t's wrong with him. Only the symptoms. A telepath can follow the
patient's symptoms perfectly, but it takes an esper to dig in his guts
and perceive the tumor that's pressing on the spine or the striae on his
liver."

"Yeah."

"So I flopped on a couple of tests that the rest of the class sailed
through, just because I was not fast enough to read their minds and put
my own ability to work. It made 'em suspicious and so here I am, a mere
doctor instead of a scholar."

"There are fields for you, I'm sure."

He nodded. "Two. Psychiatry and psychology, neither of which I have any
love for. And medical research, where the ability to grasp another
doctor or scholar's plan, ideas and theories is slightly more important
than the ability to dig esper into the experiments."

"Don't see that," I said with a shake of my head.

"Well, Steve, let's take Mekstrom's Disease, for instance."

"Let's take something simple. What I know about Mekstrom's Disease could
be carved on the head of a pin with a blunt butter knife."

"Let's take Mekstrom's. That's my chance to make Scholar of Medicine,
Steve, if I can come up with an answer to one of the minor questions.
I'll be in the clinical laboratory where the only cases present are
those rare cases of Mekstrom's. The other doctors, espers every one of
them, and the scholars over them, will dig the man's body right down to
the last cell, looking and combing--you know some of the better espers
can actually dig into the constituency of a cell?--but I'll be the
doctor who can collect all their information, correlate it, and maybe
come up with an answer."

"You picked a dilly," I told him.

It was a real one, all right. Otto Mekstrom had been a mechanic-tech at
White Sands Space Station during the first flight to Venus, Mars and
Moon round-trip with landings. About two weeks after the ship came home,
Otto Mekstrom's left fingertips began to grow hard. The hardening
crawled up slowly until his hand was like a rock. They studied him and
worked over him and took all sorts of samples and made all sorts of
tests until Otto's forearm was as hard as his hand. Then they amputated
at the shoulder.

But by that time, Otto Mekstrom's toes on both feet were getting solid
and his other hand was beginning to show signs of the same. On one side
of the creepline the flesh was soft and normal, but on the other it was
all you could do to poke a sharp needle into the skin. Poor Otto ended
up a basket ca