Spurgeon picked up a pair of forceps and without looking at either of the other men he found and removed the offending object and let it drop into the waste basket. “Your friend is waiting to take you home,” he said.

She left very quickly.

The intern from anesthesiology had stopped laughing. Potter just stood there looking at him through the stupid round mirror on his forehead. “It was harmless, Robinson. Just a gag.”

“You goddam scum.”

He waited a moment for trouble but of course none came and he left Emergency and went back up to the ward, trembling only slightly.

If he had to make an enemy on the staff, Potter was the one he would have chosen, a prize screw-up. Detailed to show an intern how to strip out a varicose vein in the leg, he had been talked through a dry run of the procedure by Lew Chin. When the Visiting Surgeon was summoned into the adjoining OR to help with a cardiac arrest, Potter had gone right ahead, mistakenly stripping out the femoral artery instead of the vein. Dr. Chin, so angry he could scarcely talk, had tried to repair the damage, attempting to replace the vital artery with a nylon graft. But it was a shambles; the graft was impossible and a woman who had entered the operating room for a simple procedure was returned to the ward following an amputation. Dr. Longwood had spoken pointedly of the case in a discussion of the week’s complications. But less than a week later Potter, performing the most basic of hernia repairs, had tied off the spermatic cord along with the hernial sac. The blood supply in the area was completely compromised, and within days the man had irreparably lost the function of one testicle. This time the Old Man had reviewed the case more acidly, reminding the staff that medicine did not yet have access to a spare parts bin.

Spurgeon had felt sorry for Potter, but the resident’s arrogant stupidity made continued sympathy impossible, and now he was content to be disdainfully ignored whenever he met Potter in the corridor. The Emergency Room incident had the opposite effect on Jack Moylan, who tried to be extra-friendly, a bribe he despised.

Only a few people had been involved, and most of his fellow-workers treated him as before. He and Silverstone had integrated the sixth floor. Otherwise he lived alone on his island, on rare occasions even preferring his solitude.