“Old friend,” O’Mara said, holding up one digit to indicate the biosensor displays, “will you for God’s sake stop for breath!”
“I am not entirely helpless,” Mannen said after the briefest of pauses. “I bet that I could arm-wrestle Prilicla.”
One of the Cinrusskin’s incredibly fragile forelimbs detached itself from the ceiling and reached down so that its slender digits rested for a moment on the patient’s forehead. “Friend Mannen,” Prilicla said, “you might not win.”
Lioren had strong feelings of pleasure and relief that the favor Mannen was asking would reflect neither shame nor dishonor on the ex-Diagnostician’s reputation. But there was also a selfish feeling of impending loss, and for the first time since the others had entered the room, Lioren spoke.
“Doctor Mannen,” he said, “I would like . . . That is, may I still go on talking to you?”
“Not,” O’Mara said, turning to face Lioren, “until you damn well talk to me first.”
On the ceiling Prilicla’s body had begun to tremble. It detached itself, made a neat half loop, and flew slowly toward the door as it said, “My empathic faculty tells me that shortly friends O’Mara and Lioren will be engaged in an argument, accompanied as it must surely be by emotional radiation of a kind I would find distressing, so let us leave them alone to settle it, friend Seldal.”
“What about me?” Mannen said when the door had closed behind them.
“You, old friend,” O’Mara said, “are the subject of this argument. You are supposed to be dying. What exactly did this . . . this trainee psychologist, do or say to you to bring about this insane urge to return to work?”
“Wild horses,” Mannen said, showing its teeth again, “wouldn’t drag it out of me.”
Lioren wondered what relevance a nonintelligent species of Earth quadruped had to the conversation, and had decided that the words had a meaning other than that assigned by his translator.
O’Mara swung around to face him and said, “Lioren, I want an immediate verbal and later a more detailed written report of all the attendant circumstances and conversations that took place between this patient and yourself. Begin.”
It was not Lioren’s intention to be disobedient or insubordinate by refusing to speak, it was simply that he needed more time to separate the things he could say from those which should on no account be revealed. But O’Mara’s yellow-pink face was deepening in color, and he was not to be given any time at all.
“Come, come,” O’Mara said impatiently. “I knew that you were interviewing Mannen in connection with the Seldal investigation. That was an obvious move on your part even though, if Mannen did not ignore you as he had everyone else, it carried the risk of you revealing what you were doing to the patient—”
“That is what happened, sir,” Lioren broke in, knowing that they were on a safe subject and hoping to stay there. “Doctor Mannen and I discussed the Seldal assignment at length, and while the investigation is not yet complete, the indications so far are that the subject is sane—”
“For a Senior Physician,” Mannen said.
O’Mara made an angry sound and said, “Forget that investigation for the moment. What concerns me now is that Seldal noticed a marked, nonclinical change in its terminal patient which it ascribed to conversations with my trainee psychologist. Subsequently it asked that you talk to its Groalterri patient, who was stronger but being just as silent as Mannen, with the result that when it did speak you forbade the use of speech recorders.”
When the Chief Psychologist went on, his voice was quiet but very clear, in the way that Tarlans described as shouting in whispers, as it went on, “Tell me, right now, what you said to these two patients, and they to you, that brought about the change in the Groalterri’s behavior and caused this, this particular act of constructive insanity in a dying man.”
One of its hands moved to rest very gently on Mannen’s shoulder and even more quietly it said, “I have professional, and personal, reasons for wanting to know.”
Once again Lioren searched his mind in silence for the right words until he was ready to speak.