Sector general omnibus, p.90
Sector General Omnibus, page 90
“Cinrusskins are susceptible to illness only during childhood,” Prilicla went on. “The adults do occasionally suffer from nonphysical disturbances, and the onset of symptoms, as expected with psychological disorders, takes many forms, some of which resemble my present—”
“Nonsense, you’re not going insane!” Conway broke in. But he did not feel as sure as he sounded, and he was uncomfortably aware that Prilicla knew his feelings and was beginning to tremble again.
“The obvious course,” Conway said, trying to regain his clinical calm, “is to desensitize you with a hefty sedative shot. You know that as well as I. But you are too good a doctor to self-administer the indicated medication which would, we both realize, simply be treating the symptoms, without first doing something about the disease, like reporting it to me. Isn’t that so?”
“That is so, friend Conway.”
“Right, then,” Conway said briskly. “You also realize that we can’t do anything about curing the condition until we have you back in the hospital. In the meantime we’ll treat the symptoms with heavy sedation. I want you completely unconscious. You are relieved of all medical duties, naturally, until we have the answer to your little problem.”
Conway could almost feel the little empath’s objections while he was lifting it gently into a pressure litter fitted with gravity nullifiers and the incredibly soft restraints required by this uftrafragile species. Finally Prilicla spoke.
“Friend Conway,” it said weakly, “you know that I am the only medically trained empath on the staff. Our patient wiil require extensive and delicate cerebral surgery. If my condition precludes me from taking a direct part in the operation, I wish to be treated in an adjacent ward where this abnormal hyper-sensitivity will better enable me to monitor the EGCL’s unconscious emotional radiation.
“You know as well as I do,” it went on, “that brain surgery in a hitherto unknown life-form is largely exploratory and very, very risky, and my empathic faculty enables me to sense when surgical intervention in any area is right or wrong. By becoming a patient I have lost none of my abilities as a diagnostic empath, and for this reason, friend Conway, I want your promise that I will be placed as close as possible to the patient and restored to full consciousness while the operation is in progress.”
“Well—” Conway began.
“I am not a telepath, as you know,” Prilicla said, so weakly that Conway had to increase the gain on his translator to hear it. “But your feelings, if you do not intend to keep this promise, will be clear to me.”
Conway had never known the normally timid Prilicla to be so forthright in its manner. Then he thought of what the empath was asking him to do—to subject it, in its hypersensitive state, to the emotional trauma of a lengthy operation during which, because of the patient’s strange physiological classification and metabolism, the effectiveness of the anesthetics could not be guaranteed. His hard-held clinical detachment slipped for a moment and he felt like any concerned friend or relative watching a patient whose prognosis was uncertain.
Prilicla began to shake in its harness, but the sedative was taking effect, and very soon it was unconscious and untroubled by Conway’s feelings for it.
“This is Reception,” a flat, translated voice said from the Control Deck’s main speaker. “Identify yourself, please. State whether visitor, patient, or staff and give physiological classification. If unable to do so because of physical injury, mental confusion, or ignorance of the classification system, please make vision contact.”
Conway cleared his throat and said briskly, “Ambulance ship Rhabwar, Senior Physician Conway. Staff and two patients, all warm-blooded oxygen breathers. Staff classifications are Earth-human DBDG, Cinrusskin GLNO, and Kelgian DBLF. One patient is an EGCL, origin unknown, space wreck casualty in condition nine. The second patient is also staff, a GLNO in condition three. We need—”
“Prilicla?”
“Yes, Prilicla,” Conway said. “We need matching environment OR and postop intensive care facilities for the EGCL, treatment to begin on arrival, and adjacent accommodation for the GLNO whose empathic faculty may be required during the operation. Can do?”
There was silence for a few minutes, then Reception said, 'Use Entry Lock Nine into Level One Six Three, Rhabwar.
Your traffic coding is Priority Red One. ETA?”
Fletcher looked across at his astrogator, and Lieutenant Dodds said, “Two hours, seven minutes, sir.”
“Wait,” Reception said.
There was another silence, much longer this time, before the voice returned. “Diagnostician Thornnastor wishes to discuss the patient’s condition and metabolic profile with Pathologist Murchison and yourself as soon as possible. Senior Physician Edanelt has been assigned to assist Thomnastor during the operation. Both require information on the type and extent of the EGCL’s injuries and want you to transmit surface and deep-scan pictures at once. Until otherwise instructed you are assigned to the Cinrusskin patient. As soon as possible Chief Psychologist O’Mara wants to talk to you about Prilicla.”
It promised to be a very busy two hours and seven minutes.
In Rhabwar’s forward viewscreen the hospital grew from a fuzzy smear of light against the stellar background until it seemed to fill all of space like a gigantic, cylindrical Christmas tree. Its thousands of viewports blazed with light in the dazzling variety of color and intensity necessary for the visual equipment of its patients and staff.
Within a few minutes of Rhabwar docking at Lock Nine, the EGCL and Prilicla had been moved into Operating Room Three and Ward Seven respectively on Level 163. Con way was not familiar with this particular level because it had still been in the process of conversion from the old FROB, FGLI, and ELNT medics’ quarters when he had been detached for ambulance ship duty. Now the Tralthans, Hudlars, and Melfans had more spacious accommodations and their old abode had become the emergency admission and treatment level for warmblooded oxygen breathers, with its own operating theaters, intensive care units, observation and recovery wards, and a diet kitchen which could reproduce the staples of every known warm-blooded, oxygen-breathing race.
While Naydrad and Conway were transferring the EGCL casualty from the litter’s portable life-support and biosensor systems to those of the operating room, Thornnastor and Edanelt arrived.
Senior Physician Edanelt had been the natural if not the inevitable choice for this case. Not only was it one of the hospital’s top surgeons, the permanent possessor of four physiology tapes and, according to the grapevine, a being shortly to be elevated to Diagnostician status, the crablike Melfan’s physiological classification of ELNT was perhaps the closest of all the life-forms on the medical staff to that of the EGCL survivor—a vitally important factor when no physiology tape was available for the patient being treated. Where Thornnastor, the elephantine Diagnostician-in-Charge of Pathology, was concerned there were no physical similarities to the patient at all, other than that they breathed the same air.
In spite of being a Tralthan FGLI and as such one of the more massive intelligent species in the Federation, Thornnastor was no mean surgeon itself. But on this case its primary responsibility was the rapid investigation of the survivor’s physiology and metabolism and, using its own vast experience in the field of e-t pathology together with the facilities available in its department, the synthesizing of the required medication which would include a safe anesthetic, coagulant, and tissue regenerative.
Edanelt and Conway had already discussed the case in detail on the way in, as had Murchison and her chief, Thomnastor. He knew that their initial efforts would be directed toward repairing the grosser structural damage, after which would come the extremely delicate, dangerous, and perhaps impossible operation to relieve the pressure on and repair the damage to the brain and adjacent organs caused by the extensive depressed fracturing of the carapace. At that stage the assistance of Prilicla and its wonderfully sensitive and precise empathic faculty would be required to monitor the operation if the EGCL was to continue to survive as something more than a vegetable.
Conway’s presence was no longer needed, and he would be more usefully employed discussing Prilicla’s condition with O’Mara.
As he excused himself and left, Edanelt waved a pincer it was spraying with the fast-setting plastic film favored by the Melfan medics instead of surgical gloves, but Thornastor’s four eyes were on the patient, Murchison, and two separate pieces of its equipment so that it did not see him leave.
In the corridor Conway stopped for a moment to work out the fastest route to the Chief Psychologist’s office. The three levels above this one, he knew, were the province of the chlorine-breathing Illensans, and if he had not known that then the anticontamination warnings above the interlevel airlocks would have told him. There was no danger of contamination from the levels below since they housed the MSVK and LSVO life-forms, each of which breathed oxygen, required a gravity pull of one-quarter Earth normal, and resembled thin, tripedal storks. Below them were the water-filled wards of the Chalders and then the first of the nonmedical treatment levels where O’Mara’s department was situated.
On the way down a couple of the Nallajim MSVK medics chirped a greeting at him and a recuperating patient narrowly missed flying into his chest before he reached the lock into the AUGL section. For that leg of the journey he had to don a lightweight suit and swim through the vast tanks where the thirty-meters long, water-breathing inhabitants of the water world of Chalderscol drifted ponderously like armorplated crocodiles in their warm, green wards. With his suit still beaded with Chalder water, he was in O’Mara’s office just twenty-three minutes later.
Major O’Mara indicated a piece of furniture designed for the comfort of a DBLF and said sourly, “No doubt you have been too busy in your professional capacity to contact me, Doctor, so don’t waste time apologizing. Tell me about Pril-icla.”
Conway insinuated himself carefully into the Kelgian chair and began describing the Cinrusskin’s condition, from the symptoms at onset to their intensification to the degree where complete sedation was indicated, and the relevant circumstance pertaining at the time. While he was speaking, the Chief Psychologist’s craggy features were still and his eyes, which opened into a mind so keenly analytical that it gave O’Mara what amounted to a telepathic faculty, were likewise unreadable.
As Chief Psychologist of the Federation’s largest multien-vironment hospital, he was responsible for the mental well-being of a staff of several thousand entities belonging to more than sixty different species. Even though his Monitor Corps rank of Major did not place him high in the hospital’s Service chain of command, and anyway had been given for purely administrative reasons, there was no clear limit to O’Mara’s authority. To him the medical staff were patients, too, regardless of seniority, and an important part of his job was to ensure that the right doctor was assigned to each of the weird and often wonderful variety of patients who turned up at the hospital, and that there was no xenophobic complications on either side.
He was also responsible for the hospital’s medical elite, the Diagnosticians. According to O’Mara himself, however, the real reason for the high level of mental stability among the diverse and often touchy medical staff was that they were all too frightened of him to risk his displeasure by going mad.
O’Mara watched him closely until Conway had finished, then he said, “A clear, concise, and apparently accurate report, Doctor, but you are a close friend of the patient. There is the possibility of clouded judgment, exaggeration. You are not a psychologist but an e-t physician and surgeon who has apparently already decided that the case is one which should be treated by my department. You appreciate my difficulty? Please describe for me your feelings during this mission from the rescue until now. But first, are you feeling all right?”
All that Conway could feel just then was his blood pressure rising.
“Be as objective as possible,” O’Mara added.
Conway took a deep breath and let it out agaJn slowly through his nose. “After our very fast response to the distress signal there was a general feeling of disappointment at the rescue of just one survivor, a survivor who was barely alive. But you’re on the wrong track, Major. The feeling was shared by everyone on the ship, I believe, but it was not strong enough to explain the Cinrusskin’s hypersensitivity. Prilicla was picking up emotional radiation of distressing intensity from crew members stationed at the other end of the ship, a distance at which emoting would normally be barely detectable. And I am given neither to maudlin sentimentality nor exaggeration of symptoms. Right at this moment 1 feel the way I usually do in this blasted office and that is—”
“Objectively, remember,” O’Mara said dryly.
“I was not trying to do your diagnostic work for you,” Conway went on, bringing his voice back to a conversational level, “but the indications are that there is a psychological Problem. The result, perhaps, of an as yet unidentified disease, or organic malfunction or an imbalance in the endocrine system. But a purely psychological reason for the condition is also a Possibility which—”
“Anything is possible. Doctor,” O’Mara broke in impatiently. “Be specific. What are you going to do about your friend, and what exactly do you want me to do about it?”
“Two things,” Conway said. “I want you to check on Pril-icla’s condition yourself—”
“Which you know I will do anyway,” O’Mara said.
“—and give me the GLNO physiology tape,” he went on, “so that I can confirm or eliminate the nonpsychological reasons for the trouble.”
For a moment O’Mara was silent. His face remained as expressionless as a lump of basalt, but the eyes showed concern. “You’ve carried Educator tapes before now and know what to expect. But the GLNO tape is . . . different. You will feel Jike a very unhappy Cinrusskin indeed. You are no Diagnostician, Conway—at least, not yet. Better think about it.”
The physiology tapes, Conway knew from personal experience, fell somewhere between the categories of mixed blessing and necessary evil. While skill in e-t surgery came with aptitude, training, and experience, no single being could hope to hold in its brain the vast quantity of physiological data needed for the treatment of the variety of patients encountered in a hospital like Sector General. The incredible mass of clinical and anatomical information needed to take care of them had therefore to be furnished, usually on a temporary basis, by means of the Educator tapes, which were the brain recordings of the great medical specialists belonging to the species concerned. If an Earth-human doctor had to treat a Kelgian patient, he took one of the Kelgian physiology
tapes until treatment was completed, after which he had it erased. But for the medic concerned, whether the tape was being carried for as long as it took to perform an other-species operation or for a teaching project lasting several months, the experience was not a pleasant one.
The only good thing about it from the medic’s point of view was that he was much better off than one of the Diagnosticians.
They were the hospital’s elite. A Diagnostician was one of those rare entities whose mind had proved itself stable enough to retain up to ten physiology tapes simultaneously. To their data-crammed minds was given the work of original research in xenological medicine and the diagnosis and treatment of
disease and injury in hitherto unknown life-forms. There was a saying current in the hospital, reputed to have originated with O’Mara himself, that anyone sane enough to be a Diagnostician was mad.
For it was not only physiological data which the tapes imparted; the complete memory and personality of the entity who had possessed that knowledge was impressed on the receiving mind as well. In effect, a Diagnostician subjected himself or itself voluntarily to a form of multiple schizophrenia, with the alien personalities sharing its mind so utterly different that in many cases they did not have even a system of logic in common. And all too frequently the foremost medical authorities of a planet, despite their eminence in the field of healing, were very bad-tempered, aggressive, and unpleasant people indeed.
Such would not be the case with the GLNO tape, Conway knew, because Cinrusskins were the most timid, friendly, and likable beings imaginable.
“I’ve thought about it,” Conway said.
O’Mara nodded and spoke into his desk set. “Carrington? Senior Physician Conway is approved for the GLNO tape, with compulsory postimpression sedation of one hour. I’ll be in Emergency Admissions on Level One Six Three—” he grinned suddenly at Conway “—trying not to tell the medics their business.”
Conway woke to see a large, pink balloon of a face hanging °yer him. Instinctively he tried to scramble up the wall beside “is couch in case the enormous, heavily muscled body sup-Porting the face fell and crushed the life out of him. Then suddenly there was a mental shift in perspective as the features registered concern and withdrew and the slim, Earth-human body in Monitor Corps green straightened up.
Lieutenant Carrington, one of O’Mara’s assistants, said, Easy, Doctor. Sit up slowly, then stand. Concentrate on put-big your two feet onto the floor and don’t worry because they aren’t a Cinrusskin’s six.”
He made good time back to 163 in spite of having to walk a large number of beings who were much smaller than just because the Cinrusskin component of his mind that they were big and dangerous. From Murchison he learned that O’Mara was in Prilicla’s ward, having first called in to the OR to discuss the EGCL’s basic physiology and probable environmental and evolutionary influence with Thorn-nastor and Edanelt, both of whom had been too busy to speak to him.
They would not speak to Con way, either, and he could see why. The operation on the EGCL had become an emergency with an unknown but probably extremely short time limit.
When the splinters of depressed carapace had been removed from the brain over an hour earlier, Murchison explained quietly between rumbled instructions from Thomnastor, there had been a sudden and surprising deterioration in the EGCL’s condition. The change had been detected by Prilicla who, because of its condition, had been excluded from any part of the operation. But the Cinrusskin had continued to act like a doctor by making use of its abnormally heightened emotion-detection faculty. Prilicla had pulled rank to send Ward Seven’s duty nurse to the operating theater with its empathic findings and a diffident suggestion that if they were to relay the operational proceedings to Seven’s viewscreen, it would be able to assist them.
