James White: Final Diagnosis

“No,” said Leethveeschi with equal firmness. “Since it is the only Hudlar nurse attached to my ward, you will have no trouble identifying it. Just point a manipulatory appendage at it and call ‘Nurse’ loudly.”

“Where I come from,” said Hewlitt, trying not to lose his temper, “that would be considered the height of bad manners. Are you being deliberately unhelpful? You told me your name and those of the patients around me, so why not tell me the Hudlar’s name?”

“Because,” said Leethveeschi, “I don’t know it.”

“That is ridiculous!” Hewlitt burst out, no longer able to hold his temper with this loathsome and obviously petty-minded creature. “You are in charge of the nurses on the ward and you expect me to believe that you don’t know all their names? Do you think I’m stupid? Oh, just forget it. I will ask the next time I see it and it will give me its name itself.”

“I hope not!” said the charge nurse. It did something with its body that made it turn and move back until it was disconcertingly close to his bedside again.

“Regarding your degree of stupidity, Patient Hewlitt,” it said, “I am constrained by politeness not to comment. But it is possible that you are ignorant rather than stupid, and I am allowed to reduce your level of ignorance.

“Our Hudlar nurse wears a band around one limb that shows its rank and hospital staff number,” Leethveeschi went on. “The number is used for administrative purposes and is the only identity known to us. Since other species find Hudlars impossible to tell apart, if one of them has to be picked out of a group this is done by calling out the last few digits of its staff number. It is not called by name because the Hudlars consider their names to be their most private and personal possession. Among their species the name is used only by close members of the family, or among those who are intending to become life-mates immediately prior to conjugation.

“It seems that you may have formed a liking for our Hudlar nurse,” it added, “but in the circumstances it is better that the relationship stops short of a personal exchange of names.”

Leethveeschi returned to the nurses’ station, making disgusting, untranslatable noises that sounded like someone in the last stages of pulmonary failure but were probably the sound of Illensan laughter. He felt sure that the heat of his embarrassment was warming the whole ward. Then he flung himself back against the pillows to glare at the monitor lens in the ceiling, wondering if the sudden reddening of his face would worry an observer and some other horrible medical creature would come hurrying to investigate.

Apparently not. Several minutes passed and there were no further visitations. But his relief was mixed with irritation as he wondered if he would have to do something melodramatic like falling out of bed and breaking an arm to attract attention. His embarrassment had faded, but it was being replaced by the old, familiar feelings of helpless anger and despair.

I should not have come here.

He looked along both sides of the ward at the large, complicated beds, several of whose occupants were not, unfortunately, screened from view, and beyond to the nurses’ station, where the alien shapes were rendered a little less frightening by distance, and listened to the quiet barking and moaning and gobbling sounds of other-species’ conversations. He had always felt distrustful of strangers, and even of relatives he had not met for a long time, because they usually represented varying degrees of change and disruption to the comfortable, organized, lonely, and moderately happy life he had made for himself. But now he was among the strangers who were stranger than he could ever have imagined, and it was his own stupid fault.

Hewlitt had been advised not to go to Sector General, by a succession of Earth doctors who had studied his psych profile and decided that it would not be a comfortable place for him. They had not, however, been able to do anything about his illness beyond stating the obvious, that his symptoms were unusually varied, nonspecific, and, at times, violently nonresponsive to the indicated medication. It was suggested that his trouble might lie in an overactive mind that was having a disproportionately large influence on the body containing it.

Being a solitary person out of necessity rather than choice, Hewlitt had had to take responsibility for looking after his own wellbeing, which included guarding himself against accident, illness, and infection. But he was not, or at least not entirely, a hypochondriac. He knew that there was something seriously wrong with him and that, in these days of advanced medical science, it was his right as a Galactic Federation citizen to demand that it be put right by somebody, somewhere.

He did not like being among strangers, but neither did he like the prospect of being intermittently and inexplicably sick for the rest of his life, so he had insisted on his rights. Now he was wondering if it would not have been better for him to stay and die comfortably on Earth. Here the treatment, and certainly the doctors prescribing it, were likely to cause him more mental anguish than the disease.

All at once Hewlitt wanted to be back home.

His attention was drawn to the nurses’ station entrance, where two creatures had emerged and were moving down the ward toward him. The first one was a long, fat, silver-furred being who undulated along the floor on more legs than he was able count and who belonged to the same species as Patient Henredth in the bed opposite. It was accompanied by the Hudlar nurse-for some reason he had begun to think of it as his nurse, possibly because it was both familiar and polite-whose flanks appeared to have been repainted since he had seen it last. In the Earth hospitals quite a few of the nurses haa used cosmetics, although only on their faces.

For a moment he wondered if his nurse was considered beautiful by other Hudlars; then he sat up straight in the bed and steeled himself for his first medical examination by a giant extraterrestrial caterpillar. But they stopped at the bed beside his, the one containing Patient Kletilt, moved inside its screens, and completely ignored his existence.

He could hear three different voices talking quietly. There was the Kelgian modulated moaning sound that must have been coming from the doctor, an erratic scraping and clicking noise that he had never heard before but that had to belong to the Melfan patient, and-with lesser frequency, suggesting that it was in response to questions or instructions-the remembered sound of the Hudlar nurse’s speaking membrane. But none of their translators were set for human speech, so he did not know what they were saying.

That irritated him, because every few minutes the fabric of the screen bulged outward as if something large and round, like the Hudlar’s flanks, or small and sharp, like something else, moved behind it. In spite of the fact that it would probably have horrified him, Hewlitt wanted to know what was going on.

Whatever it was lasted for about twenty minutes; then the Kelgian doctor emerged from behind the screens and undulated toward the nurses’ station without even a side glance at him. He could hear the Hudlar nurse moving around Kletilt’s bed, apparently doing something to or for the patient; then it, too, appeared and began following the doctor. He did not point and shout “Nurse” as Leethveeschi had advised; he waved to attract its attention.

The nurse paused to make an adjustment to its translator, then said, “Is there anything wrong, Patient Hewlitt?”

You fool, he thought, it should be obvious what is wrong. But he tried to keep his tone polite as he said, “I was expecting to be examined, Nurse. What is going on? That doctor completely ignored me!”