Alien Emergencies - James White [138]
In common with the other medics trained for service in a multienvironment hospital, Conway had a thorough grounding in the basics of extraterrestrial physiology, metabolism, and the more common diseases of the Federation’s member species. But for a detailed consultation and diagnosis of the kind required here he needed an Illensan physiology tape, and Gilvesh knew that as well as he did. So the Illensan Senior, it seemed, was sufficiently worried by the current state of its patients to seek a quick, other-species opinion.
With the Cinrusskin tape and his intense concern for Prilicla confusing his clinical view, Conway could do little more than make encouraging noises while Gilvesh discussed a painful intestinal tract, a visually dramatic and undoubtedly uncomfortable fungoid infection involving all eight of the spatulate limbs, and sundry other conditions to which Illensans were heir.
While the patients were seriously ill, their conditions were not critical, and the increased dosages of painkilling medication which Gilvesh was administering against its better judgment seemed to be having the desired effect, albeit slowly. Conway excused himself from the frantically busy wards as soon as he could and headed towards the much quieter MSVK and LSVO levels.
He had to pass through Level 163 again on the way, and stopped to check on the condition of the EGCL. Murchison yawned in his face and said that the operation was going well and that Prilicla was satisfied with the patient’s emotional radiation. He did not call on Prilicla.
But he found that the low-gravity levels were having one of those days, too, and he was immediately trapped into further consultations. He could not very well avoid them because he was Conway, the Earth-human Senior Physician, known throughout the hospital for his sometimes unorthodox but effective methods and ideas on diagnosis and treatment. Here, at least, he was able to give some useful if orthodox advice because his Cinrusskin mind-partner was closer temperamentally and physically to the Nallajim LSVOs and the MSVKs of Euril who were fragile, birdlike, and extremely timid where the larger life-forms were concerned. But he could find no solution, orthodox or otherwise, to the problem he most desperately wanted to solve.
Prilicla’s.
He thought about going to his quarters where he would have peace and quiet in which to think, but they were more than an hour’s journey away at the other end of the hospital and he wanted to be close by in case there was a sudden deterioration in Prilicla’s already close to critical condition. So instead he continued listening to Nallajim patients describing their symptoms and feeling a strange sadness because the Cinrusskin part of his mind knew that they were suffering, feeling, and emoting on many levels but his Earth-human mental equipment was incapable of receiving their emotional radiation. It was as if a sheet of glass lay between them, through which only sight and sound could pass.
But something more was getting through, surely? He had felt some of the aches and pains of the Illensan patients as he was feeling, to a certain extent, those of the Eurils and Nallajims around him. Or was that simply the GLNO tape fooling him into believing that he was an empath?
A sheet of glass, he thought suddenly, and an idea began to stir at the back of his mind. He tried to bring it out into the light, to give it form. Glass. Something about glass, or the properties of glass?
“Excuse me, Kytili,” he said to the Nallijim medic who was worrying aloud about an atypical case of