Conway swallowed, his eyes going to the vicious-looking, horny bludgeon with which, he had no doubt, the patient’s species had battered their way to the top of their evolutionary tree. He said dryly, “Don’t try too hard, Lieutenant.”
Using his eyes and a portable X-ray scanner Conway examined his patient thoroughly inside and out. He took several specimens, including sections of the affected skin, and sent them off to Pathology with three closely written pages of covering notes. Then he stood back and scratched his head.
The patient was warm-blooded, oxygen-breathing, and had fairly normal gravity and pressure requirements which, when considered with the general shape of the beastie, put its physiological classification as EPLH. It seemed to be suffering from a well-developed and widespread epithelioma, the symptoms being so plain that he really should have begun treatment without waiting for the Path report. But a cancerous skin condition did not, ordinarily, render a patient deeply unconscious.
That could point to psychological complications, he knew, and in that case he would have to call in some specialized help. One of his telepathic colleagues was the obvious choice, if it hadn’t been for the fact that telepaths could only rarely work minds that were not already telepathic and of the same species as themselves. Except for the very odd instance, telepathy had been found to be a strictly closed circuit form of communication. Which left his GLNO friend, the empath Dr. Prilicla…
Behind him the Lieutenant coughed gently and said, “When you’ve finished the examination, Doctor, O’Mara would like to see you.”
Conway nodded. “I’m going to send someone to keep an eye on the patient,” he said, grinning, “guard them as well as you’ve guarded me.”
Going through to the main ward, Conway detailed an Earth-human nurse-a very good-looking Earth-human nurse-to duty in the observation ward. He could have sent in one of the Tralthan FGLIs, who belonged to a species with six legs and so built that beside one of them an Earthly elephant would have seemed a fragile, sylph-like creature, but he felt that he owed the Lieutenant something for his earlier bad manners.
Twenty minutes later, after three changes of protective armor and a trip through the chlorine section, a corridor belonging to the AUGL water breathers and the ultra-refrigerated wards of the methane life-forms, Conway presented himself at the office of Major O’Mara.
As Chief Psychologist of a multi-environment hospital hanging in frigid blackness at the Galactic rim, he was responsible for the mental well-being of a Staff of ten thousand entities who were composed of eighty-seven different species. O’Mara was a very important man at Sector General. He was also, on his own admission, the most approachable man in the hospital. O’Mara was fond of saying that he didn’t care who approached him or when, but if they hadn’t a very good reason for pestering him with their silly little problems then they needn’t expect to get away from him again unscathed. To O’Mara the medical staff were patients, and it was the generally held belief that the high level of stability among that variegated and often touchy bunch of e-ts was due to them being too scared of O’Mara to go mad. But today he was in an almost sociable mood.
“This will take more than five minutes so you’d better sit down, Doctor,” he said sourly when Conway stopped before his desk. “I take it you’ve had a look at our cannibal?”
Conway nodded and sat down. Briefly he outlined his findings with regard to the EPLH patient, including his suspicion that there might be complications of a psychological nature. Ending, he asked, “Do you have any other information on its background, apart from the cannibalism?”
“Very little,” said O’Mara. “It was found by a Monitor patrol vessel in a ship which, although undamaged, was broadcasting distress signals. Obviously it became too sick to operate the vessel. There was no other occupant, but because the EPLH was a new species to the rescue party they went over its ship with a fine-tooth comb, and found that there should have been another person aboard. They discovered this through a sort of ship’s log cum personal diary kept on tape by the EPLH, and by study of the airlock tell-tales and similar protective gadgetry the details of which don’t concern us at the moment. However, all the facts point to there being two entities aboard the ship, and the log tape suggests pretty strongly that the other one came to a sticky end at the hands, and teeth, of your patient.”