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. Either you are different from
the rest of your people--which I doubt--or else you are driven to force
yourself into a pattern foreign to your nature for very compelling
reasons. What are they? Why do you want medicine?"

It was the hardest question of all, the question Dal had dreaded. He
knew the answer, just as he had known for most of his life that he
wanted to be a doctor above all else. But he had never found a way to
put the reasons into words. "I can't say," he said slowly. "I _know_,
but I can't express it, and whenever I try, it just sounds silly."

"Maybe your reasons don't make reasonable sense," the old man said
gently.

"But they do! At least to me, they do," Dal said. "I've always wanted to
be a doctor. There's nothing else I want to do. To work at home, among
my people."

"There was a plague on Garv II, wasn't there?" Doctor Arnquist said. "A
cyclic thing that came back again and again. The cycle was broken just a
few years ago, when the virus that caused it was finally isolated and
destroyed."

"By the physicians of Hospital Earth," Dal said.