hospital gown. I mean, Thornnastor is all right as a person, but it’s an FGLI, after all, and its movements are about as graceful as those of a six-legged baby elephant. Did you see what it did to the ladder on the Casualty Deck, and to the door of your cabin, ma’am?”
He broke off to smile admiringly at Murchison. Lieutenant Haslam muttered something about often feeling like breaking down the pathologist’s door himself, and the Captain silenced him with a frown. Lieutenants Dodds and Chen, like the good junior officers they were, maintained a respectful silence, and in common with the other male Earth-human DBDGs present, exuded minor-key emotional radiation of a pleasurable nature, which Prilicla would have described as being associated with the urge to reproduce. Charge Nurse Naydrad, who rarely allowed anything to interfere with bodily refueling, kept on moving large portions of the green and yellow vegetable fiber it was pleased to call food, and ignored them.
The emotion-sensitive Doctor Prilicla, who could ignore nobody, hovered silently above the edge of the table, showing no signs of emotional distress. Obviously the Captain was not as irritated as he sounded.
“… Seriously, Doctor,” Fletcher went on, “it isn’t just Thornnastor blundering into areas of the ship that were not meant for FGLIs. Some of the other e-ts take up a lot of space as well, and there are times when each crew- member of the Tenelphi has about half a dozen e-ts or Earth-humans sitting at his feet while he chatters on and on about the things he saw on that derelict, and they treat us as if we’d caught a mutated form of leprosy instead of the same influenza virus as the scoutship crew.”
Conway laughed. “I can understand their feelings, Captain. They lost material of priceless historic value, which was already considered irretrievably lost for many centuries. That means they have lost it twice and feel twice as angry with me for not bringing back an ambulance shipful of records and artifacts from the Einstein. At the time I was tempted. But who knows what else I might have brought back with those records in the way of seven-hundred-year-old bacterial and viral infections from which we have little or no immunity? I couldn’t take the risk, and they, when they stop being bitterly disappointed amateur historians and go back to being the hospital’s top seniors and Diagnosticians, will know that, given the same circumstances, they would have done exactly what I did.”
“I agree, Doctor,” said Fletcher, “and I sympathize with your problem and theirs. I also know that they have to undergo a very thorough and, well, physically inconvenient decontamination procedure on leaving the ship, regardless of their physiological classifications, and this weeds out all but the most enthusiastic or masochistic amateur historians. All I want to know is whether there is a polite way, or any way, of telling them to stay off my ship.”
“Some of them,” said Conway helplessly, “are Diagnosticians.”
“You say that as if it was some kind of answer, Doctor,” said the Captain, looking perplexed. “What is so special about a Diagnostician?”
Everyone stopped eating to look at Conway, who alone among them could not eat anywhere outside his sterile cabin. Prilicla’s hover became somewhat unstable, and Naydrad gave a short foghorn blast that was untranslatable but was probably the Kelgian equivalent of a snort of incredulity.
It was Murchison who finally spoke. “The Diagnosticians are very special, Captain,” she said. “And peculiar. You already know that they are the top-ranking medical personnel in the hospital, and as such, cannot be readily ordered around. Another reason is that when you speak to one of them you can never be sure who or what you are talking to …”
Sector General was equipped to treat every known form of intelligent life, Murchison explained, but no single person could hold in his or its brain even a fraction of the physiological data necessary for this purpose. Surgical dexterity and a certain amount of e-t diagnostic ability came with training and experience, but the complete physiological knowledge of any patient requiring complex treatment was furnished by means of an Educator tape. This was simply the brain recording of some great medical authority belonging to the same species as or a species similar to that of the patient undergoing treatment.
If an Earth-human doctor had to treat a Kelgian patient, he took a DBLF physiology tape until treatment was completed, after which the recording was erased from his mind. The sole exceptions to this rule were senior physicians with teaching duties, which required the retention of one or two tapes, and the Diagnosticians.
A Diagnostician was one of the hospital elite, a being whose mind was considered stable enough to retain six, seven, and in a few cases, ten physiology tapes simultaneously. To these datacrammed minds were given projects such as original research in xenological medicine and the treatment of new diseases in hitherto unknown life-forms.
But the tapes did not impart only physiological data. Rather, the complete memory and personality of the entity who had possessed that knowledge was transferred as well. In effect, a Diagnosticianan subjected himself or itself voluntarily to the most drastic form of schizophrenia. The entities apparently sharing a Diagnostician’s mind could well be aggressive, unpleasant individuals-geniuses, whether medical or otherwise, were rarely pleasant people-with all sorts of peeves and phobias.
The original personality was never submerged completely, but depending on the case or research project currently being worked on and the depth of concentration required for it, one could never be sure of a Diagnostician’s reaction to any request that was not of a medical nature. Even then it was considered good manners to find out who or what kind of personality was in partial mental control of the entity concerned before saying anything at all. As a class they were not people one gave orders to, and even the hospital’s Chief Psychologist O’Mara had to treat them with a certain degree of circumspection.
“… So I’m afraid you can’t just tell them to go away, Captain,” Murchison went on, “and the seniors accompanying those Diagnosticians will have sound medical reasons, as well as non-medical ones, for being here. You should also remember that for the past two weeks they have been checking us practically cell by cell, and they might become even more thorough if we were to suggest that they stop wasting time talking history to the scoutship crew and—”
“Not that,” said the Captain hurriedly, and sighed. “But Thornnastor seems a friendly enough being, if a bit big and awkward, and it is our most frequent visitor. Could you suggest to it, ma’am, that if it came less often and without its medical retinue …”
Murchison shook her head firmly. “Thornnastor is Diagnosticianin-Charge in Pathology and as such is the hospital’s senior Diagnostician. It is also a source of news, a friend, and my head of department. Anyway, I enjoy Thorny’s visits. You may think it odd that a Tralthan FGLI, an oversized, elephantine, six-legged, warmblooded oxygen-breather with four manipulatory appendages and more eyes than seems decent should relish discussing a juicy piece of gossip from the SNLU section of the methane wards. You may even wonder how anything of a scandalous nature could occur between two intelligent crystalline entities living at minus one hundred and fifty degrees centigrade, or why their off-duty activities are of such interest to a warm-blooded oxygen-breather. But you must understand that Thorny’s feeling for other e-ts, and even for us Earth-humans, is unique. It is, you see, one of our most stable and well-integrated multi-personalities …
Fletcher held up both hands in a gesture of surrender. “As well as possessing the ability to instill a degree of personal loyalty in its staff, which is unusual, to say the least. All right, ma’am, you’ve convinced me. I am no longer ignorant about Diagnosticians, and I can do nothing about their overrunning my ship.”
“I’m afraid not, Captain,” Murchison agreed sympathetically. “Only O’Mara could do something about that. But he is very fond of his Diagnosticians and of saying that any being sane enough to be a Diagnostician is mad …
While Murchison and Fletcher had been speaking, the illumination in the dining compartment had undergone a subtle change, caused by the vision screen lighting up to show the craggy features of the Chief Psychologist.
“Why is it that every time I break in on a conversation I find people talking about me,” O’Mara asked sourly. “But don’t apologize or explain; you would strain my credulity. Conway, Fletcher, I have news for you. Doctor, you can discard that spacesuit, reconnect your cabin to the ship’s air system, and resume eating and direct physical contact with your colleagues.” He smiled faintly, but did not look at Murchison as he went on. “The ship has been cleared as free from infection, but frankly, this business has uncovered a serious weakness in patient reception procedures.
“Up until now,” he continued, “we have assumed, and rightly, that new patients or casualties pose no threat because e-t pathogens cannot affect entities of another species. And because any being traveling in space, even on an interplanetary hop, has to undergo strict health checks, we tended to be a bit lax regarding same-species
