As the winter of 2002 wore on, Mort’s office transformed into a kind of geopolitical salon, with writers dropping in from the New York Times and the Nation, Vanity Fair and Foreign Affairs, to debate the prospect of war. It was like a macho smoking club. You could only dimly perceive the men through a nicotine haze, but you could hear them, as cool debate devolved into shouts. Then the men would burst from Mort’s office, dazed and furious, like a gang of hockey goons who’d thrashed each other on the ice.

The girl from Vice smirks and makes a note.

“Do you remember Daniel Pearl?” I ask.

She shakes her head.

He was a reporter with the Wall Street Journal, I explain, who was kidnapped in Pakistan. Mort took his abduction as a personal attack. The kidnappers released a photo of Pearl holding up a newspaper, and Mort taped it to his office door. He was horrified by this kind of extremism, but never on the fence about the war. The Bystander immediately assumed a posture of dissent.

Still, there was no denying Mort relished the atmosphere of combat. It must’ve taken him back to the ’60s, when everyone’s career got made in the heat of the moment.

“I think he believed objecting to war in the most strenuous possible terms would cement the legacy of the Bystander,” I tell her, “but I’m willing to wager the countless pieces we ran about Iraq will be among the least-read in this book.”

“I admit I couldn’t get through them all.”

“They’re of sociological interest only.”

“Yeah,” she says. “I know how the story turns out.”

2.

When I arranged my trip to Retreat, Mort authorized my expenses, but he didn’t take the sustained interest in my story that I wanted. Everything with him had become WMDs, Al Qaeda links, oil reserves.

In my corner of the office, I dove into what Dr. Kriss had sketched in the interview. I began by researching the history of artificial blood. I read about the experiments of T. Gaillard Thomas, an eminent nineteenth-century gynecologist who’d devised the method of lacteal injections: intravenous infusions of cow’s milk. Dr. Thomas recorded three cases in which he injected a patient with eight ounces of milk. One survived, two died, and Dr. Thomas concluded that in order to be successful, the injections should be made with fresh, not settled, milk. No one developed his theory any further.

In the 1950s, the navy treated some anemic soldiers with a hemoglobin solution, resulting in everything from renal problems to what researchers called untoward side effects. And most recently, a corporate developer of highly purified bovine hemoglobin, a bizarre echo of Dr. Thomas’s milk experiments, canceled their trials after 50 percent of the subjects died, having developed various pulmonary, cardiovascular, and neurologic dysfunctions.