He faced into the slightly less cluttered corridor and looked for someone in authority. But he could see no Monitor Corps coveralls or insignia of rank to read, so obviously the men were employed by one of the civilian contractors. He filled his lungs.
“Men!” he shouted above the background noise. “I want to speak to your squad leader. Now.”
A large, red-faced man jumped down from a section of scaffolding about twenty yards away and dodged quickly between the intervening equipment to stand facing him. The red facial coloration, O’Mara decided, was due to irritation as well as hard work. He tried the Craythorne approach.
“Sorry for the inconvenience,” he said, nodding along the corridor, “when you’re obviously busy. I’m taking a group of newly arrived Kelgian nurses to their quarters on Forty-Three, and I would like you to clear a path for them through the – “
“The hell you would,” the other broke in, looking past O’Mara’s shoulder for a moment. “I’ve got just two hours to finish this stretch of corridor. Take them to the dining hall and feed them lettuce, or whatever else overgrown caterpillars eat, until then. Otherwise go up to Fifty-One, the freight elevator is supposed to be working to that level now, and the ramps down to Forty-Nine are clear. Then if you take a left past the – “
While the squad leader had been talking, O’Mara had decided that he could not go around for the reasons that neither of them could be completely sure that the way would be clear and he did not want his party diverting all over the hospital while trying to find a way to their quarters. He shook his head.
“Going around is not an option,” said O’Mara.
“Who d’you think you’re ordering around?” the squad leader said angrily. “Get your trainees out of here and stop wasting my time.”
The men working nearby had stopped to listen, followed by the ones who were farther down the line. It was as if a strange wave of silence were rolling slowly down the corridor.
“Your scaffolding, especially the sections with wall plating projecting over the edges, is on wheels,” said O’Mara in what he hoped was a quiet, reasonable voice. “It can be easily moved against one wall to let my people pass in safety. The same applies to the paint and other loose stuff lying around, which you will have to stow and take away soon, anyway. I’ll lend a hand to move it.”
Deliberately the squad leader did not lower his voice. He said, “No you won’t, because you don’t give me orders and you’re not coming this way. Move off. Just who the hell do you think you are, anyway?”
O’Mara tried hard to keep his temper in check and his voice low. Two more of the men nearest to them had jumped to the floor and were moving to join their boss. He waited until they were close; then he looked them up and down and nodded to each before speaking.
“I don’t have an identity problem,” he said, “so I know that my name is O’Mara. In case I’m tempted to report this matter later, it would be better not to know your names. My trainees will move along this corridor, without trouble, I trust, because we do not want to give other-species medical staff a bad impression. Please clear a path for them. I’m afraid I must insist.”
Craythorne would approve of my gentlemanly manner and phraseology, he thought. Not so the squad leader. He gave O’Mara specific instructions where a brainless, over-muscled gorilla trying to use fancy language should go and the various physiologically impossible acts he should perform on himself – when be got there, regrettably in language that was clear enough to be processed by the Kelgians’ translators. O’Mara had had more than enough of people who held it to be a law of nature that brains and brawn were mutually exclusive, and he felt a terrible urge to finish the argument their way, with his fists, head, and feet. He held up one hand.
“Enough,” he said in a cold, quiet voice that cut the other off in mid-word. “If this argument is about to become physical, which I would rather it didn’t, we have twelve nurses available whose training covers the treatment of the three, or maybe more, Earth-human casualties that will result. It is your move.”