But unrequited love, as O’Mara knew from long experience, was rarely a life- or sanity-threatening condition.
The younger Conway, he remembered, had been the only Earth-human male on the junior staff who had not shown, or had done a good job of concealing, his feelings for her during the first few occasions when they made professional contact. It wasn’t that he was antisocial, anything but; it was simply that he honestly preferred making friends with other-species staff. He had told O’Mara during the initial interview that his life’s ambition was to practice medicine in a multi-species hospital, he had succeeded in gaining entry to the biggest and best in the galaxy, and a serious romantic relationship would be an unwanted distraction from his studies. Normally an Earth-human person who preferred socializing with Tralthans, Melfans, and the other even more alien patients and staff members would have been a matter for psychiatric concern, but in Sector General such an abnormality was a distinct advantage.
The psych profiles of Murchison and young Conway, he remembered, had been so alike that if the old adage about opposites attracting and likes repelling had held true they should never have become an item. But O’Mara had taken such a fatherly interest in them fulfilling their future potential that he had shamelessly tinkered, not with their minds, but with their single and later their joint work assignments. He had been deliberately hard on them by forcing them to make clinical adaptations and decisions and to take responsibility far above their nominal rank. And what he hadn’t done to them fate had – in the shape of the Etlan War and a succession of combined rescue and first-contact missions on the special ambulance ship Rhabwar – testing them not quite to destruction until they were really good, separately and together. At all times he had remained as sarcastic and nasty toward them as ever. But he wondered if they would ever realize how much he liked them as people and how intensely proud he was of the fact that Murchison, still so maturely beautiful that Earth-human males looked after her when she passed, was now in line to succeed Thornnastor as head of Pathology, while the brilliant young Conway, no longer quite so young, was the diagnostician-in-charge of Other-Species Surgery, and that he felt especially pleased that they were now life-mates.
With the exception of two other beings, one of whom would never visit Sector General in person and the other of whom would not talk to anyone other than himself about it, O’Mara was able to conceal those feelings. He shook his head abruptly in self-irritation at his increasing tendency to spend so much of his mental life in the past, looked at his watch, and prepared once again to have all his feelings read like an open book.
When Senior Physician Prilicla entered the office a few moments later, O’Mara pointed at the item of furniture resembling a surrealistic wastepaper basket, which the Cinrusskin empath found most comfortable, then said gruffly, “Well, little friend, how am I feeling?”
Prilicla made a musical trilling sound that did not translate because it was the Cinrusskin’s equivalent of laughter, and said, “You know your feelings, friend O’Mara, as do I, so there isn’t much sense in either of us listing them aloud. I assume the question is partly rhetorical. The other part may have something to do with your feelings of general anxiety coupled with the emotional tension characteristic of a mind that is about to make a suggestion that may not be well received. I’m an empath, remember, not a telepath.”
“Sometimes I wonder about that,” said O’Mara quietly. “Observation and deduction,” it went on, “even without the ability to read emotions, can amount to the same thing, as you would know if you played poker. I know what you feel, not what you think, so if you are forcing yourself to impart bad news, you’ll have to tell me exactly what you are thinking.”
O’Mara sighed. “You are a psychiatrist’s psychiatrist,” he said, “in addition to everything else.”
For a moment the other’s fragile, insectile body trembled in response to his emotional radiation, but it waited in silence for him to speak. O’Mara lengthened the silence while he tried to choose the right words to break it.