The Black Doctor pulled off his glasses and glared at Tiger. “Whatever are you talking about?” he said.
“Just what I said. We had a conference after he’d examined the patient in the operating room, and I insisted that we call the hospital ship. Why, Dal—Dal wanted to go ahead and try to finish the case right then, and I wouldn’t let him,” Tiger blundered on. “I didn’t think the patient could take it. I thought that it would be too great a risk with the facilities we had here.”
Dal was staring at Tiger, and he felt Fuzzy suddenly shivering violently in his pocket. “Tiger, don’t be foolish—”
The Black Doctor slammed the file down on the table again. “Is this true, what he’s saying?” he asked Dal.
“No, not a word of it,” Dal said. “I wanted to call the hospital ship.”
“Of course he won’t admit it,” Tiger said angrily. “He’s afraid you’ll kick me out too, but it’s true just the same in spite of what he says.”
“And what do you say?” the Black Doctor said, turning to Jack Alvarez.
“I say it’s carrying this big brother act too far,” Jack said. “I didn’t notice any conferences going on.”
“You were back at the ship getting the surgical pack,” Tiger said. “You didn’t know anything about it. You didn’t hear us talking, and we didn’t see any reason to consult you about it.”
The Black Doctor stared from Dal to Tiger, his face growing angrier by the minute. He jerked to his feet, and stalked back and forth across the control room, glaring at them. Then he took a capsule from his pocket, gulped it down with some water, and sat back down. “I ought to throw you both out on your ears,” he snarled. “But I am forced to control myself. I mustn’t allow myself to get angry—” He crashed his fist down on the control panel. “I suppose that you would swear to this statement of yours if it came to that?” he asked Tiger.
Tiger nodded and swallowed hard. “Yes, sir, I certainly would.”
“All right,” the Black Doctor said tightly. “Then you win this one. The code says that two opinions can properly decide any course of action. If you insist that two of you agreed on this decision, then I am forced to support you officially. I will make a report of the incident to patrol headquarters, and it will go on the permanent records of all three of this ship’s crew—including my personal opinion of the decision.” He looked up at Dal. “But be very careful, my young friend. Next time you may not have a technicality to back you up, and I’ll be watching for the first plausible excuse to break you, and your Green Doctor friend as well. One misstep, and you’re through. And I assure you that is not just an idle threat. I mean every word of it.”
And trembling with rage, the Black Doctor picked up the folder, wrapped his cape around him, and marched out of the control room.
*
“Well, you put on a great show,” Jack Alvarez said later as they prepared the ship for launching from the snow-swept landing field on Morua VIII. An hour before the ground had trembled as the Black Doctor’s ship took off with Dr. Tanner and the Four-star Surgeon aboard; now Jack broke the dark silence in the Lancet’s control room for the first time. “A really great show. You missed your calling, Tiger. You should have been on the stage. If you think you fooled Dr. Tanner with that story for half a second, you’re crazy, but I guess you got what you wanted. You kept your pal’s cuff and collar for him, and you put a black mark on all of our records, including mine. I hope you’re satisfied.”
Tiger Martin took off his earphones and set them carefully on the control panel. “You know,” he said to Jack, “you’re lucky.”
“Really?”
“You’re lucky I don’t wipe that sneer off your face and scrub the walls with it. And you’d better not crowd your luck, because all I need right now is an invitation.” He stood up, towering over the dark-haired Blue Doctor. “You bet I’m satisfied. And if you got a black mark along with the rest of us, you earned it all the way.”
“That still doesn’t make it right,” Dal said from across the room.
“You just keep out of this for a minute,” Tiger said. “Jack has got to get a couple of things straight, and this is the time for it right now.”
Dal shook his head. “I can’t keep out of it,” he said. “You got me off the hook by shifting the blame, but you put yourself in trouble doing it. Dr. Tanner could just as well have thrown us both out of the service as not.”
Tiger snorted. “On what grounds? For a petty little error like this? He wouldn’t dare! You ought to read the log books of some of the other GPP ships some time and see the kind of bloopers they pull without even a reprimand. Don’t worry, he was mad enough to throw us both out if he thought he could make it stick, but he knew he couldn’t. He knew the council would just review the case and reverse his decision.”
“It was still my error, not yours,” Dal protested. “I should have gone ahead and finished the case on the spot. I knew it at the time, and I just didn’t quite dare.”
“So you made a mistake,” Tiger said. “You’ll make a dozen more before you get your Star, and if none of them amount to any more than this one, you can be very happy.” He scowled at Jack. “It’s only thanks to our friend here that the Black Doctor heard about this at all. A hospital ship would have come to take the patient aboard, and the local doctors would have been quieted down and that would have been all there was to it. This business about losing a contract is a lot of nonsense.”
“Then you think this thing was just used as an excuse to get at me?”
“Ask him,” Tiger said, looking at Jack again. “Ask him why a Black Doctor and a Four-star Surgeon turned up when we just called for a hospital ship.”
“I called the hospital ship,” Jack said sullenly.
“But you called Dr. Tanner too,” said Tiger. “Your nose has been out of joint ever since Dal came aboard this ship. You’ve made things as miserable for him as you could, and you just couldn’t wait for a chance to come along to try to scuttle him.”
“All right,” Jack said, “but he was making a mistake. Anybody could see that. What if the patient had died while he was standing around waiting? Isn’t that important?”
Tiger started to answer, and then threw up his hands in disgust. “It’s important—but something else is more important. We’ve got a job to do on this ship, and we can’t do it fighting each other. Dal misjudged a case and got in trouble. Fine, he won’t make that mistake again. It could just as well have been you, or me. We’ll all make mistakes, but if we can’t work as a team, we’re sunk. We’ll all be drummed out of the patrol before a year is out.” Tiger stopped to catch his breath, his face flushed with anger. “Well, I’m fed up with this back-stabbing business. I don’t want a fight any more than Dal does, but if I have to fight, I’ll fight to get it over with, and you’d better be careful. If you pull any more sly ones, you’d better include me in the deal, because if Dal goes, I go too. And that’s a promise.”
There was silence for a moment as Jack stared up at Tiger’s angry face. He shook his head and blinked, as though he couldn’t quite believe what he was hearing. He looked across at Dal, and then back at Tiger again. “You mean you’d turn in your collar and cuff?” he said.
“If it came to that.”
“I see.” Jack sat down at the control panel, still shaking his head. “I think you really mean it,” he said soberly. “This isn’t just a big brother act. You really like the guy, don’t you?”
“Maybe I do,” Tiger said, “but I don’t like to watch anybody get kicked around just because somebody else doesn’t happen to like him.”
The