Conway sighed. He could not help remembering his own first weeks at Sector General and the horrible, nightmare creatures which had haunted his sleep. What had made the nightmares particularly horrifying had been the fact that they were not figments of his imagination but actual, physical realities which in many cases were only a few bullcheads away.
He had never fled from any of these nightmares who had later become his teachers, colleagues and eventually friends. But to be honest with himself this was not due so much to intestinal fortitude as the fact that extreme fear had a tendency to paralyze Conway rather than to make him run away.
“I think you may need psychiatric assistance, Doctor,” he told the Creppelian gently, “and the hospital’s Chief Psychologist will help you. But I would advise you not to consult him at once. Spend a week or so trying to adapt to the situation before going to him. You will find that he will think more highly of you for doing this. .
… And less likely, he added silently, to send you packing as unsuited for duty in a multi-environment hospital.
The Creppelian left the storeroom with very little persuasion, after Conway told it that Prilicla was the only GLNO in the hospital at the moment and that their paths were very unlikely to cross twice in the same day. Ten minutes later the AMSL was settled in its dining tank and Conway was making for his own dinner by the fastest possible route.
CHAPTER 7
By a stroke of luck he saw Dr. Mannon at an otherwise empty table in the Senior’s enclosure. Mannon was an Earth-human who had once been Con way’s superior and was now a Senior Physician well on the way to achieving Diagnostician status. Currently he was allowed to retain three physiology tapes-those of a Tralthan specialist in microsurgery and two which had been made by surgeons of the low-gravity LSVO and MSVK species-but despite this his reactions were reasonably human. At the moment he was working through a salad with his eyes turned toward Heaven and the dining hall ceiling in an effort not to look at what he was eating. Conway sat down facing him and made a sympathetic, querying noise.
“I’ve had a Tralthan and a LSVO on my list this afternoon, both long jobs,” Mannon said grumpily. “You know how it is, I’ve been thinking like them too much. If only these blasted Tralthans weren’t vegetarians, or the LSVOs weren’t sickened by anything which doesn’t look like bird seed. Are you anybody else today?”
Conway shook his head. “Just me. Do you mind if I have steak?”
“No, just don’t talk about it.”
“I won’t.”
Conway knew only too well the confusion, mental double vision and the severe emotional disturbance which went with a physiology tape that had become too thoroughly keyed in to the operating physician’s mind. He could remember a time only three months ago when he had fallen hopelessly-but hopelessly-in love with one of a group of visiting specialists from Melf IV. The Melfans were ELNTs-six-legged, amphibious, vaguely crab-like beings-and while one half of his mind had insisted that the whole affair was ridiculous the other half thought lovingly of that gorgeously marked carapace and generally felt like baying at the moon.
Physiology tapes were decidedly a mixed blessing, but their use was necessary because no single being could hope to hold in its brain all the physiological data needed for the treatment of patients in a multienvironment hospital. The incredible mass of data required to take care of them was furnished by means of Educator tapes, which were simply the brain recordings of great medical specialists of the various species concerned. If an Earth-human doctor had to treat a Kelgian patient he took one of the DBLF physiology tapes until treatment was complete, after which he had it erased. But Senior Physicians with teaching duties were often called onto retain these tapes for long periods, which wasn’t much fun at all.
The only good thing from their point of view was that they were better off than the Diagnosticians.
They were the hospital’s elite. A Diagnostician was one of those rare beings whose mind was considered stable enough to retain permanently up to ten physiology tapes simultaneously. To their data-crammed minds was given the job of original research in xenological medicine and the diagnosis and treatment of new diseases in hitherto unknown life-forms. There was a well-known saying in the hospital, reputed to have originated with O’Mara himself, that anyone sane enough to want to be a Diagnostician was mad.