"James White - SG 03 - Major Operation" - читать интересную книгу автора (White James)terms, you are hoping that if enough other mistakes are made your friend's will pass relatively
unnoticed. And stop opening and closing your mouth-your turn to talk will come! One of the aspects of this whole situation which really troubles me is that I share responsibility for it in that I gave you an insoluble problem hoping that you might attack it from a new angle-an angle which might give a partial solution, enough to let our friend off the hook. Instead you created a new and perhaps worse problem! "I may have exaggerated things a little because of excusable annoyance, Doctor," O'Mara went on quietly, "but the fact remains that you may be in serious trouble over this business. I don't believe that the nursing staff will deliberately make mistakes-at least, not of the order which would endanger their patients. But any relaxation of standards is dangerous, obviously. Do you begin to see what you've been doing, Doctor?" file:///F|/rah/James%20White/White,%20James%20...tor%20General%2003%20-%20Major%20Operation.txt (7 of 72) [5/21/03 10:25:10 PM] file:///F|/rah/James%20White/White,%20James%20-%20Sector%20General%2003%20-%20Major%20Operation.txt "Yes, sir," said Conway. "I see that you do," O'Mara said with uncharacteristic mildness. "And now I would like to know why you did it. Well, Doctor?" Conway took his time about answering. This was not the first time he had left the Chief Psychologist's office with his ego singed around the edges, but this time it looked serious. The generally held opinion was that when O'Mara was not unduly concerned over, or in some cases when he actually liked an individual, the psychologist felt able to relax with them and be his bad- tempered, obnoxious self, but when O'Mara became quiet and polite and not at all sarcastic, when he began treating a person as a patient rather than a colleague in other words, that person was in Finally, Conway said, "At first it was simply a story to explain why I was being so nosy, sir. Nurses don't tell tales and it might have looked as if that was what I wanted them to do. All I did was suggest that as Doctor Mannon was in all respects fit, outside physical agencies such as e-t bacteria or parasites and the like were ruled out because of the thoroughness of our aseptic procedures. You, sir, had already reassured us regarding his mental condition. I postulated an... an outside, nonmaterial cause which might or might not be consciously directed. "I haven't anything so definite as a theory about it," Conway went on quickly. "Nor did I mention disembodied intelligences to anyone, but something odd happened in that theater, and not only during the time of Mannon's operation. . He described the echo effect Prilicla had detected while monitoring Mannon's emotional radiation, and the similar effect when Naydrad had had the accident with the knife. There was also the later incident of the Melfan intern whose sprayer wouldn't spray-their mandibles weren't suited to surgical gloves so that they painted them with plastic before an op. When the intern had tried to use the sprayer it oozed what the Melfan described as metallic porridge. Later the sprayer in question could not be found. Perhaps it had never existed. And there were other peculiar incidents. Mistakes which seemed a little too simple for trained staff to make-errors in instrument counts, dropping things, and all seeming to involve a certain amount of temporary mental confusion and perhaps outright hallucination. So far there has not been enough to make a statistically meaningful sample," Conway went on, "but they are enough to make me curious. I'd give you their names if I wasn't sworn to keep them confidential, because I think you would be interested in the way they describe some of these incidents. "Possibly, Doctor," said O'Mara coldly. "On the other hand I might not want to lend my professional support to a figment of your imagination by investigating such trivia. As for the |
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