“You know I wasn’t,” Conway said, opening his eyes to see Prilicla clinging to the ceiling above him, trembling uncontrollably as it was washed by his own and the patient’s emotional radiation.
Doctor Prilicla was of physiological classification GLNO — an insectile, exoskeletal, six-legged life-form with two pairs of iridescent and not quite atrophied wings and possessing a highly developed empathic faculty. Only on Cinruss, with its dense atmosphere and one-eighth gravity, could a race of insects have grown to such dimensions and in time developed intelligence and an advanced civilization.
But in both the hospital and Rhabwar, Prilicla was in deadly danger for most of its working day. It had to wear gravity nullifiers everywhere outside its own special quarters because the gravity pull which the majority of its colleagues considered normal would instantly have crushed it flat. When Prilicla held a conversation with anyone it kept well out of reach of any thoughtless movement of an arm or tentacle which would easily have caved in its eggshell body or snapped off one of the incredibly fragile limbs.
Not that anyone would have wanted to hurt the little being — it was far too well liked. The Cinrusskin’s empathic faculty forced it to be considerate to everyone in order to make the emotional radiation of the people around it as pleasant for itself as possible — except when its professional duties exposed it to pain and associated violent emotion in a patient or to the unintentionally unpleasant feelings of its colleagues.
“You should be sleeping, Prilicla,” Conway said with concern, “or are Murchison and Naydrad emoting too loudly for you?”
“No, friend Conway,” the empath replied timidly. “Their emotional radiation troubles me no more than that of the other people on the ship. I came for a consultation.”
“Good!” Conway said. “You’ve had some useful thoughts on the treatment of our—”
“I wish to consult you about myself,” Prilicla said, committing the — to it — gross impoliteness of breaking in on another’s conversation without prior apology. For a moment its pipestem legs and body shook with the strength of Conway’s reaction, then it added, “Please, my friend, control your feelings.”
Conway tried to be clinical about the little Cinrusskin who had been his friend, colleague, and invaluable assistant on virtually every major case since his promotion to Senior Physician. His sudden concern and unadmitted fear of the possible loss of a close friend were not helping that friend and were, in fact, causing it even greater distress. He tried hard to think of Prilicla as a patient, only as a patient, and slowly the empath’s trembling abated.
“What,” Conway said in time-honored fashion, “seems to be the trouble?”
“I do not know,” the Cinrusskin said. “I have no previous experience and there are no recorded instances of the condition among my species. I am confused, friend Conway, and frightened.”
“Symptoms?” Conway asked.
“Empathic hypersensitivity,” Prilicla replied. “The emotional radiation of yourself, the rest of the medical team, and the crew is particularly strong. I can clearly detect the feelings of Lieutenant Chen in the Power Room and those of the rest of the crew in Control with little or no attenuation with distance. The expected, low-key feelings of disappointment and sorrow caused by the unsuccessful rescue bid are reaching me with shocking intensity. We have encountered these tragedies before now, friend Conway, but this emotional reaction to the condition of a being who is a complete stranger is — is—”
“We do feel bad about this one,” Conway broke in gently, “perhaps worse than we normally do, and the feelings are cumulative. And you, as an emotion-sensitive, could be expected to feel them much more strongly. This might explain your apparent hypersensitivity.”
The empath trembled with the effort needed to express disagreement. It said, “No, friend Conway. The condition and emotional radiation of the EGCL, highly unpleasant though it is, is not the problem. It is the ordinary, everyday radiation of everyone else — the minor embarrassments, the bursts of irritation, the odd emotions associated with the feeling you Earth-humans call humor and the like, are registering so strongly with me that I find difficulty in thinking clearly.”
“I see,” Conway said automatically, although he could not see at all. “Apart from the hypersensitivity, are there any other symptoms?”
“Some unlocalized discomfort in the limbs and lower thorax,” Prilicla replied. “I checked the areas with my scanner but could find no obstructions or abnormalities.”
Conway had been reaching for his own pocket scanner but thought better of it. Without taking a Cinrusskin physiology tape he would have only a vage idea of what to look for, and Prides, Prilicla was a first-class diagnostician and surgeon and if it said that there were no abnormalities then that was good enough for Conway.
“Cinrusskins are susceptible to illness only during childhood,” Prilicla went on. “The adults do occasionally suffer from nonphysical disturbances, and the onset of symptoms, as expected with psychological disorders, takes many forms, some of which resemble my present—”
“Nonsense, you’re not going insane!” Conway broke in. But he did not feel as sure as he sounded, and he was uncomfortably aware that Prilicla knew his feelings and was beginning to tremble again.
“The obvious course,” Conway said, trying to regain his clinical calm, “is to desensitize you with a hefty sedative shot. You know that as well as I. But you are too good a doctor to self-administer the indicated medication which would, we both realize, simply be treating the symptoms, without first doing something about the disease, like reporting it to me. Isn’t that so?”
“That is so, friend Conway.”
“Right, then,” Conway said briskly. “You also realize that we can’t do anything about curing the condition until we have you back in the hospital. In the meantime we’ll treat the symptoms with heavy sedation. I want you completely unconscious. You are relieved of all medical duties, naturally, until we have the answer to your little problem.”
Conway could almost feel the little empath’s objections while he was lifting it gently into a pressure litter fitted with gravity nullifiers and the incredibly soft restraints required by this uftrafragile species. Finally Prilicla spoke.
“Friend Conway,” it said weakly, “you know that I am the only medically trained empath on the staff. Our patient wiil require extensive and delicate cerebral surgery. If my condition precludes me from taking a direct part in the operation, I wish to be treated in an adjacent ward where this abnormal hyper-sensitivity will better enable me to monitor the EGCL’s unconscious emotional radiation.
“You know as well as I do,” it went on, “that brain surgery in a hitherto unknown life-form is largely exploratory and very, very risky, and my empathic faculty enables me to sense when surgical intervention in any area is right or wrong. By becoming a patient I have lost none of my abilities as a diagnostic empath, and for this reason, friend Conway, I want your promise that I will be placed as close as possible to the patient and restored to full consciousness while the operation is in progress.”
“Well—” Conway began.
“I am not a telepath, as you know,” Prilicla said, so weakly that Conway had to increase the gain on his translator to hear it. “But your feelings, if you do not intend to keep this promise, will be clear to me.”
Conway had never known the normally timid Prilicla to be so forthright in its manner. Then he thought of what the empath was asking him to do — to subject it, in its hypersensitive state, to the emotional trauma of a lengthy operation during which, because of the patient’s strange physiological classification and metabolism, the effectiveness of the anesthetics could not be guaranteed. His hard-held clinical detachment slipped for a moment and he felt like any concerned friend or relative watching a patient whose prognosis was uncertain.