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at the same time he was grinning. They were alone in the room with Ditana
Amanso.
"Digen, I know it's ironic, how we finally got to the surgical ward and
all butreally , a doctor ought to be dignified and all that especially around
the critically ill at least when they're conscious." He glanced at Amanso,
whose breathing was stronger and more regular now than it had been.
Digen shook himself out of it and got to his feet. He was exhausted as no
physical exertion could make a Sime. He felt as if he'd just been through
three consecutive A-prime functionals. He went unsteadily toward one of the
vacant beds. "I agree absolutely," he said, "but right now& " His feet betrayed
him and he grabbed at the end of the bed, hanging on for dear life as the room
tilted around him.
Only a moment, and Hogan was there supporting him.
"What's the matter with you? You've been acting strange ever since you
dropped that retractor "
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Digen groped toward the bed, letting Hogan help him climb up on it. His knees
had turned to water as the entran symptoms grabbed hold. It was like nothing
he'd ever felt before. Some muscles contracted hard, shaking in spasm, while
others let go, completely flaccid but they were all the wrong muscles. His
head throbbed with exploding migraine, but he somehow was wholly
hypoconscious, still flying in the grip of postsyndrome, and he should have
felt great.
"Digen?" Hogan was enough of a doctor not to panic. His brain-was still
ticking off diagnoses, and in a moment he added it up. "Some kind of seizure?"
Hogan fumbled in a bedside drawer and came up with a thick object that he
attempted to force between Digen's teeth.
Digen resisted. He knew, as Hogan didn't, that those sticks were not strong
enough to hold against a Sime's jaw muscles, and he had no desire to have a
surgeon pick splinters out of his tongue.
Then, suddenly, pain like he'd never felt before in his life flashed through
every fiber of his body, and the world went black.
He came to moments later, the entran broken yet still lurking as an undefined
tension gathering at the base of his neck. "Digen?"
"Joel, listen& " But he couldn't find the strength to finish the sentence.
"I'll go get help. Just hang on "
"No! No time." Digen gathered himself, realizing that he was in serious
trouble and might as well be on the moon for all the help the Sime Center
could be. "Must get the retainers off before next seizure. Then I think you
can help me stop them."
"Digen, you should have a Donor "
"Notime . This one is sudden death." He couldn't explain vriamic fibrillation
or how a simple thing like entran could induce vriamic malfunctions in the
Farris mutation strain. "The retainers the laterals that's why I fainted. Got
to get themoff , Joel."
Hogan looked at the door, lips tight. It had a lock. He went toward it
decisively. "If they catch us, it's your career. But if you're dead, who cares
about a career!"
Hogan snapped the lock home and returned to help Digen divest himself of the
retainers. It was a slow, painful process that further disrupted his selyn
flows. When it was over, he pulled Hogan down to sit beside him on the bed.
Hypoconsciousness had disappeared under the slamming torture of entran.
"Quick course in doing entran outfunctions, Joel. Ready?"
"I guess," said the Gen.
"I'm going to use your selyn field you don't know what that is. Well, you
have a a force about you that I can push against to regain control of my
internal flows. You're going to provide me with traction, internal traction,
understand?"
It was badly stated, but Digen didn't usually train out-Territory Donors, and
he had no other analogies ready. "All you have to do, is well, just what we've
talked about so much just be a doctor who cares. You won't feel any selyn
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movement "
With the next seizure gathering like a dark cloud, Digen slid into lateral
contact. At first Hogan flinched, and Digen paused, saying, "I have to have a
full contact to make this work your field is so weak. I'll let you initiate
the lip contact when you're ready/" The last syllable exploded out of him as
the next spasm claimed him.
Hogan steeled himself inwardly and completed the lip contact. That was the
moment, Digen realized later, when he should have broken off, recognizing that
Hogan's defensive courage was operating again a courage used to suppress fear,
not banish it. But Digen was involved in a life-or-death struggle against a
strange sort of entran seizure, and Hogan was offering a Donor's empathy
despite the fear curled within him.
For quite a while it seemed to be working all right. But for Digen it was
something like dying of pulmonary edema and trying not to wheeze. He succeeded
up to a point and then reflex took over.
The first two or three times it happened, Digen managed to keep the
vibrations in the fields between them from inducing perceptible currents in
Hogan's system. But then, at the highest crest of the entran seizure, Digen
was locked against himself and helpless. His show field oscillated
uncontrollably. To Hogan it felt like a transfer draw, though no selyn was
exchanged between them, and the Gen panicked.
The fear lanced through Digen like a spear of white fire. In one instant, the
shock wiped away the entran and the postsyndrome, leaving him cold level. The
entran he could gladly live without. But the loss of the last trace of the
postsyndrome, the newly awakened hope of banishing the stubborn dependency on
Im'ran, which was causing him abort after abort on his transfers, was more
than he could stand.
In a last-ditch effort to save it, he reached out to Hogan, blindly groping
for that oh-so-vital sensation. Instantly Gen panic struck through them both.
By an act of will, before his conditioning could even engage. Digen brought
about an abort taking the entire backlash from the suddenly broken contact
into himself, protecting the Gen from all but the most minor selyn flux.
It was almost as bad as the entran attack, leaving him convulsing, senseless,
for minutes. When it was over, with only a dull thudding ache left somewhere
in the region of his vriamic node, Digen found himself alone in the room with
Amanso. The door was unlocked, standing slightly ajar.
Hastily Digen slipped on his retainers, looking toward his patient as he did
so. The severe perturbation in the room's ambient nager had not damaged her at
all, but then Amanso wasn't a terribly sensitive Donor like Ilyana. Digen
dragged himself off the bed and peered out into the hall.
At the nurses' station, several of the women nurses were gossiping, watching
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