“A little,” the other replied. “But then it’s mostly answering questions from the tutor or charge nurse, or talking to wide-awake patients. If any of them make sleeping noises they do it somewhere else in the hospital, not here in study block. The dining hall is big enough to let everyone dine among their own people, so we don’t have to watch some of the others’ disgusting eating habits. The same goes for the rec deck. It’s better, and much more comfortable for us, if we stay away from them and them from us. Not just the snoring Tralthans and clattering Melfans, I mean everybody else.”
O’Mara started to speak, then decided against it because he could think of nothing constructive to say. The situation was much worse than he had thought.
One pint-sized furry Nidian still looked much like any other to O’Mara, but with the one who opened its door to him it was immediately obvious that the reverse did not hold true.
“You’re that other Earth-human psychologist, O’Mara,” it said. Even through the translator it sounded as if it were barking angrily at him. “What is a psychologist going to do about that damned noise? Tell me to think beautiful, positive thoughts and ignore it? Suggest IOD on tranquilizers? Move the source to the other side of the galaxy? What?”
“I agree,” said O’Mara, fighting an urge not to bark back at the irate little teddy bear, “that you have a legitimate complaint – “
“No!” snapped the Nidian. “I have a legitimate request. I want to be moved out of here. There’s Nidian accommodation on Level One-Fourteen, I’ve seen Maintenance working on it.”
“Level One-Fourteen isn’t just for Nidians,” said O’Mara quietly, but the other wasn’t listening to him.
“They haven’t finished the interior furnishings yet,” it went on, “and it won’t be nearly as comfortable as this place. But with a bunk and a chair and a console I’ll be able to study in peace, and during sleep periods Maintenance are considerate enough to stop hammering and drilling, so at night it will be quiet…”
It was interrupted by a low, intermittent, growling sound from farther along the corridor that rose slowly in pitch and volume like a modulated foghorn before fading away. But the silence lasted only for the few moments necessary to lull a listener into thinking that it had gone away for good. The sound was muffled to an unknown extent by the sleeper’s room walls, but at times it was so deep that it seemed as if the accompanying subsonics were vibrating the bones as well as the eardrums. Before O’Mara could speak there was a new sound, a slow, irregular clicking like amplified castanets. The short periods of silence during the Tralthan snoring were filled by the Melfan sleeping sounds and vice versa. The noises weren’t all that loud, but together they were so nerve-shredding and insistent that O’Mara found himself clenching his teeth.
“I rest my case,” barked the Nidian. “Well, what are you going to do about it?”
O’Mara remained silent, because right then he didn’t know how to answer. Another set of amplified castanets were starting up, but they faltered and died. A door hissed open and a Melfan emerged and moved diagonally across the corridor to stab at a door call button with a bony pincer. A blocky Tralthan head and fore-body appeared and they exchanged complaints about wanting to sleep in loud rumbling and clicking conversations interspersed with beeps because their translators had not been programmed to accept some of the words they were using. O’Mara shook his head.
“The Earth-human word that applies here,” said the Nidian as it closed its door, “is ‘chicken’.”
For a few minutes O’Mara watched the two quarreling ETs until he was sure that the dire threats of violence would be verbal rather than physical. He told himself that he was not being a moral coward, but he wasn’t sure that he entirely believed himself. Trying to talk sense to those two when he didn’t know how to solve the problem would simply increase the level of noise, especially if they made him lose his temper. Before he talked to them he needed to know what he was talking about.