O’Mara waited precisely ten seconds for Conway’s reply, then he said, “Very well, Doctor. See the Colonel. And tell Prilicla I’m rearranging its schedule-it may be helpful to have your emotional echo-detector available at all times. Since you insist on making a fool of yourself you might as well do it properly. Afterward-well, we will be very sorry to see Mannon go, and in all honesty I suppose I must say the same about you. Both of you are likely to be on the same ship out. .
A few seconds later he was dismissed very quietly.
Mannon himself had accused Conway of misguided loyalty and now O’Mara had suggested that his present stand was the result of not wanting to admit to a mistake. He had been given an out, which he had refused to take, and now the thought of service in the smaller multienvironment hospital, or even a planet-side establishment where the arrival of an e-t patient would be considered a major event, was beginning to come home to him. It gave him an unpleasantly gone feeling in the abdominal area. Maybe he was basing his theory on too little evidence and refusing to admit it. Maybe the odd errors were part of an entirely different puzzle, with no connection whatever with Mannon’s trouble. As he strode along the corridors, taking evading action or being evaded every few yards, the impulse grew in him to rush back to O’Mara, say yes to everything, apologize abjectly and promise to be a good boy. But by the time he was ready to give into it he was outside Colonel Skempton’s door.
Sector General was supplied and to a large extent maintained by the Monitor Corps, which was the Federation’s executive and law enforcement arm. As the senior Corps officer in the hospital, Colonel Skempton handled traffic to and from the hospital in addition to a horde of other administrative details. It was said that the top of his desk had never been visible since the day it arrived. When Conway was shown in he looked up, said “Good morning,” looked down at his desk and said, “Ten minutes . .
It took much longer than ten minutes. Conway was interested in traffic from odd points of origin, or ships which had called at such places. He wanted data on the level of technology, medical science and physiological classification of their inhabitants-especially if the psychological sciences or psionics were well-developed or if the incidence of mental illness was unusually high. Skempton began excavating among the papers on his desk.
But the supply ship, ambulances and ships pressed into emergency service as ambulances which had arrived during the past few weeks had originated from Federation worlds which were well known and medically innocuous. All except one, that was-the Cultural Contact and Survey vessel Descartes. It had landed, very briefly, on a most unusual planet. She was on the ground, if it could be called that, for only a few minutes. None of the crew had left the ship, the air-locks had remained sealed and the samples of air, water and surface material were drawn in, analyzed and declared interesting but harmless. The pathology department of the hospital had made a more thorough analysis and had had the same thing to say. Descartes had called briefly to leave the samples and a patient…
“A patient!” Conway almost shouted when the Colonel reached that point in his report. Skempton would not need an empathic faculty to know what he was thinking.
“Yes, Doctor, but don’t get your hopes up,” said the Colonel. “He had nothing more exotic than a broken leg. And despite the fact e-t bugs find it impossible to live on beings of another species, a fact which simplifies the practice of extraterrestrial medicine no end, ship medics are constantly on the lookout for the exception which is supposed to prove the rule. In short, he was suffering only from a broken leg.”
“I’d like to see him anyway,” said Conway.
“Level Two-eighty-three, Ward Four, name of Lieutenant Harrison,” said Skempton. “Don’t slam the door.”
But the meeting with Lieutenant Harrison had to wait until late that evening, because Prilicla’s schedule needed time to rearrange and Conway himself had duties other than the search for hypothetical disembodied intelligences. The delay, however, was fortunate because much more information was made available to him, gathered during rounds and at mealtimes, even though the data was such that he did not quite know what to do with it.