He knew that they were going to do the operation anyway, with or without the patient’s cooperation, but it would be kinder to let it think that it still had a say in the matter.
“I’m, I’m afraid,” the distant Tunneckis replied. It made a low, hissing sound that did not translate, then went on, “I’m afraid of this place, and your cold, shiny, clicking machines that do things to me, and of all the horrible people in the hospital including you. Mostly I’m afraid of going on living this way. Please, I just want this black, awful, continual fear of everybody and everything to stop.”
O’Mara thought of Dr. Cerdal as he had seen it last, heavily sedated but still babbling and crying and completely out of control, and of the others, who had had less protracted contact with Tunneckis and who were in proportionately better shape. He could have said that he understood because others were feeling the same intense and unreasoning fear of all those around them that manifested itself as manic xenophobia, but that would have been adding guilt to the patient’s already crushing mental load.
Instead he said gently, “We want to cure you, Tunneckis, and remove the cause of that fear. Will you help us?”
The silence seemed to last much longer than the few seconds shown on the room’s chronometer, but finally the answer came.
“Yes.”
O’Mara gave an almost explosive sigh of relief and looked away from the screen. Braithwaite was looking quietly pleased, Thornnastor was stamping a forefoot against the floor in agitation, the emotional radiation from some person or persons in the room was giving Prilicla the shakes again, and Conway was frowning and chewing at his lower lip. O’Mara sighed again more quietly.
“Conway,” he said dryly, “I know the signs. You are thinking about doing something stupid. Well?”
“I’ve been too busy to thank you properly or bring you up to date on the later developments,” said Conway quickly. “That was a really good steer you gave us about reinvestigating Tunneckis’s accident. The Orligian medical officer on Kerm base was once a forensic scientist, and it took the scene of the crime – I mean the accident – and related circumstances apart and used a microscopic sieve on the evidence. It sent us detailed analyses of the metal structure – the padding, and even the body paintwork of Tunneckis’s ground car following the lightning strike, and of an undamaged vehicle of the same type. There were also the results of a complete physical examination on a normally healthy Kerm volunteer to serve as an organic benchmark. But it was you who pointed us in the right direction in the first place and…”
“Flattery doesn’t work on me,” O’Mara broke in sharply, “so get to the point.”
“The point,” said Conway, beginning to sound excited, “is that nothing like the Tunneckis accident had ever happened before because their technology isn’t advanced and ground vehicles are a recent development. The brief, ultra-high temperature and exposure to the electrical discharge of the lightning strike vaporized sections of the internal padding so that toxic material was inhaled and eventually circulated to the brain. Mistakenly I thought that the minor scorching of Tunneckis’s body surface was the only symptom. But now I know differently, and Thornnastor has come up with a specific that will detoxify the brain area involved. I’m confident – well, let’s say I’m guardedly optimistic – of effecting a cure.”
O’Mara looked at him steadily for a moment, then said, “You are about to say ‘but’.”
“But it will be very delicate work,” said Conway, “work I would rather not do at a distance with remotely controlled instruments. It will have to be a hands-on job. I fully realize the risks of a lengthy exposure to Tunneckis’s mental contagion, but I don’t foresee it being a long operation. Sir, I’ll have to be there.”
“And I” said Thornnastor and Prilicla, practically making it a duet.
O’Mara was silent for a moment. He was wondering how it would feel at first hand, rather than listening to Cerdal or the others trying to describe it, when the higher levels of one’s mind began to dissolve away and one became more and more suspicious and afraid of all the other-species staff in the hospital, people he had known and respected and liked for a great many years. He took a firm grip on the mind he still had and spoke.