“It could make a good plea of self-defense,” Conway retorted. “But I was saying that it was desperately afraid of dying, so that it would be constantly trying to get a better, more efficient doctor for itself … Oh!”
“Oh, what?” said O’Mara.
It was Prilicla, the emotion sensitive who replied. It said, “Doctor Conway has just had an idea.”
“What is it, you young whelp? There’s no need to be so damn secretive …!” O’Mara’s voice had lost its gentle fatherly tone, and there was a gleam in his eye which said that he was glad that gentleness was no longer necessary. “What is wrong with the patient?”
Feeling happy and excited and at the same time very much unsure of himself, Conway stumbled across to the intercom and ordered some very unusual equipment, checked again that the patient was so thoroughly strapped down that it would be unable to move a muscle, then he said, “My guess is that the patient is perfectly sane and we’ve been blinding ourselves with psychological red herrings. Basically, the trouble is something it ate.”
“I had a bet with myself you would say that sometime during this case,” said O’Mara. He looked sick.
The equipment arrived-a slender, pointed wooden stake and a mechanism which would drive it downward at any required angle and controlled speeds. With the Tralthan’s help Conway set it up and moved it into position. He chose a part of the patient’s body which contained several vital organs which were, however, protected by nearly six inches of musculature and adipose, then he set the stake in motion. It was just touching the skin and descending at the rate of approximately two inches per hour.
“What the blazes is going on?” stormed O’Mara. “Do you think the patient is a vampire or something!”
“Of course not,” Conway replied. “I’m using a wooden stake to give the patient a better chance of defending itself. You wouldn’t expect it to stop a steel one, would you.” He motioned the Tralthan forward and together they watched the area where the stake was entering the EPLH’s body. Every few minutes Prilicla reported on the emotional radiation. O’Mara paced up and down, occasionally muttering to himself.
The point had penetrated almost a quarter of an inch when Conway noticed the first coarsening and thickening of the skin. It was taking place in a roughly circular area, about four inches in diameter, whose center was the wound created by the stake. Conway’s scanner showed a spongy, fibrous growth forming under the skin to a depth of half an inch. Visibly the growth thickened and grew opaque to his scanner’s current setting, and within ten minutes it had become a hard, bony plate. The stake had begun to bend alarmingly and was on the point of snapping.
“I’d say the defenses are now concentrated at this one point,” Conway said, trying to keep his voice steady, “so we’d better have it out.”
Conway and the Tralthan rapidly incised around and undercut the newly-formed bony plate, which was immediately transferred into a sterile, covered receptacle. Quickly preparing a shot-a not quite maximum dose of the specific he had tried the previous day-Conway injected, then went back to helping the Tralthan with the repair work on the wound. This was routine work and took about fifteen minutes, and when it was finished there could be no doubt at all that the patient was responding favorably to treatment.
Over the congratulations of the Tralthan and the horrible threats of O’Mara — the Chief Psychologist wanted some questions answered, fast- Prilicla said, “You have effected a cure, Doctor, but the patient’s anxiety level has markedly increased. It is almost frantic.”
Conway shook his head, grinning. “The patient is heavily anestheticized and cannot feel anything. However, I agree that at this present moment …” He nodded toward the sterile container … its personal physician must be feeling pretty bad.”
In the container the excised bone had begun to soften and leak a faintly purplish liquid. The liquid was rippling and sloshing gently about at the bottom of the container as if it had a mind of its own. Which was, in fact, the case.
Conway was in O’Mara’s office winding up his report on the EPLH and the Major was being highly complimentary in a language which at times made the compliments indistinguishable from insults. But this was O’Mara’s way, Conway was beginning to realize, and the Chief Psychologist was polite and sympathetic only when he was professionally concerned about a person.
He was still asking questions.
An intelligent, amoebic life-form, a organized collection of submicroscopic, virus-type cells, would make the most efficient doctor obtainable,” said Conway in reply to one of them. “It would reside within its patient and, given the necessary data, control any disease or organic malfunction from the inside. To a being who is pathologically afraid of dying it must have seemed perfect. And it was, too, because the trouble which developed was not really the doctor’s fault. It came about through the patient’s ignorance of its own physiological background.
“The way I see it,” Conway went on, “the patient had been taking its rejuvenation treatments at an early stage of its biological lifetime. I mean that it did not wait until middle or old age before regenerating itself. But on this occasion, either because it forgot or was careless or had been working on a problem which took longer than usual, it aged more than it had previously and acquired this skin condition. Pathology says that this was probably a common complaint with this race, and the normal course would be for the EPLH to slough off the affected skin and carry on as usual. But our patient, because the type of its rejuvenation treatment caused memory damage, did not know this, so its personal physician did not know it either.”
Conway continued, “This, er, resident physician knew very little about the medical background of its patient- host’s body, but its motto must have been to maintain the status quo at all costs. When pieces of its patient’s body threatened to break away it held onto them, not realizing that this could have been a normal occurrence like losing hair or a reptile periodically shedding its skin, especially as its master would have insisted that the occurrence was not natural. A pretty fierce struggle must have developed between the patient’s body processes and its doctor, with the patient’s mind also ranged against its doctor. Because of this the doctor had to render the patient unconscious the better to do what it considered to be the right thing.
“When we gave it the test shots the doctor neutralized them. They were a foreign substance being introduced into its patient’s body, you see. And you know what happened when we tried surgical removal. It was only when we threatened underlying vital organs with that stake, forcing the doctor to defend its patient at that one point …
“When you began asking for wooden stakes,” said O’Mara dryly, “I thought of putting you in a tight harness.”
Conway grinned. He said, “I’m recommending that the EPLH takes his doctor back. Now that Pathology has given it a fuller understanding of its employer’s medical and physiological history it should be the ultimate in personal physicians, and the EPLH is smart enough to see that.”
O’Mara smiled in return. “And I was worried about what it might do when it became conscious. But it turned out to be a very friendly, likeable type. Quite charming, in fact.”
As Conway rose and turned to go he said slyly, “That’s because it’s such a good psychologist. It is pleasant to people all the time …
He managed to get the door shut behind him before the explosion.
CHAPTER 5
n time the EPLH patient, whose name was Lonvellin, was discharged I and the steady procession of ailing e- ts who came under his care made the memory of Lonvellin’s fade in Conway’s mind. He did not know whether the EPLH had returned to its home galaxy or was still wandering this one in search of good deeds to do, and he was being kept too busy to care either way. But Conway was not quite finished with the EPLH.
Or more accurately, Lonvellin was not quite finished with Conway … “How would you like to get away from the hospital for a few months,
Doctor?” O’Mara said, when Conway had presented himself in the Chief Psychologist’s office in answer to an urgent summons over the PA. “It would be in the nature of a holiday, almost.”
Conway felt his initial unease grow rapidly into panic. He had urgent personal reasons for not leaving the hospital for a few months. He said, “Well …
