Before it had finished speaking, Hewlitt had thrown back the covers and swung his feet onto the floor, where a pair of soft ward shoes were waiting for them. Then he stood up quickly and said, “I like your first suggestion better, Nurse.”
The Hudlar moved aside to allow him to leave.
About twenty minutes later he was climbing back into bed, feeling clean and fresh and less tired, when the ceiling lights brightened to full strength and the day staff came bustling along the ward. A Kelgian pushing a small trolley loaded with basins and towels poked its furry head and shoulders between the screens and said, “Good morning, Patient Hewlitt. You look clean. Are you?”
“Yes,” he said, and it disappeared.
A few minutes later he heard two patients approaching and then passing his bed on their way to the washroom. One seemed to be large and heavy and walking on more than four feet, while the other one moved with an irregular, tapping sound. He knew they were patients because one was complaining about being wakened when it had only just succeeded in getting to sleep, and the other was insisting that Leethveeschi was conducting illegal sleepdeprivation research and it was being brainwashed as well as waiting to have the croamsteti on its kuld duct replaced. His translator reproduced the original word sounds, so presumably there was no equivalent part of an Earth-human body. He sympathized with them, whatever they were, over their missed sleep.
He had just settled back in the bed and closed his eyes, and the sounds of the ward were beginning to fade, when the Kelgian nurse reappeared, this time carrying his breakfast on a tray. Or maybe it was another Kelgian. As yet he could not tell the difference between one outsize, furry caterpillar and another, and doubted if he ever would.
“Sit up and eat at the bedside table, Patient Hewlitt,” it said. “Your particular species is subject to digestive upsets with accompanying regurgitation, I have learned, if gravity is not allowed to aid the movement of food to the stomach. Enjoy.”
“I don’t want to eat, Nurse,” he said, trying hard to control his irritation, “I want to sleep. Please go away.
“Eat it, then sleep,” said the nurse. “Or try to eat some of it, or Charge Nurse Leethveeschi will eat me.”
“It would?” said Hewlitt, the return of his earlier fears bringing him fully awake. In this place it might not be joking.
“Of course not,” said the nurse. “But only because it is a chlorine-breather and my body meat would poison it.”
“All right, I’ll try,” he said, knowing that way out here in Sector General, as it had been on the ship, the food would be synthesized. But when he raised the tray cover to look inside and the odor wafted up, he realized how long it had been since he had eaten, and added, “It looks and smells very good, Nurse.”
“It is a visually disgusting and nauseating mess,” said the nurse, backing hurriedly through the screens, “and it smells even worse.
“You don’t have much tact, do you, Nurse?” said Hewlitt, but its multiple footfalls were already receding up the ward. Then another voice called out to him from the bed opposite, belonging, he recalled, to a Kelgian patient called Henredth.
“What is tact?” it said.
Hewlitt ignored the question and tried to close his ears to the other questions that followed it until he had finished his breakfast, after which his eyes closed by themselves.
He wakened to the sound of quiet, alien voices and the sight of the screen that was still around his bed, which made him realize where he was. But somehow the realization was not as terrifying as it had been yesterday and, after a few minutes listening through his translator, he pressed the button that raised his bed screens.
Hewlitt saw at once that the Ian who had been in the bed beside his, Patient Makolli, had been moved while he had been asleep, because there was an Orligian lying there now. He recognized the species at once because it was the same as that of the medical officer on Treevendar, but this specimen seemed much older. The parts of it that were not hidden by the blankets-its head, arms, and upper chest-were covered by reddish brown fur that was streaked with grey. It was wearing a personal monitor like his own as well as a translator, but it took no notice of him. He was not sure whether it was asleep, anesthetized, or being antisocial.
In the bed opposite, Patient Kletilt had moved its viewscreen to what, for a Melfan, must have been a more convenient position for viewing in bed. Its eyes were hidden by the back of the set and it did not appear to be interested in anything or anyone but the program it was watching. Hewlitt had not known that his set could be swung over the bed like that and he made a mental note to experiment with it later.
In the bed beside Kletilt the Kelgian patient, Henredth, and a nurse belonging to a species he had never seen before, were talking together, but so quietly that his translator missed most of what they were saying. Beyond them there was a huge, elephantlike creature that he recognized as being a Tralthan. Instead of lying in a bed it stood on its six blocky legs, surrounded by a complicated framework to which was attached the harness that held it upright. He remembered reading somewhere that Tralthans did everything including sleeping on their feet, and even the healthy ones had great difficulty getting up again if they fell onto their sides.
He was still thinking about that and wondering why the creature was in hospital when Senior Physician Medalont, followed by Charge Nurse Leethveeschi, emerged from the nurses’ station. They skittered and squelched respectively along the center of the aisle, speaking to nobody and looking only in Hewlitt’s direction. He knew what the doctor’s first words would be.
“How are we feeling today, Patient Hewlitt?”
“Fine,” he replied, as it knew he would.
“Patient Hewlitt’s monitor readout since its arrival,” said Leethveeschi, “supports its nonclinical and subjective selfassessment. The patient appears to be in optimum health.”
“Good,” said the senior physician, clicking one of its pincers together in a gesture that might have signified approval but that looked threatening. “I would like to have another long talk with you, Patient Hewlitt, this time covering the episode that resulted in your first admission to an Earth hospital when you…
“But you already have that information,” Hewlitt broke in. “It’s in my case history, in much more detail than I could possibly remember now. There is nothing wrong with me, at least not right now. Instead of wasting time talking to me, surely you could visit patients who are more in need of attention?”
“They received attention,” Leethveeschi joined in, “while you were sleeping. Now it’s your turn. But Patient Hewlitt is right. I have more important things to do than listen to two healthy beings talking to each other. Do you need me here, Doctor?”
“Thank you, no, Charge Nurse,” Medalont replied. It returned its attention to Hewlitt and went on, “I am not wasting my time talking to you, because I am hoping that today, or sometime soon, you will tell me something that is not in your case history, something that will enable me to solve this clinical conundrum… .
The interrogation resumed at the point where it had ended the previous day, and it seemed to last forever. If Hewlitt could have read the other’s bony exoskeletal features, he felt sure that they would have been registering disappointment. But they were forced to break off when the voice of the charge nurse spoke from his bedside viewer. Until then he had not known that the device included a communicator.
“Doctor,” said Leethveeschi, “the midday meal is due in thirty minutes. Will you be finished with your patient by then?”