a Monitor in his life.
One of the Monitors smiled slightly, the other nodded. Both gave him odd looks over their shoulders as they passed because his teeth were chattering so much.
His intention of going to the Educator room had been clearly formed, but now it did not seem to be such a good idea. It was cold and dark there with all those machines and shaded lighting, and the only company might be O’Mara. Conway wanted to lose himself in a crowd, and the bigger the better. He thought of the nearby dining hall and turned toward it. Then at an intersection he saw a sign reading “Diet Kitchen, Wards 52 to 68, Species DBDG, DBLF & FGLI.” That made him remember how terribly cold he felt…
The Dietitians were too busy to notice him. Conway picked an oven which was fairly glowing with heat and lay down against it, letting the germ-killing ultraviolet which flooded the place bathe him and ignoring the charred smell given off by his light clothing. He felt warmer now, a little warmer, but the awful sense of being utterly and completely alone would not leave him. He was cut off, unloved and unwanted. He wished that he had never been born.
When a Monitor-one of the two he had recently passed whose curiosity had been aroused by Conway’s strange behavior-wearing a hastily borrowed heat suit belonging to one of the Cook-Dietitians got to him a few minutes later, the big, slow tears were running down Conway’s cheeks…
“You,” said a well-remembered voice, “are a very lucky and very stupid young man.
Conway opened his eyes to find that he was on the Erasure couch and that O’Mara and another Monitor were looking down at him. His back felt as though it had been cooked medium rare and his whole body stung as if with a bad dose of sunburn. O’Mara was glaring furiously at him, he spoke again.
“Lucky not to be seriously burned and blinded, and stupid because you forgot to inform me on one very important point, namely that this was your first experience with the Educator. .
O’Mara’s tone became faintly self-accusatory at this point, but only faintly. He went onto say that had he been thus informed he would have given Conway a hypno-treatment which would have enabled the doctor to differentiate between his own needs and those of the Telfi sharing his mind. He only realized that Conway was a first-timer when he filed the thumb-printed slip, and dammit how was he to know who was new and who wasn’t in a place this size! And anyway, if Conway had thought more of his job and less of the fact that a Monitor was giving him the tape, this would never have happened.
Conway, O’Mara continued bitingly, appeared to be a self-righteous bigot who made no pretense at hiding his feelings of defilement at the touch of an uncivilized brute of a Monitor. How a person intelligent enough to gain appointment to this hospital could also hold those sort of feelings was beyond O’Mara’s understanding.
Conway felt his face burning. It had been stupid of him to forget to tell the psychologist that he was a first-timer. O’Mara could easily bring charges of personal negligence against him-a charge almost as serious as carelessness with a patient in a multi-environment hospital-and have Conway kicked out. But that possibility did not weigh too heavily with him at the moment, terrible though it was. What got him was the fact that he was being told off by a Monitor, and before another Monitor!
The man who must have carried him here was gazing down at him, a look of half-humorous concern in his steady brown eyes. Conway found that harder to take even than O’Mara’s abusiveness. How dare a Monitor feel sorry for him!