I still say it’s a waste,” he said angrily, “a waste of lives, of medical talent, everything! All the cases are, and will continue to be, Monitor casualties. Every one an Earth-human. So there are no juicy e-t cases for them to work on. The e-t staff should be sent home!
“Present company included,” he ended, with a glare at Prilicla before he turned to face Mannon.
Dr. Mannon made an incision in his steak and hefted a generous forkful mouth ward. Since the disappearance of all his light-gravity patients he had had his LSVO and MSVK tapes erased and so had no mental restrictions placed on his diet. In the five weeks since the evacuation he had noticeably put on weight.
“To an e-t,” he said reasonably, “we are juicy e-ts.”
“You’re quibbling,” said Conway . “What I’m objecting to is senseless heroics.”
Mannon raised his eyebrows. “But heroics are nearly always senseless,” he said dryly, “and highly contagious as well. In this case I’d say the Corps started it by wanting to defend this place, and because of that we felt obliged to stay also to look after the wounded. At least a few of us feel like that, or we think a few of us feel like that.
“The sane, logical thing to do would have been to get while the going was good,” Mannon continued, not quite looking at Conway , “and not a word would have been said to those who got. But then these sane, logical people have colleagues or, uh, friends who they suspect might be in the true hero category, and they won’t leave because of what they imagine their friends will think of them if they run away. So they’d sooner die than have their friends think they were cowards, and they stay.”
Conway felt his face getting warm, but he didn’t say anything.
Mannon grinned suddenly and went on, “But this is a form of heroism, too. A case of Death before Dishonor, you might say. And before you can turn around twice everybody is a hero of one kind or the other. And no doubt the e-ts . . .” He gave a sly glance at Prilicla. “. . . are staying for similar reasons. And also, I suspect, because they don’t want it thought that Earth-human DBDGs have a monopoly on heroism.”
“I see,” said Conway . He knew that his face was flaming red. It was now quite obvious that Mannon knew that the only reason he had stayed in the hospital was because Murchison, O’Mara and Mannon himself might have been disappointed in him if he’d left. And at the other side of the table Prilicla, the emotion sensitive, would be reading him like a book. Conway thought that he had never felt worse in his whole life.
“You are so right,” said Prilicla suddenly, deftly inserting its fork into the plate of spaghetti before it and using two mandibles to twist. “If it had not been for the heroic example of you DBDGs I would have been on the second ship out.”
“The second?” asked Mannon.
“I am not,” said Prilicla, waving spaghetti for emphasis, “completely without valor.”
Listening to the by-play Conway thought that the honest thing would have been for him to admit his cowardice to them, but he also knew that to do so would be to cause embarrassment all round. It was plain that they both knew him for the coward he was and were telling him in their separate fashions that it didn’t matter. And looking at it objectively it really did not matter, because there would be no more ships leaving Sector General and its remaining staff were going to be heroes whether they liked it or not. But Conway still did not think it right that he should be given credit for being a brave, selfless, dedicated man of medicine when he was nothing of the sort.
Before he could say anything, however, Mannon switched subjects abruptly. He wanted to know where Conway and Murchison had been during the fourth, fifth and sixth days of the evacuation. He said that it was highly suggestive that both of them were out of circulation at exactly the same time and he began to list some of the suggestions which occurred to him-which were colorful, startling and next to physically impossible. Soon Prilicla joined in, although the sexual mores of two Earth-human DBDGs could have at most only an academic interest to a sexless GLNO, and Conway was defending himself strenuously from both sides.