O’Mara’s thumb was on the door button when Craythorne spoke from behind him.
“Am I being nasty enough, Lieutenant?”
“Not bad, sir,” said O’Mara, “but you need more practice.”
One-Eleven had been the first accommodation level to be completed and fully furnished to the requirements of five different other-species life-forms. The Maintenance Department was quietly but intensely proud of it and had promised that real soon, or at least as soon as possible, the other uncompleted and partially occupied accommodation levels would be brought up to the same standard of comfort. Since One-Eleven’s completion it had been the hospital’s most desirable place to live, but now, it seemed, the neighborhood was fast going to hell.
He already knew who the offenders were, but made his first calls in the side corridors housing the innocent bystanders. Perhaps the major would have considered this a subtle approach.
In the short corridor accommodating the Kelgian DBLFs, the first few door IDs were flagged ABSENT, ON DUTY or SLEEPING, DO NOT DISTURB. The fourth said OCCUPIED, but several minutes of almost continuous thumb pressure passed before the door was opened by a Kelgian wearing large, padded headphones which it was lifting from its ears. Behind it he could see a lighted screen showing clinically nasty things being performed deep inside a species whose organs he couldn’t identify~
The Kelgian ruffled its fur irritably at him and said, “I’m studying. Didn’t hear you. What do you want?”
“Information,” he replied, falling into the other’s direct mode of speech, “regarding complaints of high levels of organic noise in this area. Have you been inconvenienced by it?”
“Yes, but not now,” said the Kelgian. “My species has a low tolerance for being vivisected by Melfan pincers or trampled to death by Tralthan feet, so I was afraid to attempt to reduce the noise level at the source by remonstrating with them…” It tapped an earphone with one of its tiny fingers. . so I took other measures. Go away.
Its door hissed shut before O’Mara could finish saying, “Thank you.
A few minutes later he was trying to talk to one of the Eurilian MSVKs, a storklike, tripedal nonflier whose atrophied wings were flapping so furiously that they all but lifted it into the air anyway, and whose angry, twittering speech didn’t allow him to get a word in edgewise.
… and you’ve got to do something about this!” the Euril was saying, not for the first time. “Somehow you’ve 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.