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    David Hamilton wiped the sweat from his face as he came blindly through the door, leaning briefly against the light paneled wall.
    He'd made it this time, but God! The blind terror when the anesthetic began to blot out light—
    No, it was going to be too much. He'd have to quit. Around him the hospital, crammed with humans and nonhumans, breathed and sweated pain and misery at every crack in the walls; and although David, from years of practice, could shut most of it out, his defenses were lowered from the strain of the operation just past and it began to wear in on him again from every direction.
    Is the whole world groaning in pain? His sharpened nerves gave him an absurd and frightening visual commentary, a planet splitting like a fractured skull, a globe of a world with a bandage round its equator; he started to giggle and cut it off just that fraction before it became hysteria.
    No good. I'll have to quit.
    I'm not insane. The doctors went all over that when I was nineteen and just beginning Medic training.
    I made it through Medical school on nerve and guts; and whatever else it did or didn't do, it gave me an uncanny knack for diagnosis. But here in the hospital it's too much. Too many symptoms, too many people in fear and terror. Too much pain, and I have to feel it all. I can't help them by sharing it.
    Dr. Lakshman, dark and grave, his eyes full of compassion beneath the white surgical plastic cap, put a brief hand on David's shoulder as he passed through the hall. David, fresh from horror, shrank from the touch as he had learned to do, then relaxed; Lakshman, as always, was clean sympathy and all kindness, a restful spot in a world grown full of horror. He said: "Pretty bad, Hamilton? Is it getting worse?"
    David managed a smile, wrung out like a used mop, and said, "With all of medical science these days you'd think they'd manage a cure for my particular type of lunacy."
    "Not lunacy," said Lakshman, "but unfortunately no cure. Not here. You happen to be a freak of a very rare kind, David, and I've watched it killing you for over a year now. But maybe there is an answer."
    "You didn't—" David shrank; Lakshman of all people to violate his confidence? Who could he trust? The older man seemed to follow his thought; "No, I haven't discussed this with anyone, but when they sent out the message I thought of you right away. David, do you know where Cottman's Star is?"
    "Not a clue," David said, "or care."
    "There's a planet—Darkover they call it," Lakshman said. "There are telepaths there and they're looking for—no, listen," he added firmly, feeling David tense under his hands. "Maybe they can help you find out about this thing. Control it. If you try to go on here at the hospital—well, they can't let you go on much more, David. Sooner or later it will distract you at a crucial moment. Your work is all right, so far. But you'd better look into this; or else forget all about medicine and find a job in the forest service on some uninhabited world. Very uninhabited."
    David sighed. He had known this was coming, and if nine years of study and work was to be thrown away, it didn't much matter where he went.
    "Where is Darkover?" he asked. " Do they have a good medical service there?"

 
     
CHAPTER THREE
     
     
    THEY SAW the guards lockstepped around him as he came through the crowd to the airstrip. It was icy, cold, near evening, only a few red clouds lingering where the red sun had been, and a bitter wind eating down from the sharp-toothed crags behind Thendara. Normally there would have been very few people on the streets at this hour; Darkovan night sets in early and is as cold as their own legendary ninth hell, and most people seek the comfort of heated rooms and light, leaving the streets to the snow and the occasional unlucky Terran from the Trade City.
    But this was something new, and Darkovans in the streets put off minding their own business to watch it; to follow and murmur that singular and ugly