“Little friend,” he said finally, “I intended the purpose of this meeting to be a discussion of possibilities and a request for help rather than to give you another work assignment. You may know that my time at Sector General is limited, and that I will be leaving as soon as I have chosen and installed my successor, who will be both the hospital’s administrator and its chief psychologist. The choice will be difficult.”
Prilicla opened its iridescent wings and shook them out before refolding them tightly against its body again. It remained silent.
He went on, “All of the people I have in mind, the outsider as well as those already on the staff, are good. I could leave now knowing that any of them would do an adequate job. But I want to know more than my own insight and experience can tell me about the successful applicant’s inner feelings. Frankly, I feel possessive. For a very long time the psychological health of this place has been my baby, the only one I have, or will ever have, and I don’t want to hand it over to a parent who is merely adequate. That’s why I feel it necessary, if you agree, that you monitor the feelings of all the applicants and report them to me so as to guide me in my final choice.”
“I know your feelings, friend O’Mara, and those of every other source of emotional radiation whether it is large and strong, simple, complex, weak, or even non-sapient. They cannot be concealed from me, but that doesn’t mean that I will impart them to a third party if the ethic governing privileged information is involved; otherwise I will be pleased to advise you. But you rarely take advice. Since I detected the presence of your Kelgian mind partner and you reluctantly confided the details to me, my advice has been that its continued occupancy of your mind has caused you as much emotional disruption as contentment over the years and that you should have it erased. I feel its presence still affecting you.”
“It is,” said O’Mara, “but we both know that the Marrasarah business is not the strongest feeling in my mind, and that you are trying to change the subject.”
“Naturally,” said Prilicla, its body trembling slightly, “because I feel you nerving yourself to say something that you believe I will find unpleasant. Be direct like your Kelgian mind partner and tell me what it is.”
“Right,” said O’Mara. “But first I want to talk about you, little friend, before I talk to you. Think back to the time you first came here, for a probationary period because neither of us believed that an empath with your degree of sensitivity could survive here for long. In Sector General people in large numbers suffer physical trauma, fear, and emotional uncertainty. That is an accepted fact of hospital life. To an emotion-sensitive like you it must have been, and probably still is, hell. The therapeutic help I was able to give you in the early days was minimal. But against all the odds you did survive. Not only that, you assumed extra surgical responsibilities and remained effective and mentally stable during the processing of the hundreds of extra casualties that resulted from the Etlan War. When you were promoted to senior physician and took over medical charge of Rhabwar, you and your hypersensitive empathy climbed about in shifting ship wreckage and disaster areas so you could point out the dead from the dying inside their spacesuits and very often save the latter’s lives. And now, well, you don’t need to use telepathy or empathy or anything but your tiny ear slits to know that…”
He broke off for a moment to smile, then went on, “Of course it’s only a rumor that you will shortly be promoted to full diagnostician, but I can unofficially confirm it.”
The empath’s pipestem limbs trembled faintly as it said, “Friend O’Mara, you are heaping me with high professional praise that I know is sincere. It should be making me feel good but it isn’t. Why are you emoting so much anxiety?”
O’Mara shook his head and said, “Before I answer that I want to talk about myself, briefly, you’ll be glad to hear. Since I started in this job over thirty years ago, without any formal qualifications and with an enormous chip on my shoulder, I deliberately refrained from trying to be friendly. Most of the people think they know the reason, that I’m a self-confessed, thoroughly nasty person who saves his professional sympathy only for the most troubled patients. But only you, little friend, with your damned empathy were able to piece together the complete truth.”