A HOSPITAL was a hospital, even at the far end of the galaxy.  Waking early and not yet sure where he was, before opening his eyes David felt the familiar ambiance around him, the years-long texture of the life which had become second nature: the preoccupation of busy doctors, the subliminal feel of pain kept under and at a distance, the hurried pace of healing.

Then he opened his eyes and remembered that he was on Darkover, uncounted light-years away from his own home, and that if they had quartered him in a hospital it was not because of the M.D. that he could still write after his name but because of the generally medical nature of this project.

Freaks and telepaths - and I'm going to be one of them!  What kind of a planet have they landed me on?

All he remembered of disembarking last night - spaceports were all alike - was a glimpse of a great, luminous, pale purple moon, and another, smaller and crescent, floating low in a strangely colored night sky.

The light in here was Earth-normal yellow, but when he went to the window he saw high, craggy, dark mountains and a great, inflamed, red sun, already high in the sky.  He'd come in late; they'd let him sleep, but probably someone would be coming for him sooner or later.  Try as he would - and he had tried on the ship that brought him here - he couldn't work up much enthusiasm for the project.  Hell, he didn't want to know more about the freak talent that had swept away his chosen career; he wanted to be rid of it!

Oh, well, he thought, turning away from the strange sun and mountains and going toward the bathroom, maybe this will help, and if not maybe it will help somebody else.  Treat it like research - a chance to research a rare and freakish disease.  Like Madame Curie studying her own radiation burns, or Lanach on Vega Nine doing work on space rot when he was literally rotting away with it.

Anyhow, there was no point to a long face.  If his fellow members on the project were telepaths, a cheerful one wouldn't fool them, but it might raise his own morale.  By the time he had finished his bath and dressed, he was singing under his breath.  He was young and, against his own will, curious.

The hospital cafeteria, where they had told him last night to go for meals, was crowded at this hour.  David hated crowds, always had - it took too much work to shut out the sense of people jostling him even when they weren't - but at least it was a familiar crowd, even though there were racial and ethnic types he'd never seen before.  Doctors and nurses, mostly in the caduceus-adorned uniform of Terran Empire Medical, but they all had the unmistakable stamp of the profession.  Many of the younger ones were a single unfamiliar type he supposed must be Darkovan, swart-skinned with dark crisp-curling hair, ridged foreheads, short broad six-fingered hands, and gray eyes.

He was finishing his breakfast when a young man, not in medical uniform but in green tunic and high, soft leather boots with short-cut red hair, came up to him and said, "Doctor Hamilton?  I recognized you at once.  Will you come and join us, please?  My name is Danilo.  I hope the food is to your liking; that is one thing we can never predict.  I know that here in the Terran HQ building they can adjust the lights and even the gravity to the planet of your origin, but cultural preferences about what is and what isn't good to eat -" he shrugged.  "All they can do here, I guess, is offer a sort of inoffensive lowest common denominator and hope it won't offend anyone too much."