Hospital Station

VI

The infant’s appendages curled in the way O’Mara knew meant that it was going to cry again, and grimly he began pushing himself onto his elbows for another patting session. That was the very least he could do. And even though he was convinced that going on was useless, the kid had to be given the chance. O’Mara had to have time to finish the treatment without interruptions, and to insure that he would have to answer this Monitor’s questions in a full and satisfactory manner. If the kid started crying again he wouldn’t be able to do that.

For your kind cooperation,” the Major was saying dryly. “First off, I want an explanation for your sudden change of personality.”

“I was bored,” said O’Mara. “Hadn’t enough to do. Maybe I’d become a bit of a sorehead, too. But the main reason for setting out to be a lousy character was that there was a job I could do here which could not be done by a nice guy. I’ve studied a lot and think of myself as a pretty good rule-of-thumb psychologist …

Suddenly came disaster. O’Mara’s supporting elbow slipped as he was reaching for the counterweight rope and he crashed back to the floor from a distance of two-and-a-half feet. At three Gs this was equivalent to a fall of seven feet. Luckily he was in a heavy duty suit with a padded helmet so he did not lose consciousness. But he did cry out, and instinctively held onto the rope as he fell.

That was his mistake.

One weight dropped, the other swung up too far. It hit the ceiling with a crash and loosened the bracket which supported the light metal girder which carried it. The whole structure began to sag, and slip, then was suddenly yanked floorward by four Gs onto the infant below. In his dazed state O’Mara could not guess at the amount of force expended on the infant-whether it was a harder than usual pat, the equivalent of a sharp smack on the bottom, or something very much more serious. The baby was very quiet afterward, which worried him.

For the third time,” shouted the Monitor, “what the blazes is going on in there?”

O’Mara muttered something which was unintelligible even to himself. Then Caxton joined in.

“There’s something fishy going on, and I bet it involves the kid! I’m going over to see—” “No wait!” said O’Mara desperately. “Give me six hours …” “I’ll see you,” said Caxton, “in ten minutes.” “Caxton!” O’Mara shouted, “if you come through my airlock you’ll kill me! I’ll have the inner seal jammed open and if you open the outer one you’ll evacuate the place. Then the Major will lose his prisoner.”

There was a sudden silence, then:

“What,” asked the Monitor quietly, “do you want the six hours for?”

O’Mara tried to shake his head to clear it, but now that it weighed three times heavier than normal he only hurt his neck. What did he want six hours for? Looking around him he began to wonder, because both the food sprayer and its connecting water tank had been wrecked by the fall of tackle from the ceiling. He could neither feed, wash, nor scarcely see his patient for fallen wreckage, so all he could do for six hours was watch and wait for a miracle.

“I’m going over,” said Caxton doggedly.

“You’re not,” said the Major, still polite but with a no-nonsense tone. “I want to get to the bottom of this. You’ll wait outside until I’ve spoken with O’Mara alone. Now O’Mara, what … is … happening?”

Flat on his back again O’Mara fought to gain enough breath to carry on an extended conversation. He had decided that the best thing to do would be to tell the Monitor the exact truth, and then appeal to him to back O’Mara up in the only way possible which might save the infant — by leaving him alone for six hours. But O’Mara was feeling very low as he talked, and his vision was so poor that he couldn’t tell sometimes whether his eyelids were open or shut. He did see someone hand the Major a note, but Craythorne didn’t read it until O’Mara had finished speaking.

“You are in a mess,” Craythorne said finally. He briefly looked sympathetic, then his tone hardened again. “And ordinarily I should be forced to do as you suggest and give you that six hours. After all, you have the book and so you know more than we do. But the situation has changed in the last few minutes. I’ve just had word that two Hudlarians have arrived, one of them a doctor. You had better step down, O’Mara. You tried, but now let some skilled help salvage what they can from the situation. For the kid’s sake,” he added.

It was three hours later. Caxton, Waring and O’Mara were facing the Major across the Monitor’s desk. Craythorne had just come in.

He said briskly, “I’m going to be busy for the next few days so we’ll get this business settled quickly. First, the accident. O’Mara, your case depends entirely on Waring’s corroboration for your story. Now there seems to be some pretty devious thinking here on your part. I’ve already heard Waring’s evidence, but to satisfy my own curiosity I’d like to know what you think he said?”

“He backed up my story,” said O’Mara wearily. “He had no choice.”

He looked down at his hands, still thinking about the desperate sick infant he had left in his quarters. He told himself again that he wasn’t responsible for what had happened, but deep inside he felt that if he had shown more flexibility of mind and had started the pressure treatment sooner the kid would have been all right now. But the result of the accident enquiry didn’t seem to matter now, one way or the other, and neither did the Waring business.

“Why do you think he had no choice?” prodded the Monitor sharply.

Caxton had his mouth open, looking confused. Waring would not meet O’Mara’s eyes and he was beginning to blush.

“When I came here,” O’Mara said dully, “I was looking out for a secondary job to fill my spare time, and hounding Waring was it. He is the reason for my being an obnoxious type, that was the only way I could go to work on him. But to understand that you have to go a bit further back. Because of that power pile accident,” O’Mara went on, “all the men of his section were very much in Waring’s debt — you’ve probably heard the details by now. Waring himself was a mess. Physically he was below par — had to get shots to keep his blood-count up, was just about strong enough to work his control console, and was fairly wallowing in self-pity. Psychologically he was a wreck. Despite all Pelling’s assurances that the shots would only be necessary for a few more months he was convinced that he had pernicious anemia. He also believed that he had been made sterile, again despite everything the doctor told him, and this conviction made him act and talk in a way which would give any normal man the creeps — because that sort of thing is pathological and there wasn’t anything like that wrong with him. When I saw how things were I started to ridicule him every chance I got. I hounded him unmercifully. So the way I see it he had no other choice but to support my story. Simple gratitude demanded it.”

“I begin to see the light,” said the Major. “Go on.”

“The men around him were very much in his debt,” O’Mara continued. “But instead of putting the brakes on, or giving him a good talking to, they smothered him with sympathy. They let him win all fights, card games or whatever, and generally treated him like a little tin god. I did none of these things. Whenever he lisped or stuttered or was awkward about anything,” O’Mara went on, “whether it was due to one of his mental and self-inflicted disabilities or a physical one which he honestly couldn’t help, I jumped on him hard with both feet. Maybe I was too hard sometimes, but remember that I was one man trying to undo the harm that was being done by fifty. Naturally he hated my guts, but he always knew exactly where he was with me. And I never pulled punches. On the very few occasions when he was able to get the better of me, he knew that he had won despite everything I could do to stop him — unlike his friends who let him beat them at everything and in so doing made his winning meaningless. That was exactly what he needed for what ailed him, somebody to treat him as an equal and made no allowances at all. So when this trouble came,” O’Mara ended, “I was pretty sure he would begin to see what I’d been doing for him — consciously as well as subconsciously — and that simple gratitude plus the fact that basically he is a decent type would keep him from withholding the evidence which would clear me. Was I right?”

“You were,” said the Major. He paused to quell Caxton who had jumped to his feet, protesting, then continued, “Which brings us to the FROB infant.

“Apparently your baby caught one of the mild but rare diseases which can only be treated successfully on the home planet,” Craythorne went on. He smiled suddenly. “At least, that was what they thought until a few hours ago. Now our Hudlarian friends state that the proper treatment has already been initiated by you and that all they have to do is wait for a couple of days and the infant will be as good as new. But they’re very annoyed with you, O’Mara,” the Monitor continued. “They say that you’ve rigged special equipment for petting and soothing the kid and that you’ve done this much more often than is desirable. The baby has been overfed and spoiled shamelessly, they say, so much so that at the moment it prefers human beings to members of its own species—”

Suddenly Caxton banged the desk. “You’re not going to let him get away with this,” he shouted, red-faced. “Waring doesn’t know what he’s saying sometimes..

“Mr. Caxton,” said the Monitor sharply, “All the evidence available proves that Mr. O’Mara is blameless, both at the time of the accident and while he was looking after the infant later. However, I am not quite finished with him here, so perhaps you two would be good enough to leave …

Caxton stormed out, followed more slowly by Waring. At the door the tractor-beam man paused, addressed one printable and three unprintable words to O’Mara, grinned suddenly and left. The Major sighed.

“O’Mara,” he said sternly, “you’re out of a job again, and while I don’t as a rule give unasked for advice I would like to remind you of a few facts. In a few weeks time the staff and maintenance engineers for this hospital will be arriving and they will be comprised of practically every known species in the galaxy. My job is to settle them in and keep friction from developing between them so that eventually they will work together as a team. No text-book rules have been written to cover this sort of thing yet, but before they sent me here my superiors said that it would require a good rule-of-thumb psychologist with plenty of common sense who was not afraid to take calculated risks. I think it goes without saying that two such psychologists would be even better …”

O’Mara was listening to him all right, but he was thinking of that grin he’d got from Waring. Both the infant and Waring were going to be all right now, he knew, and in his present happy state of mind he could refuse nothing to anybody. But apparently the Major had mistaken his abstraction for something else.

“…Dammit I’m offering you a job! You fit here, can’t you see that? This is a hospital, man, and you’ve cured our first patient …