would come the extremely delicate, dangerous, and perhaps impossible operation
to relieve the pressure on and repair the damage to the brain and adjacent
organs caused by the extensive depressed fracturing of the carapace. At that
stage the assistance of Prilicla and its wonderfully sensitive and precise
empathic faculty would be required to monitor the operation if the EGCL was to
continue to survive as something more than a vegetable.
Conway’s presence was no longer needed, and he would be more usefully employed
discussing Prilicla’s condition with O’Mara.
As he excused himself and left, Edanelt waved a pincer it was spraying with the
fast-setting plastic film favored by the Melfan medics instead of surgical
gloves, but Thornastor’s four eyes were on the patient, Murchison, and two
separate pieces of its equipment so that it did not see him leave.
In the corridor Conway stopped for a moment to work out the fastest route to the
Chief Psychologist’s office. The three levels above this one, he knew, were the
province of the chlor-
e-breathing Illensans, and if he had not known that then the
anticontamination warnings above the interlevel airlocks would
have told him. There was no danger of contamination from the
levels below since they housed the MSVK and LSVO life-forms, each of which
breathed oxygen, required a gravity pull of one-quarter Earth normal, and
resembled thin, tripedal storks. Below them were the water-filled wards of the
Chalders and then the first of the nonmedical treatment levels where O’Mara’s
department was situated.
On the way down a couple of the Nallajim MSVK medics chirped a greeting at him
and a recuperating patient narrowly missed flying into his chest before he
reached the lock into the AUGL section. For that leg of the journey he had to
don a lightweight suit and swim through the vast tanks where the thirty-meters
long, water-breathing inhabitants of the water world of Chalderscol drifted
ponderously like armorplated crocodiles in their warm, green wards. With his
suit still beaded with Chalder water, he was in O’Mara’s office just
twenty-three minutes later.
Major O’Mara indicated a piece of furniture designed for the comfort of a DBLF
and said sourly, “No doubt you have been too busy in your professional capacity
to contact me, Doctor, so don’t waste time apologizing. Tell me about
Pril-icla.”
Conway insinuated himself carefully into the Kelgian chair and began describing
the Cinrusskin’s condition, from the symptoms at onset to their intensification
to the degree where complete sedation was indicated, and the relevant
circumstance pertaining at the time. While he was speaking, the Chief
Psychologist’s craggy features were still and his eyes, which opened into a
mind so keenly analytical that it gave O’Mara what amounted to a telepathic
faculty, were likewise unreadable.
As Chief Psychologist of the Federation’s largest multien-vironment hospital, he
was responsible for the mental well-being of a staff of several thousand
entities belonging to more than sixty different species. Even though his Monitor
Corps rank of Major did not place him high in the hospital’s Service chain of
command, and anyway had been given for purely administrative reasons, there was
no clear limit to O’Mara’s authority. To him the medical staff were patients,
too, regardless of seniority, and an important part of his job was to ensure
that the right doctor was assigned to each of the weird and often wonderful
variety of patients who turned up at the hos-
pital, and that there was no xenophobic complications on either side.
He was also responsible for the hospital’s medical elite, the Diagnosticians.
According to O’Mara himself, however, the real reason for the high level of
mental stability among the diverse and often touchy medical staff was that they
were all too frightened of him to risk his displeasure by going mad.
O’Mara watched him closely until Conway had finished, then he said, “A clear,
concise, and apparently accurate report, Doctor, but you are a close friend of
the patient. There is the possibility of clouded judgment, exaggeration. You are
not a psychologist but an e-t physician and surgeon who has apparently already
decided that the case is one which should be treated by my department. You
appreciate my difficulty? Please describe for me your feelings during this