At first Conway had not been able to see how the EGCL’s people had risen to
dominance on their world, how they had fought their way to the top of their
evolutionary tree. They had
no physical weapons of offense, and their snaillike apron of muscle which
furnished locomotion was incapable of moving them fast enough to avoid natural
enemies. Their carapace was a defense of sorts in that it protected vital
organs, but that osseus shell was mounted high on the body, making it top-heavy
and an easy prey for any predator who had only to topple it over to get at the
soft underside. Its manipulatory appendages were flexible and dexterous, but too
short and lightly muscled to be a deterrent. On their home world the EGCLs
should have been one of nature’s losers. They were not, however, and there had
to be a reason.
It had come to him slowly, Conway went on, while he was moving through the
chlorine and light-gravity sections. In every ward there had been cases of
patients with known and properly diagnosed ailments displaying, or at least
complaining about, atypical symptoms. The demand for painkilling medication had
been unprecedented. Conditions which should have caused a minor degree of
discomfort were, it seemed, inflicting severe pain. He had been aware of some of
this pain himself, but had put that down to a combination of his imagination and
the effect of the Cinrusskin tape.
He had already considered and discarded the idea that the trouble was
psychosomatic because the condition was too widespread, but then he thought
about it again.
During their return from the disaster site with the sole surviving EGCL,
everyone had felt understandably low about the mission’s lack of success and
because Prilicla was giving cause for concern. But in retrospect there was
something wrong, unprofessional, about their reactions. They were feeling things
too strongly, overreacting, developing in their own fashions the same kind of
hypersensitivity which had affected Prilicla and which had affected the patients
and staff on the Illensan and the Nallajim levels. Conway had felt it himself;
the vague stomach pains, the discomfort in hands and fingers, the
ov-erexcitability in circumstances which did not warrant it. But the effect had
diminished with distance, because when he vis-ited O’Mara’s office for the GLNO
tape and later for the era-sure, he had felt normal and unworried except for the
usual degree of concern over a current case, accentuated in this instance
because the patient was Prilicla.
The EGCL was receiving the best possible attention from Thornnastor and Edanelt,
so it was not on his mind to any large extent. Conway had been sure of that.
“But then I began to think about its injuries,” Conway went on, “and the way I
had felt on the ship and within three levels of the EGCL operation. In the
hospital while I had the GLNO tape riding me, I was an empath without empathy.
But I seemed to be feeling things—emotions, pains, conditions which did not
belong to me. I thought that, because of fatigue and the stress of that time, I
was generating sympathetic pains. Then it occurred to me that if the type of
discomfort being suffered by the EGCL were subtracted from the symptoms of the
medics and patients on those six levels and the intensity of the discomfort
reduced, then the affected patients and staff would be acting and reacting
normally. This seemed to point toward—”
“An empath!” O’Mara said. “Like Prilicla.”
“Not like Prilicla,” Conway said firmly. “Although it is possible that the
empathic faculty possessed by the preintelligent ancestors of both species was
similar.”
But their prehistoric world was an infinitely more dangerous place than Cinruss
had been, Conway continued, and in any case the EGCLs lacked the ability of the
Cinrusskins quite literally to fly from danger. And in such a savage environment
there was little advantage in having an empathic faculty other than as a highly
unpleasant early warning system, and so the ability to receive emotions had been
lost. It was probable that they no longer received even the emotional radiation
of their own kind.
They had become organic transmitters, reflectors and fo-cusers and magnifiers of