James White - Mind Changer

“The security detail is standing by at a safe distance” it said, maintaining a stable hover just inside the entrance, “but they can be here within three minutes. I must remind you that you have been in close proximity to your patient for nearly two hours and—”

“No, dammit!” Conway broke in. “We could be nearly there. I’m not stopping now.”

“Nor I” rumbled Thornnastor.

“The ambient emotional radiation here is—” Prilicla began, when Conway broke in again.

“Thornnastor,” he said urgently, “if our empathic friend calls in the security heavies, will you block the door with your body? They won’t dare do anything too violent to the hospital’s senior diagnostician even if our administrator tells them otherwise. Right?”

“Right” said Thornnastor.

“Your administrator,” said O’Mara firmly, “will order them to keep their distance.”

Conway’s expression was puzzled but very pleased as he looked up briefly at O’Mara and then at Prilicla before going on, “Please listen to me. I’m not afraid of anybody here, or anywhere else for that matter. There’s no xenophobia that I’m aware of…” For a moment his voice was tinged with doubt. “… unless losing my temper like this with a good friend is an early symptom. But I don’t feel that there’s anything wrong with my mind. How is the patient feeling?”

“I know exactly what and how you feel, friend Conway” said Prilicla, “and friend Tunneckis is feeling frightened, disoriented, and badly confused.”

“Tunneckis” said Conway urgently, “what’s happening?”

“I don’t know what’s happening,” the other replied angrily. “My mind is flashing pictures and sounds. They are disconnected, unrelated, and, and nonverbal. What, what did you just do to me?”

“It would take too long to explain right now,” Conway replied, “but I intend doing it again for as long as I can.” Keeping his hands inside the stepdown gauntlets and his eyes fixed on the operating screen, he said excitedly, “The patient’s reaction proves it. We’re beginning to get results.”

“Friend Conway, I don’t know what’s happening, either” said Prilicla. “Based on the staff distance and exposure tables we worked out for friend Tunneckis’s telepathic, ah, shouting, all of you should be showing marked changes in emotional radiation and behavior by now. Instead your symptoms, with one exception, are minimal. I can only attribute this to the presence of several tape-donor entities within your minds. These tapes, which are the recordings of the past donors’ knowledge and memories, are not subject to modification by a mental influence of the present, so they may be serving as a mental anchor for the minds concerned. As diagnosticians in possession of many mind partners, you are being kept stable by the thoughts and feelings of your taped entities. But this is buying you only a little time, how much exactly I can’t say, because I can already feel your minds being affected. You will need to leave soon.”

“And one of us,” said Conway, with his eyes still fixed on the operating screen, “is not a diagnostician. Administrator, for your own mental safety you must leave at once. You can talk to the patient by communicator, and keep Security off our backs, when you’re at a safe distance.”

“No,” said O’Mara.

Prilicla was the only person in the hospital who knew that O’Mara had a mind partner, one single mental anchor called Marrasarah that might or might not save his sanity, but the empath was sworn to silence on that subject. One strong-willed, Kelgian anchor, he told himself, should be enough. He knew that Prilicla was feeling his doubts, but it left without mentioning them.

It was insidious.

He was watching Conway and Thornnastor at work and trying with little success to find reassuring words to say to Tunneckis, whose confusion and fear and despair hung around it like an unseen, smothering, and terrifying cloud that was almost palpable. He felt a growing urge to leave the room, if only to get the chance to breathe some clean air. More and more he found himself wondering if they were wasting their time, and he was gradually coming to the decision that they were. This Tunneckis creature was suffering because it had been the victim of a fluke accident that none of its own people could do anything about, and it was wrecking the sanity of the hospital staff who were trying to cure it. One had to keep a sense of proportion in these things. And an overgrown, sluglike, loathsome thing was all that Tunneckis was, a telepath who was eating away at his mind, a foul thing that could never go home and must not be allowed to stay here. The solution was obvious, the decision simple, and he had the rank to see that it was carried out. He would tell this self-opinionated young upstart Conway and the stupid elephant assisting him that the Kerma slug was expendable and to abort the procedure forthwith.

But suddenly O’Mara felt afraid, more afraid than he had ever been in his entire life. The fear was formless, unfocused but intense, and reinforced with a feeling of utter despair. He didn’t want to make a decision or give orders because he was sure Conway, who had always managed to do things his own way, would refuse to obey them; and Thornnastor would grip him in its long, warty tentacles and stamp him to a pulp under its elephant’s feet. He just wanted to run away and hide, from everything and every horrible, frightening, and alien person in this terrible place. Even Prilicla, so soft and fragile and so outwardly friendly, was forever crawling into his mind with its empathic faculty and uncovering the deepest, most shameful feelings that nobody should ever know while it waited its chance to tell everybody the truth about him. He was no good, O’Mara told himself bitterly, despairingly and fearfully, and useless to himself and everybody else. He was nothing.

O’Mara gripped the edge of the operating table so tightly that his fingers and hands turned white. He wasn’t aware that when he spoke it was closer to being a shout of anguish.

“Marrasarah, please help me!”

Conway looked up, his expression furious. “You bloody fool, O’Mara! Don’t make sudden loud noises like that, this is a delicate operation. Who the hell is Marrasarah? Never mind, just stand there and keep quiet.”

A tiny, cool, and aloof group of brain cells that were unaffected by the storm of fear and despair sweeping his tortured mind noted the disrespectful words and manner and decided that this was totally uncharacteristic of Conway, and that the Tunneckis contagion was getting to him, too. Suddenly the other shouted even louder than had O’Mara.

“Dammit, my head!”

Conway’s teeth were clenched and his face contorted with pain, but he had not taken his hands out of the operating gauntlets. Then slowly he relaxed.

For some reason the intensity of O’Mara’s fear and despair was beginning to ease. Concerned, he said, “What’s wrong with your head?”

“A deep, unlocalized itching between the ears that felt as if somebody was working in my brain with a wire brush,” Conway replied. Suddenly recovering his respectful manners, he went on excitedly, “Sir, I’ve felt that itching sensation before. It was Tunneckis trying to communicate telepathically with nontelepaths. It lasted only for an instant. Didn’t you feel it, too? And hear the message?”

“No,” said O’Mara.

“I felt the cranial itching,” said Thornnastor, being ponderously clinical, “but not from between my ears, which are, as you must know, differently situated in my species. It was accompanied by a confusion of mental noise but no message. What did it say?”

Conway had returned all of his attention to the operating screen and was speaking quickly as he worked.