Alien Emergencies - James White [133]
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 which it was spraying with the fast-setting plastic film favored by the Melfan medics instead of surgical gloves, but Thornnastor’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 Prilicla.”
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 multienvironment 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