“And one of us,” said Conway, with his eyes still fixed on the operating screen, “is not a diagnostician. Administrator, for your own mental safety you must leave at once. You can talk to the patient by communicator, and keep Security off our backs, when you’re at a safe distance.”
“No,” said O’Mara.
Prilicla was the only person in the hospital who knew that O’Mara had a mind partner, one single mental anchor called Marrasarah that might or might not save his sanity, but the empath was sworn to silence on that subject. One strong-willed, Kelgian anchor, he told himself, should be enough. He knew that Prilicla was feeling his doubts, but it left without mentioning them.
It was insidious.
He was watching Conway and Thornnastor at work and trying with little success to find reassuring words to say to Tunneckis, whose confusion and fear and despair hung around it like an unseen, smothering, and terrifying cloud that was almost palpable. He felt a growing urge to leave the room, if only to get the chance to breathe some clean air. More and more he found himself wondering if they were wasting their time, and he was gradually coming to the decision that they were. This Tunneckis creature was suffering because it had been the victim of a fluke accident that none of its own people could do anything about, and it was wrecking the sanity of the hospital staff who were trying to cure it. One had to keep a sense of proportion in these things. And an overgrown, slug-like, loathsome thing was all that Tunneckis was, a telepath who was eating away at his mind, a foul thing that could never go home and must not be allowed to stay here. The solution was obvious, the decision simple, and he had the rank to see that it was carried out. He would tell this self-opinionated young upstart Conway and the stupid elephant assisting him that the Kerma slug was expendable and to abort the procedure forthwith.
But suddenly O’Mara felt afraid, more afraid than he had ever been in his entire life. The fear was formless, unfocused but intense, and reinforced with a feeling of utter despair. He didn’t want to make a decision or give orders because he was sure Conway, who had always managed to do things his own way, would refuse to obey them; and Thornnastor would grip him in its long, warty tentacles and stamp him to a pulp under its elephant’s feet. He just wanted to run away and hide, from everything and every horrible, frightening, and alien person in this terrible place. Even Prilicla, so soft and fragile and so outwardly friendly, was forever crawling into his mind with its empathic faculty and uncovering the deepest, most shameful feelings that nobody should ever know while it waited its chance to tell everybody the truth about him. He was no good, O’Mara told himself bitterly, despairingly and fearfully, and useless to himself and everybody else. He was nothing.
O’Mara gripped the edge of the operating table so tightly that his fingers and hands turned white. He wasn’t aware that when he spoke it was closer to being a shout of anguish.
“Marrasarah, please help me!”
Conway looked up, his expression furious. “You bloody fool, O’Mara! Don’t make sudden loud noises like that, this is a delicate operation. Who the hell is Marrasarah? Never mind, just stand there and keep quiet.”
A tiny, cool, and aloof group of brain cells that were unaffected by the storm of fear and despair sweeping his tortured mind noted the disrespectful words and manner and decided that this was totally uncharacteristic of Conway, and that the Tunneckis contagion was getting to him, too. Suddenly the other shouted even louder than had O’Mara.
“Dammit, my head!”
Conway’s teeth were clenched and his face contorted with pain, but he had not taken his hands out of the operating gauntlets. Then slowly he relaxed.
For some reason the intensity of O’Mara’s fear and despair was beginning to ease. Concerned, he said, “What’s wrong with your head?”
“A deep, unlocalized itching between the ears that felt as if somebody was working in my brain with a wire brush,” Conway replied. Suddenly recovering his respectful manners, he went on excitedly, “Sir, I’ve felt that itching sensation before. It was Tunneckis trying to communicate telepathically with non-telepaths. It lasted only for an instant. Didn’t you feel it, too? And hear the message?”