centers, and medical schools here, the
physicians of Hospital Earth went out to all corners of the galaxy. In
the permanent outpost clinics, in the gigantic hospital ships that
served great sectors of the galaxy, and in the General Practice Patrol
ships that roved from star system to star system, they answered the
calls for medical assistance from a multitude of planets and races,
wherever and whenever they were needed.

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. Unthinkably distant, yet only days
away with the power of the star-drive motors that its people had
developed thousands of years before, Garv II was a warm planet, teeming
with activity, the trading center of the galaxy and the governmental
headquarters of the powerful Galactic Confederation of Worlds. Dal could
remember the days before he had come to Hospital Earth, and the many
times he had longed desperately to be home again.

He drew his fuzzy pink friend out of his pocket and rested him on his
shoulder, felt the tiny silent creature rub happily against his neck. It
had been his own decision to come here, Dal knew; there was no one else
to blame. His people were not physicians. Their instincts and interests
lay in trading and politics, not in the life sciences, and plague after
plague had swept across his home planet in the centuries before Hospital
Earth had been admitted as a probationary member of the Galactic
Confederation.

But as long as Dal could remember, he had wanted to be a doctor. From
the first time he had seen a General Practice Patrol ship landing in his
home city to fight the plague that was killing his people by the
thousands, he had known that this was what he wanted more than anything
else: to be a physician of Hospital Earth, to join the ranks of the
doctors who were serving the galaxy.

Many on Earth had tried to stop him from the first. He was a Garvian,
alien to Earth's climate and Earth's people. The physical differences
between Earthmen and Garvians were small, but just enough to set him
apart and make him easily identifiable as an alien. He had one too few
digits on his hands; his body