He had also been advised to meet as many different entities as possible and try to gain mutual understanding, if not their friendship. Finally he had been told that if he should get into trouble through ignorance or any other reason, he should contact either of two Earth-human beings who were called O’Mara and Bryson, depending on the nature of his trouble, though a qualified being of any species would, of course, help him on request.
Immediately afterward he had met the Surgeon-in-Charge of the wards to which he had been posted, a very able Earth-human called Mannon. Dr. Mannon was not yet a Diagnostician, though he was trying hard, and was therefore still quite human for long periods during the day. He was the proud possessor of a small dog which stuck so close to him that visiting extra-terrestrials were inclined to assume a symbolic relationship. Conway liked Dr. Mannon a lot, but now he was beginning to realize that his superior was the only being of his own species toward whom he had any feeling of friendship.
That was a bit strange, surely. It made Conway begin to wonder about himself.
After that reassuring pep-talk Conway had thought he was all set- especially when he found how easy it was to make friends with the e-t members of the Staff. He had not warmed to his human colleagues- with the one exception-because of their tendency to be flippant or cynical regarding the very important and worthwhile work he, and they, were doing. But the idea of friction developing was laughable.
That was before today, though, when O’Mara had made him feel small and stupid, accused him of bigotry and intolerance, and generally cut his ego to pieces. This, quite definitely, was friction developing, and if such treatment at the hands of Monitors continued Conway knew that he would be driven to leave. He was a civilized and ethical human being-why were the Monitors in a position to tell him off? Conway just could not understand it at all. Two things he did know, however; he wanted to remain at the hospital, and to do that he needed help.
IV
The name “Bryson” popped into his mind suddenly, one of the names he had been given should he get into trouble. O’Mara, the other name, was out, but this Bryson now…
Conway had never met anyone with that name, but by asking a passing Tralthan he received directions for finding him. He got only as far as the door, which bore the legend, “Captain Bryson, Monitor Corps, Chaplain,” then he turned angrily away. Another Monitor! There was just one person left who might help him: Dr. Mannon. He should have tried him first.
But his superior, when Conway ran him down, was sealed in the LSVO theater where he was assisting a Tralthan Surgeon-Diagnostician in a very tricky piece of work. He went up to the observation gallery to wait until Mannon had finished.
The LSVO came from a planet of dense atmosphere and negligible gravity. It was a winged life-form of extreme fragility, which necessitated the theater being at almost zero gravity and the surgeons strapped to their position around the table. The little OTSB who lived in symbiosis with the elephantine Tralthan was not strapped down, but held securely above the operative field by one of its host’s secondary tentacles-the OTSB life-form, Conway knew, could not lose physical contact with its host for more than a few minutes without suffering severe mental damage. Interested despite his own troubles, he began to concentrate on what they were doing.
A section of the patient’s digestive tract had been bared, revealing a spongy, bluish growth adhering to it. Without the LSVO physiology tape Conway could not tell whether the patient’s condition was serious or not, but the operation was certainly a technically difficult one. He could tell by the way Mannon hunched forward over it and by the tightly-coiled tentacles of the Tralthan not then in use. As was normal, the little OTSB with its cluster of wire-thin, eye- and sucker-tipped tentacles was doing the fine, exploratory work-sending infinitely detailed visual information of the field to its giant host, and receiving back instructions based on that data. The Tralthan and Dr. Mannon attended to the relatively crude work of clamping, tying-off and swabbing out.