tried to hurry the more he seemed to be wading through
waist-deep mud, unable to make his fingers do what he wanted them to do.
How could he save ten seconds, twenty seconds, a half a minute? That
half a minute might make the difference between success or failure, yet
the seconds ticked by swiftly and the procedure was going slowly.

Too slowly. He reached a point where he thought he could not go on. His
mind was searching desperately for help--any kind of help, something to
lean on, something to brace him and give him support. And then quite
suddenly he understood something clearly that had been nibbling at the
corners of his mind for a long time. 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. Tiger,
for all his clumsy good-heartedness and for all the help and protection
he had offered, had been a crutch. Fuzzy, who had been by his side since
the day he was born, was still another kind of crutch to fall back on, a
way out, a port of haven in the storm. They were crutches, every one,
and he had leaned on them heavily.

But now there was no crutch to lean on. He had a quick mind with good
training. He had two nimble hands that knew their job, and two legs that
were capable of supporting his weight, frail as they were. He knew now
that he had to stand on them squarely, for the first time in his life.

And suddenly he realized that this was as it should be. It seemed so
clear, so obvious and unmistakable that he wondered how he could have
failed to recognize it for so long. If he could not depend on himself,
then Black Doctor Hugo Tanner would have been right all along. If he
could not do this job that was before him on his own strength, standing
on his own two legs without crutches to lean on, how could he claim to
be a competent physician? What right did he have to the goal he sought
if he had to earn it on the strength of the help of others? It was _he_
who wanted to be a Star Surgeon--not Fuzzy, not Tiger, nor anyone else.

He felt his heart thudding in his chest, and he saw the operation before
him as if he were standing in an amphitheater peering down over some
other surgeon's shoulder. Sudd