I’d like awfully to take bacteriology this fall instead of next year. I’ve had a lot of chemistry —”

“No. It is not time for you.”

“Honest, I know I could do it now.”

“There are two kinds of students the gods give me. One kind they dump on me like a bushel of potatoes. I do not like potatoes, and the potatoes they do not ever seem to have great affection for me, but I take them and teach them to kill patients. The other kind — they are very few!— they seem for some reason that is not at all clear to me to wish a liddle bit to become scientists, to work with bugs and make mistakes. Those, ah, those, I seize them, I denounce them, I teach them right away the ultimate lesson of science, which is to wait and doubt. Of the potatoes, I demand nothing; of the foolish ones like you, who think I could teach them something, I demand everything. No. You are too young. Come back next year.”

“But honestly, with my chemistry —”

“Have you taken physical chemistry?”

“No, sir, but I did pretty well in organic.”

“Organic chemistry! Puzzle chemistry! Stink chemistry! Drugstore chemistry! Physical chemistry is power, it is exactness, it is life. But organic chemistry — that is a trade for pot-washers. No. You are too young. Come back in a year.”

Gottlieb was absolute. His talon fingers waved Martin to the door, and the boy hastened out, not daring to argue. He slunk off in misery. On the campus he met that jovial historian of chemistry, Encore Edwards, and begged, “Say, Professor, tell me, is there any value for a doctor in organic chemistry?”

“Value? Why, it seeks the drugs that allay pain! It produces the paint that slicks up your house, it dyes your sweetheart’s dress — and maybe, in these degenerate days, her cherry lips! Who the dickens has been talking scandal about my organic chemistry?”

“Nobody. I was just wondering,” Martin complained, and he drifted to the College Inn where, in an injured and melancholy manner, he devoured an enormous banana-split and a bar of almond chocolate, as he meditated:

“I want to take bacteriology. I want to get down to the bottom of this disease stuff. I’ll learn some physical chemistry. I’ll show old Gottlieb, damn him! Some day I’ll discover the germ of cancer or something, and then he’ll look foolish in the face! . . . Oh, Lord, I hope I won’t take sick, first time I go into the dissecting-room. . . . I want to take bacteriology — now!”

He recalled Gottlieb’s sardonic face; he felt and feared his quality of dynamic hatred. Then he remembered the wrinkles, and he saw Max Gottlieb not as a genius but as a man who had headaches, who became agonizingly tired, who could be loved.

“I wonder if Encore Edwards knows as much as I thought he did? What IS Truth?” he puzzled.

IV

Martin was jumpy on his first day of dissecting.