got to stop that infernal racket. It isn’t too bad when they visit each other’s rooms to talk over lectures, or whatever else they do. You hear the Tralthans rumbling at each other sometimes when they get excited and raise their voices, and the Melfans sound as if they’re beating their walls with sticks, but that’s just a noise nuisance and bearable. But then they go back to their rooms to settle for the night. It’s quiet for maybe an hour and we begin to feel safe. But when they start falling asleep the noise nearly blows me off my sleeping perch. And when they open their doors and the Tralthans and Melfans start complaining to each other about the noise they’re both making keeping the other party awake, by then everybody is awake and we’re lucky to get any sleep for the rest of the night. Or until next day during lectures when the tutors have harsh things to say to us for being inattentive. It’s quiet now because they are settling themselves to sleep, but any minute now… I’m not equipped to inflict physical damage, but more and more often I feel like murdering one of them, any one of them. You’ve got to do something before somebody bigger and stronger than I am does.”
O’Mara held up both hands placatingly. This was worse than he had been led to believe. For a moment he considered trying for a soft, conciliatory, Craythorne-type approach, then decided against it. The trouble that was developing here was much too serious for that. He would have to be tough.
“When you applied for a position here,” he said firmly, “you knew that you would have to work and live with persons of many different species. Are you no longer able to do that?”
The Euril didn’t reply. To O’Mara the expression on its feathered, birdlike face was unreadable, but he felt that the other was looking uneasy. Maybe hinting that it might be asked to leave Sector General was an unnecessary psychological overkill, especially as it was one of the injured parties.
Gently, he went on, “Don’t worry, that would be a measure of last resort. Did you complain person to person, and explain your problem to them directly?”
“I tried once, with one of the Tralthans,” the Euril replied. “It said it was sorry, but that many members of its species made noises in their sleep, that they couldn’t help it and that the only way to stop making the noises was for them to stop breathing. It sounded very irritated, the way we all are when we don’t get enough sleep. I didn’t want to risk irritating again someone with twelve times my body mass, and decided that complaining to the Melfans, who aren’t as big but are more excitable than Tralthans, would be better. It wasn’t. The one I spoke to used words that the translator wasn’t programmed to accept. Now I don’t talk to any of them.”
“But surely you talk to them during lectures,” said O’Mara, “or on the wards, in the dining hail, or on the recreation level?”
“A little,” the other replied. “But then it’s mostly answering questions from the tutor or charge nurse, or talking to wide-awake patients. If any of them make sleeping noises they do it somewhere else in the hospital, not here in study block. The dining hall is big enough to let everyone dine among their own people, so we don’t have to watch some of the others’ disgusting eating habits. The same goes for the rec deck. It’s better, and much more comfortable for us, if we stay away from them and them from us. Not just the snoring Tralthans and clattering Melfans, I mean everybody else.”
O’Mara started to speak, then decided against it because he could think of nothing constructive to say. The situation was much worse than he had thought.
One pint-sized furry Nidian still looked much like any other to O’Mara, but with the one who opened its door to him it was immediately obvious that the reverse did not hold true.
“You’re that other Earth-human psychologist, O’Mara,” it said. Even through the translator it sounded as if it were barking angrily at him. “What is a psychologist going to do about that damned noise? Tell me to think beautiful, positive thoughts and ignore it? Suggest I OD on tranquilizers? Move the source to the other side of the galaxy? What?”
“I agree,” said O’Mara, fighting an urge not to bark back at the irate little teddy bear, “that you have a legitimate complaint—”
“No!” snapped the Nidian. “I have a legitimate request. I want to be moved out of here. There’s Nidian accommodation on Level One-Fourteen, I’ve seen Maintenance working on it.”
“Level One-Fourteen isn’t just for Nidians,” said O’Mara quietly, but the other wasn’t listening to him.
“They haven’t finished the interior furnishings yet,” it went on, “and it won’t be nearly as comfortable as this place. But with a bunk and a chair and a console I’ll be able to study in peace, and during sleep periods Maintenance are considerate enough to stop hammering and drilling, so at night it will be quiet…
It was interrupted by a low, intermittent, growling sound from farther along the corridor that rose slowly in pitch and volume like a modulated foghorn before fading away. But the silence lasted only for the few moments necessary to lull a listener into thinking that it had gone away for good. The sound was muffled to an unknown extent by the sleeper’s room walls, but at times it was so deep that it seemed as if the accompanying subsonics were vibrating the bones as well as the eardrums. Before O’Mara could speak there was a new sound, a slow, irregular clicking like amplified castanets. The short periods of silence during the Tralthan snoring were filled by the Melfan sleeping sounds and vice versa. The noises weren’t all that loud, but together they were so nerve- shredding and insistent that O’Mara found himself clenching his teeth.
“I rest my case,” barked the Nidian. “Well, what are you going to do about it?”
O’Mara remained silent, because right then he didn’t know how to answer. Another set of amplified castanets were starting up, but they faltered and died. A door hissed open and a Melfan emerged and moved diagonally across the corridor to stab at a door call button with a bony pincer. A blocky Tralthan head and forebody appeared and they exchanged complaints about wanting to sleep in loud rumbling and clicking conversations interspersed with beeps because their translators had not been programmed to accept some of the words they were using. O’Mara shook his head.
“The Earth-human word that applies here,” said the Nidian as it closed its door, “is ‘chicken.’”
For a few minutes O’Mara watched the two quarreling ETs until he was sure that the dire threats of violence would be verbal rather than physical. He told himself that he was not being a moral coward, but he wasn’t sure that he entirely believed himself. Trying to talk sense to those two when he didn’t know how to solve the problem would simply increase the level of noise, especially if they made him lose his temper. Before he talked to them he needed to know what he was talking about.
He had to see a doctor.
It would have to be a friendly, approachable, closemouthed doctor, he decided, who was neither a Tralthan nor a Melfan but who knew a lot about the behavior of other-species staff under stress.
CHAPTER 12
Senior Tutor Mannen was an Earth-human male DBDG whose age was indeterminate because his wrinkled, balding scalp was completely at odds with the fresh, youthful features visible from his eyebrows down. On the desk before him lay a neat pile of opened lecture folders and tapes, and frolicking around his feet there was a small, brown and white and very well house-trained puppy. The puppy went everywhere with him, except into OR, and there was a rumor, never officially denied by Mannen himself, that they slept together. The senior tutor looked up from his work, pointed to a chair, inclined his head in recognition, and waited.
O’Mara hesitated, then said, “Is your pup settling in okay, Doctor?”
Mannen nodded. “If you’re sucking up to me through my dog,” he said, grinning, “you must want a favor, right? You were lucky to catch me between lectures. What can I do for you…” He looked at his watch. “… during the next nine and a half minutes?”
“These days,” said O’Mara sadly, “everybody is a psychologist. Sir, it’s just that I need a little physiological or perhaps medical information on the Tralthan and Melfan life-forms. And, in confidence, your advice on how best to use it. My problem is this…
Quickly he described the serious interpersonal situation that was developing on Level One-Eleven, including the close to xenophobic reactions of the innocent-bystander life-forms. Suddenly Mannen held up one hand and with the other began tapping keys on his communicator.
“This is going to take more than nine minutes,” he said briskly. “Lecture Room Eighteen? I will be unavoidably delayed. Tell trainee Yursedth to take over the class until I arrive. Off.” To O’Mara he went on wryly, “The trouble with this place is that it accepts only the highest grade of applicants. Yursedth thinks it knows more
