Spurgeon didn’t answer. Let them withhold the residency if they want to, he said silently. Just let me remain an intern.

He had to stay in medicine.

He needed his music as a way of escaping into beauty from the ugliness of the disease he saw everywhere he looked in the hospital. But with the world going to hell forty different ways he couldn’t even pretend to himself that he wanted to spend the rest of his life playing the piano.

Wednesday morning he was less certain. The day started ominously. Adam Silverstone was in bed with a spiking temp, the latest victim of the virus that was making patients of the hospital staff. Spurgeon hadn’t realized how much he had depended on Adam’s silent support.

“Anything I can do for you?” he asked miserably.

Adam looked at him and groaned. “Oh, Jesus, just go down and get it over with.”

He skipped breakfast. Outside it was snowing heavily. Some of the Visitings had telephoned to say they would not be in for the meeting, which he considered good news until it was announced that the Death Committee meeting was transferred from the amphitheater to the library, where the intimacy would make it more of an ordeal.

At 9:50 when he was paged and told to report to Dr. Kender’s office he responded numbly, positive he would be notified of his dismissal prior to the Mortality Conference: this week they were cleaning out the misfits.

When he arrived there were two men with Kender, who introduced Lt. James Hartigan of the Narcotics Bureau and Mr. Marshall Colfax, a Dorchester pharmacist.

“Did you write these, Dr. Robinson?” Kender asked quietly.

Spurgeon took the prescriptions and leafed through them. Each was written for twenty-four tablets of morphine sulphate, quarter grain, prescribed for names that were not familiar. George Moseby, Samuel Parkes, Richard Meadows.

Each was signed with his name.

“No, sir.”

“How can you be sure?” the lieutenant asked.

“In the first place, until I finish my internship I have only a limited license to practice medicine, which means I write orders that are filled in the hospital pharmacy, but I don’t issue outside prescriptions. Second, that’s my name but not my signature. And every doctor has a Federal Narcotics Registration Number, but the number on these prescriptions isn’t mine.”

“There’s no need for concern on your part, Dr. Robinson,” Kender said quickly. “You’re not the only doctor here whose name has been used. Merely the latest. I’ll ask you, of course, not to mention this to anyone.”

Spurgeon nodded.

“What caused you to suspect that these prescriptions weren’t right?” Kender asked Mr. Colfax.

The druggist smiled. “I began noticing how very neat they were. And so complete. Take abbreviations, for example. Almost every doctor I’ve met just scrawls prn, you know, for pro re nata?”

“What does it mean?” Hartigan asked.

“Latin for ‘according as circumstances require,’” Spurgeon said.