"You likewise ignored item number thirty-six," Honeycomb said. "Was your reasoning the same?"
"Yes. The jaw was so alien to my experience that I could not safely assume that there was anything wrong with it, let alone attempt to fix it. I suppose I was foolish not to fill the labial cavity, but that would have required an assumption I was not equipped to make."
"How much time did you spend—deciding not to touch the cavity?" Honeycomb inquired sweetly.
"Half an hour." Pointless to explain that he had gone over every surface of #36 looking for some confirmation that its action was similar to that of any of the jaws he was familiar with. "If I may inquire now—what was the correct treatment?"
"None. It was a healthy jaw."
Dillingham's breath caught. "You mean if I had filled that theoretic cavity—"
"You would have destroyed our extragalactic patient's health."
"Then my decision on number thirty-six helped my examination score!"
"No. Your decision was based on uncertainty, not upon accurate diagnosis. It threw your application into serious question."
He shut his mouth and waited.
"You did not follow instructions on number forty-one," Honeycomb said. "Why?"
"I felt the instructions were mistaken. The placement of an MOD inlay was unnecessary for the correction of the condition, and foolish in the face of the peril the tooth was in from gingivitis. Why perform expensive and complicated reconstruction, when untreated gum disease threatens to nullify it soon anyway?"
"Would that inlay have damaged the function of the tooth in any way?"
"Yes, in the sense that no reconstruction can be expected to perform as well as the original. But even if there were no difference, that placement was functionally unnecessary. The expense and discomfort to the patient must also be considered. The dentist owes it to his patient to advise him of—"
"You are repetitive. Do you place your judgment before that of the University?"
Trouble again. "I must act on my own best judgment, when I am charged with the responsibility. Perhaps, with University training, I would have been able to make a more informed decision."
"Kindly delete the pleading," Honeycomb said.
Something was certainly wrong somewhere. All his conjectures seemed to go against the intent of this institution. Did its standards, as well as its knowledge, differ so radically from his own? Could all of his professional instincts be wrong?
"Your performance on the written examination was extremely poor," Sponge said. "Are you naturally stupid, or did you fail to apply yourself properly?"
"I could have done better if I had studied more."
"You failed to prepare yourself?"
Worse and worse. "Yes."
"You were aware of the importance of the examination?"
"Yes."
"You had suitable texts on hand?"
"Yes."
"Yet you did not bother to study them."
"I wanted to, but—" Then he remembered his promise to the Oyster. He could not give his reason for failing to study. If this trio picked up any hint of that episode, it would not relent until everything were exposed. After suffering this much of its interrogation, he retained no illusions about the likely fate of young Oyster. No wonder the grandfather had been anxious!
"What is your pretext for such neglect?"
"I can offer none."
The color of the sponge darkened. "We are compelled to view with disfavor an applicant who neither applies himself nor cares to excuse his negligence. This is not the behavior we expect in our students."
Dillingham said nothing. His position was hopeless—but he still couldn't give up until they made his rejection final.
Tank resumed the dialog. "You have an interesting record. Alarming in some respects. You came originally from planet Earth—one of the aborigine cultures. Why did you desert your tribe?"
They had such unfortunate ways of putting things! "I was contacted by a galactic voyager who required prosthodontic repair. I presume he picked my name out of the local directory." He described his initial experience with the creatures he had dubbed, facetiously, the North Nebulites, or Enens.
"You operated on a totally unfamiliar jaw?" Tank asked abruptly.
"Yes." Under duress, however. Should he remind them?
"Yet you refused to do similar work on a dummy jaw at this University," Honeycomb put in.
They were sharp. "I did what seemed necessary at the time."
"Don't your standards appear inconsistent, even to you?" Sponge inquired.
Dillingham laughed, not happily. "Sometimes they do." How much deeper could he bury himself?
Tank's turn. "Why did you accompany the aliens to their world?"
"I did not have very much choice."
"So you did not come to space in search of superior prosthodontic techniques?"
"No. It is possible that I might have done so, however, had I known of their availability at the time."
"Yes, you have repeatedly expressed your interest," Tank said. "Yet you did not bother to study from the most authoritative texts available on the subject in the galaxy, when you had the opportunity and the encouragement to do so."
Once again his promise prevented him from replying. He was coming to understand why his roommates had shown so little desire to spend time helping the supplicant. It appeared, in retrospect, to be a sure passport to failure.
Could he have passed—that is, brought his probability up to a reasonable level—had he turned away that plea? Should he have sacrificed that one creature, for the sake of the hundreds he might have helped later, with proper training? He had been shortsighted.
He knew he would do the same thing again, in similar circumstances. He just didn't have the heart to be that practical. At the same time, he could see why the businesslike University would have little use for such sentimentality.
"On planet Gleep," Tank said, surprising him by using his own ludicrous term for the next world he had visited, "you filled a single cavity with twenty-four tons of gold alloy."
"Yes."
"Are you not aware that gold, however plentiful it may be on Gleep, remains an exceptionally valuable commodity in the galaxy? Why did you not develop a less wasteful substitute?"
Dillingham tried to explain about the awkwardness of that situation, about the pressure of working within the cavernous mouth of a three-hundred-foot sea creature, but it did seem that he had made a mistake. He could have employed a specialized cobalt-chromium-molybdenum alloy that would have been strong, hard, resilient and resistant to corrosion, and might well have been superior to gold in that particular case. He had worried, for example, about the weight of such a mass of gold, and this alternate, far lighter, would have alleviated that concern. It was also much cheaper stuff. He had not thought about these things at the time. He said so.
"Didn't you consult your Enen associates?"
"I couldn't. The English/Enen transcoder was broken." But that was no excuse for not having had them develop the chrome-cobalt alloy earlier. He had allowed his personal preference for the more familiar gold to halt his quest for improvement.
"Yet you did communicate with them later, surmounting that problem."
He was becoming uncomfortably aware that this group had done its homework. The members seemed to know everything about him. "I discovered by accident that the English-Gleep and Gleep-Enen transcoders could be used in concert. I had not realized that at the time."
"Because you were preoccupied with the immediate problem?"
"I think so."
"But not too preoccupied to notice decay in the neighboring teeth."
"No." It did look foolish now, to have been so concerned with future dental problems, while wasting many tons of valuable metal on the work in progress. How did that jibe with his more recent concern for the Oyster's problem, to the exclusion of the much larger University picture? Was there any coherent rationale to his actions, or was he continually rationalizing to excuse his errors?