“Why not?”

“Kidney transplantation is barely out of the experimental stages. How can we try to affix responsibility for death in an area over which we still don’t have a hell of a lot of control?”

“That’s the point,” Meomartino said calmly, wiping his mouth. “It is beyond the experimental stage. Hospitals all over the country are doing this operation with success. If we’re going to use it clinically, we have to take responsibility for it.”

He could talk that way, Adam thought; the only role he had played in this case had been in removing the kidney from the cadaver.

“She looked perfectly well when you saw her last night?” Spurgeon Robinson asked.

Adam nodded and glanced at the intern sharply. Then he forced himself to relax; Spurgeon, unlike Meomartino, had no ax to grind.

“I don’t think Dr. Longwood should be allowed to chair that meeting,” Robinson said. “He’s not a well man. He runs those Mortality Conferences as if they’re the Inquisition and he’s Torquemada.”

Meomartino grinned. “His health doesn’t have a damn thing to do with it. The old bastard has always run the Death Conference that way.”

They could tear a man’s prospects to shreds in one of those meetings, Adam thought. He put down his fork and pushed his chair back.

“Tell me something,” he said to Meomartino, feeling the sudden need to be contentious. “You’re the only one on the Service who never refers to Longwood as the Old Man. Is the term too disrespectful for you?”

Meomartino smiled. “On the contrary. It is simply that I believe the term to be one of affection,” he said quietly. And went on eating with unabated enjoyment.

Just before he went off duty that night he remembered about the rose corsage.

“Flowers? Yes, they came, Dr. Silverstone,” the nurse at the desk said. “I had them sent on to the Garland home. It’s what we always do.”

Have a ball, luv . . .

I could at least have spared them that, he thought.

“It’s all right, isn’t it?”

“Sure.”

He went up to the little room on the sixth floor and sat and smoked four cigarettes without enjoyment, one after the other, and found himself biting his nails, a habit he’d believed broken long ago.

He thought of his father, from whom he had not heard, wondered about trying to phone him in Pittsburgh and then decided with relief to leave well enough alone.

After a long while he left the room and went downstairs and outside to the deserted street. Maxie’s was closed and black. The street lamps made a path through the dark like tracer bullets, interrupted halfway down the block where probably kids had stoned a bulb.

He started to walk.

Then he started to run.

Down to the corner, feeling the concrete sidewalk slam up against his feet.

Around the corner.

On the avenue, moving faster.

A car burred by, the horn hooted, a female shouted something and tittered. In his chest he felt the small choked feeling surge and he ran faster despite the stitch of pain that bubbled to life in his right side.