Alien Emergencies - James White [135]
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 over him. Instinctively he tried to scramble up the wall beside his couch in case the enormous, heavily muscled body supporting 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 putting 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 around a large number of beings who were much smaller than himself just because the Cinrusskin component of his mind insisted 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 Thornnastor and Edanelt, both of whom had been too busy to speak to him.
They would not speak to Conway, 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 Thornnastor, 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.
The cause of the deterioration was a number of large blood vessels in the cerebral area which had ruptured when the pressure from the depressed fracture had been removed. The two surgeons had been forced to accede to Prilicla’s request because, without the empath’s monitoring of the patient’s level of consciousness, they had no way of knowing whether the delicate, dangerous, and perforce hurried repair work in the cerebral area was having a good or bad effect—if any.
“Prognosis?” Conway murmured. But before Murchison could reply, one of Thornnastor’s eyes curled backward over its head to glare down at him.
“If this patient does not succumb to a massive cerebral hemorrhage within the next thirty minutes,” the Diagnostician said crossly, “it is probable that it will perish, in time, from the degenerative diseases associated with extreme old age. Now stop distracting my assistant, Conway, and tend to your own patient.”
On the way to Seven Conway wondered briefly how the empath’s emotion sensitivity could detect the unconscious level of emoting of the EGCL without the signals beings swamped by the emotional radiation of dozens of fully conscious entities in the area. Maybe Prilicla’s recent hypersensitivity was responsible, but there was a niggling doubt