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Updated: May 11, 2025
Don't stick your thumb in the pie." Tiger just stared at the little Garvian. "Look, Dal, all I'm trying to do " "I know what you're trying to do," Dal snapped, "and I don't want any part of it. I don't need your help, I don't want it. Why do you have to force it down my throat?" There was a long silence. Then Tiger spread his hands helplessly. "Okay," he said, "if that's the way you want it."
"This is the General Practice Patrol Ship Lancet," he said, "out from Hospital Earth with three physicians aboard, including a countryman of yours." "Is that Dal Timgar?" the reply came back. "By the Seven Moons! We'd heard that there was now a Garvian physician, and couldn't believe our ears. Come aboard, all of you, you'll be welcome. We'll send over a lifeboat!"
It was just after they had left a small planet in the Procyon system, one of the routine check-in points, that they made contact with the Garvian trading ship. Dal recognized the ship's design and insignia even before the signals came in, and could hardly contain his excitement.
Garvian traders were known throughout the Galaxy as much for their rigid adherence to their word as they were for the hard bargains they could drive; Dal had been enormously confused during his first months on Hospital Earth by the way Earthmen seemed to accept lying as part of their daily life, unconcerned about it as long as the falsehood could not be proven.
Such ships as these might be out from Garv II for decades at a time, tempting any ship they met with the magnificent variety of wares they carried. Slowly the trader approached, and Dal took the speaker, addressing the commander of the Teegar in Garvian.
But Dal knew that there was a connection between the tiny pink creature's emotions and the peculiar talent that Black Doctor Arnquist had spoken of the night before. It was not a telepathic power that Dal and his people possessed. Just what it was, was difficult to define, yet Dal knew that every Garvian depended upon it to some extent in dealing with people around him.
Doctor Arnquist looked up at Dal for a long moment. "Why do you want to be a doctor in the first place, Dal? This isn't the calling of your people. You must be the one Garvian out of millions with the patience and peculiar mental make-up to permit you to master the scientific disciplines involved in studying medicine.
It was as if someone had snapped on a floodlight in a darkened room, and he saw something he had never seen before. He saw that from the first day he had stepped down from the Garvian ship that had brought him to Hospital Earth to begin his medical training, he had been relying upon crutches to help him. Black Doctor Arnquist had been a crutch upon whom he could lean.
Bit by bit they divided the labor, checking in with Tiger by radio on the results of the isotopes studies he was running on the planet's surface. Bit by bit the data was collected, and Earthman and Garvian worked more closely than ever before as the task that faced them appeared more and more formidable. But the results of their tests made no sense whatever.
Dal Timgar had been on Hospital Earth for eight years, and still he was a stranger here. To him this was an alien planet, different in a thousand ways from the world where he was born and grew to manhood. For a moment now he thought of his native home, the second planet of a hot yellow star which Earthmen called "Garv" because they couldn't pronounce its full name in the Garvian tongue.
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