James White - The Genocidal Healer

“Don’t waste time worrying about it,” Tarsedth said. “Educator tapes are only offered to those studious, highly intelligent, and emotionally stable types who are being considered for promotion to Senior Physician or higher. The way Cresk-Sar criticizes our work, can you imagine one of us ever being offered an Educator tape?”

Lioren did not speak. Much stranger things had happened in Sector General — the staff records showed that Thornnastor’s principal assistant, the DBDG Earth-human Pathologist Mur-chison, had joined the hospital as a trainee nurse — but it was a strict rule of the department that the subject of a long-term promotion should not be discussed with trainees who were being considered for it nor, except in the most general terms, any of the problems associated with the Educator-tape system.

The major problem from which all the others stemmed was that, while Sector General was equipped to treat every known form of intelligent life, no single entity could hold in its mind even a fraction of the physiological data necessary for this purpose. Surgical dexterity was a product of aptitude, training, and experience, but the complete information covering the physiology of a given patient could only be transferred artificially by Educator tape, which was the brain record of some great medical authority belonging to the same species as that of the patient to be treated.

If a Melfan doctor was assigned to a Kelgian patient, it was given a DBLF tape until the treatment was complete, after which the mind recording was erased. The exceptions to this rule were the Senior Physicians of proven emotional stability such as Sel-dal, and the Diagnosticians.

The Diagnosticians were those rare beings whose minds were stable enough to retain permanently six, seven, and in one case up to ten physiology tapes simultaneously. To these data-crammed minds were given the initiation and direction of orig- inal research in xenological medicine in addition to the practice and teaching of their considerable art.

The tapes, however, imparted not only the physiological data required for treatment, but the entire memory and personality of the donor entity as well. In effect a Diagnostician, and to a lesser extent a Senior Physician, subjected itself voluntarily to an extreme form of multiple schizophrenia. The donor entities apparently sharing the host doctor’s mind could be aggressive, unpleasant individuals — geniuses were rarely nice people — with all sorts of pet peeves and phobias. Normally these would not become apparent during the course of an operation or treatment because both host and donor minds were concentrating on the purely medical aspects of the work. The worst effects were felt when the possessor of the tape was sleeping.

Alien nightmares, Lioren knew from a few of his own tape experiences, were really nightmarish. And alien sexual fantasies were enough to make the host mind wish, if it was capable of wishing coherently for anything at the time, that it was dead. He could not even imagine the physical and emotional effect of the sensorium of an enormous, intelligent crustacean on the mind of a ridiculously fragile but equally intelligent bird.

He continued to watch the frenetically active Seldal while recalling the saying often repeated among the hospital staff that anyone who was sane enough to practice as a Diagnostician was mad, a remark reputed to have originated with O’Mara itself.

“Seldal’s ELNT procedure fascinates me,” Lioren said, firmly returning to the subject of his investigation. “It shows no hesitation whatever, no pauses for thought or reconsideration, none of the too-careful movements one sees with Educator-tape work. Is it like this with other life-forms?”

“With respect, Lioren,” the Hudlar said, “at the speed it works would you notice an awkward pause if you saw one? We have watched it perform an Earth-human gastrectomy and, among others, do something to a DBLF that Tarsedth had better explain to you since the Kelgian reproductive mechanism is proving difficult for me to understand—”

“You should talk!” Tarsedth broke in. “Every time a Hudlar mother produces offspring it changes to male mode. That’s— that’s indecentl”

“Presumably these patients required only short-duration Educator taping,” the Hudlar went on, “but Seldal accommodated itself to them without apparent difficulty. For the past six weeks it has been engaged principally on Tralthan surgery and says that it finds the work most interesting, stimulating, and comfortable, next to working on another Nallajim—”

“Another female Nallajim, it means,” Tarsedth said, ruffling its fur in disapproval, or perhaps envy. “Do you know that in the three years that Seldal has been here it has been nested by nearly every female LSVO on the staff? What they see to ruffle their tail feathers in such a scrawny, self-effacing nonentity is beyond my understanding.”

“Is my translator faulty,” Lioren asked, trying to hide his excitement at acquiring this new and potentially useful datum, “or am I to understand that Seldal actually discussed its Educator-tape problems with a couple of trainees?”

“The discussion was perfunctory,” the Hudlar said before Tarsedth could reply, “and was concerned with personal preferences rather than problems. Seldal is very approachable, for a Senior, and usually invites post-op questions from anyone who has been watching from the observation gallery. There wasn’t time this morning or you could have asked questions yourself.

“In any case,” it went on, turning itself ponderously to regard Tarsedth, “my interest in Seldal’s love life, which seems to have become less gaudy in recent weeks, is at best academic. But even among my own species it is not uncommon for female-mode persons to be attracted to males who have personalities which are as shy and timid as that of Seldal. Such people are frequently more sensitive, unhurried, and interesting as lovers.”

It returned its attention to Lioren and continued. “To modify a saying of one of our classmates, which seems to apply to activities associated with same-species reproduction, a faint heart sometimes wins the fair lady.”

“It’s talking about Hadley,” Tarsedth explained, “an Earth-human trainee. It was supposed to have gone into the maintenance tunnels with …”

He had not heard that particular item of gossip before, probably because no official notice had been taken of the incident or the grapevine had been already overloaded with even more scandalous material that day. The story of Hadley’s misdemeanor was followed by others, many of which had found their way to his department in the form of much less interesting psych-file updates which were, regrettably, free of Tarsedth’s creative exaggeration. He was forced to use every verbal stra-tegem he could devise to bring the conversation back to the Nallajim Senior and keep it there.

Lioren was discovering many interesting facts about Seldal’s behavior, personality, and interests. It was information which he would not have been able to obtain from the Senior Physician’s file. So far as his assignment was concerned, the evening was being spent profitably and, he thought with increasing feelings of guilt, very enjoyably.

THE following morning’s work period was sufficiently far advanced for his digestive system to begin complaining that it had nothing to engage its attention when Braithwaite walked slowly across to Lioren’s desk. Placing its flabby pink hands palms downward on an uncluttered area of the work surface, it bent its arms so that its head was close to his and said quietly, “You haven’t spoken a word for more than four hours. Is there a problem?”

Lioren leaned back, irritated by the uninvited close approach of the being, and by the fact that on several previous occasions it had criticized him for talking too much. Even though Braithwaite was showing concern and trying to be helpful, he wished that his immediate superior’s behavior would not vacillate so. There were times when he much preferred the approach of O’Mara, who was, at least, consistently nasty.