“It sounds,” said Hewlitt, with a small, uncontrollable shiver that was partly of dread as well as a reaction to well-meaning stupidity, “that you would have preferred the hospital to blow up and save everybody a lot of trouble. But please believe us, you have absolutely nothing to worry about.”
“I’m sorry, Hewlitt,” said O’Mara. “If the Padre has broken communicator contact with us, please ask it to speak. Diagnosticians Conway and Thornnastor as well as Murchison, Prilicla, and Colonel Skempton are with me. You may already know that Lioren was once a highly respected senior physician in Sector General. No offense, Hewlitt, but right now we need to hear the report from a medical professional.”
One of Lioren’s eyes moved up to regard Hewlitt for a moment; then the Padre returned all of its attention to the Telfi dead. He could almost feel the other’s present sorrow and its old, remembered pain. It did not speak.
“Lioren is unable or unwilling to speak to you right now,” he said, “nor will it speak to me. But we have become very close to the Telfi and each other during the past few minutes. I understand the situation as well as the Padre does, and I am willing to speak.”
“It isn’t like the Padre to behave this way,” said the chief psychologist, in a voice that mixed impatience with concern. “But I suppose we must settle for a bloody amateur. Talk, dammit.”
Hewlitt took a firmer grip on his temper and said, “The Padre may indeed have taken offense at your suggestion that we are lying; I certainly did. But it is also gravely troubled by the thought of two dead Telfi who, if it had only known what we now know, might not have died. But in the event it decided to comfort Patient Cherxic, whose case was also terminal although the condition was not as far advanced as that of the other two. The mistake, which was not deliberate and not a reason to punish itself, was on a much smaller scale than the results of the wrong decision it made a few years ago, but its distress over the Cromsag Incident is never far from the Padre’s …”
“Lioren spoke to you about Cromsag?” O’Mara broke in. “It never speaks of that to anyone, not even me.”
“It did not speak to me,” said Hewlitt. “As of a few minutes ago, after the virus creature transferred temporarily from Cherxic to Lioren and then to me, I knew everything that was in the Padre’s mind.”
He had to break off, because it sounded as if six voices were trying to ask six different questions at once. He looked at the Padre for help, but Lioren’s eyes were still on the dead Telfi and he knew that its mind was on the terrible occurrence in its past when a planet had been all but depopulated because of a single wrong decision. Sympathy for the Tarlan made his voice sound harsher than he had intended.
“If you don’t stop asking questions,” he said, “I won’t be able to answer any of them. Please be quiet and listen to me.”
He was surprised at how quickly the voices died away until he realized that O’Mara had been giving them the same message, in much less polite language.
“Yes,” he said, “the virus creature briefly reentered my body, specifically my brain. And no, the process did not render me telepathic. The effect is closer to that of the Educator-tape experience remembered by the then Senior Physician Lioren, except that the process is gentler and without the psychological disorientation associated with the sudden transfer into one’s mind of the memories and personality of a completely alien donor. This was not a mindrecording, it was the transfer of memories by a thinking, sensitive entity who, because of the debt it felt it owed us, was anxious not to cause mental distress.”
“Wait,” O’Mara broke in, and there was a suspicious edge to his tone when he went on, “Are you saying that the memories were diluted, changed, or even edited?”
“Diluted with the passage of time,” Hewlitt replied, “but not distorted. You have experience with treating telepathic species and must know that it is impossible to lie with the mind. I know everything that was in the mind of the virus creature, who, because there seems to be only one of it, does not have a name. That includes its future intentions, which in a telepath cannot be concealed or edited in any way.”