O’Mara continued paying the same form of professional compliment and, thanks to the padre and Braithwaite talking freely about their chief, the people with whom he came into contact became more relaxed and even pleased in inverse proportion ~3 his degree of nastiness. His subordinates had done a good job of convincing everyone that, psychologically speaking, black was white. Only the seriously distressed personnel got as far as his inner office, his staff were fond of telling each other when he was within earshot, because the less troubled people preferred to trust themselves to the friendlier padre or Braithwaite-if they didn’t have second thoughts and decide to solve their problems themselves. Which was fine by O’Mara, because he had always held that in the long term self-help was the best kind.
As the weeks and months passed into years, O’Mara grew accustomed to his new rank, mostly by completely ignoring it and treating the higher and lower ranks as if they were the same. He saved the increased salary and duly took all of the leave to which a major was entitled, although sometimes he returned saddened and angry rather than relaxed. But Iron Man O’Mara, as rumor had it, was capable of suffering nothing less than metal fatigue, so he was not supposed to have emotional problems. If anyone out of polite curiosity asked where he had been or whether or not he had enjoyed himself there, he told them nothing in such a way that they never asked him again.
But there were times when he could not be impolite even with those people he admired and thought of as the closest thing he had to friends. Thornnastor-who had been appointed diagnosticianin-charge of Pathology, although it preferred to keep its subjects alive and advise on their cure rather than dissect them postmortem-had many problems. They were not its own because, in spite of its mind carrying six different other-species Educator tapes, it was the most intelligent and emotionally stable entity in the hospital. But it had to discuss the emotional upsets, interstaff conflicts, and possible xenophobic reactions within its department’s widening sphere of influence, as well as requesting psychiatric support with patients whose conditions included a psychological component. And there was Senior Tutor Mannen (whose other-species students insisted that he and his dog had a symbiotic relationship), who worried continually about the mental health and professional future of his charges. Mannen was especially concerned, as was O’Mara himself, about a male and a female Earth-human, both of whom were exemplary students with bright futures in other-species medicixie ahead of them. It was small consolation that the trouble they might cause themselves, their colleagues, and the succession of less brilliant superiors they would encounter on their climb to medical eminence would not be their own fault.
Mannen did not want him to tinker with two such strong, healthy, and well-integrated minds even if he’d had the right to do so, and when, at the senior tutor’s insistence, O’Mara interviewed them in depth, neither did he. Some personalities were better left as they were. But the situation with them would have to be closely monitored and, indirectly, controlled.
He had few ethical qualms about exerting influence of a nonpsychological type on them through the deliberate manipulation of their duty schedules. It was, after all, for their own good.
With the best will in the world-and he would admit only to himself that he liked and admired both of them very much-he would have to see to it that for the time being trainees Murchison and Conway were kept apart.
CHAPTER 26
Murchison had created a precedent and delighted Senior Tutor Mannen by being appointed charge nurse of Ward ThirtyNine, the mixed Melfan, Kelgian, and Nidian surgical recovery unit, immediately upon graduation from trainee status. There she asked nothing of her nursing staff that she wasn’t able and willing to do herself, and she led her team politely, firmly, and with absolute fairness from in front. On O’Mara’s recommendation, delivered via Mannen, she was given increased responsibility for certain problem patients who were not responding to orthodox lines of treatment. As a result, her ability to observe, analyze, synthesize, and diagnose from the often sparse available data brought her work, as O’Mara knew it would, to the attention of Thornnastor, who said that she was performing original work of a quality not expected of a member of the nursing staff and, if she was willing, her talents could be more gainfully employed in its own department as a junior pathologist. Murchison, as her psych file said she would, was happy to transfer up and across the ladder of promotion, because original xenobiological research was the kind of work she had always wanted to do.
She allowed herself no distractions because, she had told Mannen pleasantly but firmly, she had no time to waste on socializing with its risk of her becoming emotionally involved with a male member of her species. This complete dedication to her career pleased the senior tutor very much, but not her Earth-human male colleagues, who were fond of admitting to everyone including O’Mara that, so far as they were concerned, she was the only person in the hospital that they found impossible to regard with anything resembling clinical detachment. Every one of them had attempted vainly to conquer and exploit what they considered to be one of the hospital’s most desirable natural resources, only to be rejected firmly and with such good humor that their feelings of desire never turned to dislike.
But unrequited love, as O’Mara knew from long experience, was rarely a life- or sanity-threatening condition.
The younger Conway, he remembered, had been the only Earth-human male on the junior staff who had not shown, or had done a good job of concealing, his feelings for her during the first few occasions when they made professional contact. It wasn’t that he was antisocial, anything but; it was simply that he honestly preferred making friends with other-species staff. He had told O’Mara during the initial interview that his life’s ambition was to practice medicine in a multi-species hospital, he had succeeded in gaining entry to the biggest and best in the galaxy, and a serious romantic relationship would be an unwanted distraction from his studies. Normally an Earth-human person who preferred socializing with Tralthans, Melfans, and the other even more alien patients and staff members would have been a matter for psychiatric concern, but in Sector General such an abnormality was a distinct advantage.
The psych profiles of Murchison and young Conway, he remembered, had been so alike that if the old adage about opposites attracting and likes repelling had held true they should never have become an item. But O’Mara had taken such a fatherly interest in them fulfilling their future potential that he had shamelessly tinkered, not with their minds, but with their single and later their joint work assignments. He had been deliberately hard on them by forcing them to make clinical adaptations and decisions and to take responsibility far above their nominal rank. And what he hadn’t done to them fate had-in the shape of the Etlan War and a succession of combined rescue and first-contact missions on the special ambulance ship Rhabwar-testing them not quite to destruction until they were really good, separately and together. At all times he had remained as sarcastic and nasty toward them as ever. But he wondered if they would ever realize how much he liked them as people and how intensely proud he was of the fact that Murchison, still so maturely beautiful that Earth-human males looked after her when she passed, was now in line to succeed Thornnastor as head of Pathology, while the brilliant young Conway, no longer quite so young, was the diagnostician-in-charge of Other-Species Surgery, and that he felt especially pleased that they were now life-mates.