Sector General 11 Mind Changer by James White

Author:James White [White, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-04-08T05:43:39+00:00

CHAPTER 18

The room had provision for seating three hundred diners, he saw from the entrance, and even though there were only about two hundred and fifty passengers present, there were no single or empty tables. Instead there were rows of long, twenty-place tables with species-suitable furniture that could be moved around if different physiological classifications wanted to eat and talk together, which many of them were doing. The Orligian headwaiter-or, since it was fully dressed, possibly headwaitress-came forward to lead him to an unoccupied space at a table.

It was probably ship regulation dress, but he thought the black trousers and the hairy head and hands projecting from the neck and cuffs of the stiff, white tunic made it look ridiculous as well as feel very uncomfortable because Orligians usually wore nothing but a light harness that allowed the air to penetrate their fur and cool their bodies.

He was shown to a table containing fourteen Kelgian passengers, a Nidian, two Melfans, and one from Earth, and, inevitably, given the place opposite the Earth-human female.

She was dark-haired, young, and slim, and wore the minimum of jewelry on her head and ears and on the front of her highcollared, formal dress, which fitted her like a thin coat of black paint. Back at the hospital the Earth-human nurses had taken to wearing their whites very tight because, they insisted, it aided them in making fast changes into their otherspecies environmental protection suits, even though the style did not suit some of them. With this one it did.O’Mara gave her a brief nod and did the same to the few other-species diners who had turned to look at him, then sat down quickly and fixed his eyes on the menu display. Doubtless Craythorne would have said and done something different, but he just wanted to eat and not talk. That was not to be.

“Good evening, Lieutenant,” she said pleasantly.

“I’m afraid it’s a fixed menu on the first night out, and for the rest of the time too, as a matter of fact, although the Earth-human food they serve is usually quite good. If you don’t like it or have any special preferences, you’ll just have to starve.”

“I am starving? said O’Mara, looking up at her,

“and I’ve no special preferences. Food is just fuel.”

The Kelgian in the seat beside him spiked its fur in shock and said, “A culinary barbarian! But what else can one expect of a large, over-muscled carnivore.

Probably a messy eater, too.”

The young woman looked suddenly concerned.

She said quickly, “Lieutenant, please don’t feel offended, Kelgians always say

… exactly what they feel, ma’am? O’Mara finished for her. He tried to smile, an exercise to which his facial muscles were long unused, then glanced toward the Kelgian and added, “I don’t have mobile fur to show you how I feel, friend, but right now I am feeling very hungry but not, I think, hungry enough to eat you.

“There is doubt in your mind?” said the other.

Before O’Mara could reply there was a quiet, triple

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