“What the blazes is wrong with you?” O’Mara roared against the din. The FROB was thoroughly covered by food compound so it couldn’t be
hungry. (
Now that the infant had seen him the volume and urgency of its cries increased. The external, bellows-like flap of muscle on the infant’s back-used for sound production only, the FROBs being non-breathers- continued swelling and deflating rapidly. O’Mara jammed the palms of his hands against his ears, an action which did no good at all, and yelled, “Shut up!”
He knew that the recently orphaned Hudlarian must still be feeling confused and frightened, that the mere process of feeding it could not possibly fulfill all of its emotional needs-he knew all this and felt a deep pity for the being. But these feelings were in some quiet, sane and civilized portion of his mind and divorced from all the pain and weariness and frightful onslaughts of sound currently torturing his body. He was really two people, and while one of him knew the reason for the noise and accepted it, the other-the purely physical O’Mara-reacted instinctively and viciously to stop it.
“Shut up! SHUT UP!” screamed O’Mara, and started swinging with his fists and feet.
Miraculously after about ten minutes of it, the Hudlarian stopped crying.
O’Mara returned to the couch shaking. For those ten minutes he had been in the grip of a murderous, uncontrollable rage. He had punched and kicked savagely until the pains from his hands and injured leg forced him to stop using those members, but he had gone on kicking and screeching invective with the only other weapons left to him, his good leg and tongue. The sheer viciousness of what he had done shocked and sickened him.
It was no good telling himself that the Hudlarian was tough and might not have felt the beating; the infant had stopped crying so he must have got through to it somehow. Admittedly Hudlarians were hard and tough, but this was a baby and babies had weak spots. Human babies, for instance, had a very soft spot on the top of their heads..
When O’Mara’s utterly exhausted body plunged into sleep his last coherent thought was that he was the dirtiest, lowest louse that had ever been born.
Sixteen hours later he awoke. It was a slow, natural process which brought him barely above the level of unconsciousness. He had a brief feeling of wonder at the fact that the infant was not responsible for waking him before he drifted back to sleep again. The next time he wakened was five hours later and to the sound of Waring coming through the airlock.
“Dr. P-Pelling asked me to bring this,” he said, tossing O’Mara a small book. “And I’m not doing you a favor, understand-it’s just that he said it was for the good of the youngster. How is it doing?”
“Sleeping,” said O’Mara.
Waring moistened his lips. “I’m-I’m supposed to check. C-C-Caxton says so.
“Ca-Ca-Caxton would,” mimicked O’Mara.
He watched the other silently as Waring’s face grew a deeper red. Waring was a thin young man, sensitive, not very strong, and the stuff of which heroes were made. On his arrival O’Mara had been overwhelmed with stories about this tractor-beam operator. There had been an accident during the fitting of a power pile and Waring had been trapped in a section which was inadequately shielded. But he had kept his head and, following instructions radioed to him from an engineer outside, had managed to avert a slow atomic explosion which nevertheless would have taken the lives of everyone in his section. He had done this while all the time fully convinced that the level of radiation in which he worked would, in a few hours time, certainly cause his death.
But the shielding had been more effective than had been thought and Waring did not die. The accident had left its mark on him, however, they told O’Mara. He had blackouts, he stuttered, his nervous system had been subtly affected, they said, and there were other things which O’Mara himself would see and was urged to ignore. Because Waring had saved all their lives and for that he deserved special treatment. That was why they made way for him wherever he went, let him win all fights, arguments and games of skill or chance, and generally kept him wrapped in a swathe of sentimental cottonwool.