He sought for Meomartino with his eyes but the Surgical Fellow was absorbed in the case history. “She would be alive,” he said.

There was a silence and he looked back toward Dr. Longwood. The cavernous blue eyes that had bothered him throughout the meeting were still directed at him but he saw that their glint was gone and that they were focused far beyond him.

“Dr. Longwood?” Dr. Kender said.

“Harland,” Dr. Kender said gently. “Shall we poll the staff?”

“What?”

“Shall we poll the staff, Harland?”

“Yes,” he said.

“A preventable death,” Dr. Kender said.

Dr. Longwood ran his tongue over dry lips and looked at Dr. Sack.

“Preventable.”

At Dr. Parkhurst.

“Preventable.”

Preventable.

Preventable.

Preventable.

Spurgeon tried again to catch Meomartino’s eye but could not. It had to have been an unintentional omission, he told himself, sitting there and studying Marcello Malpighi’s portrait.

When he arrived at Silverstone’s room on the sixth floor he thought Adam was going to climb the wall in his rage.

A rage directed at Spurgeon, he discovered to his astonishment.

“How could you let Meomartino get away with a thing like that?”

“He didn’t tell me to release her. It’s true I called him on the telephone, but he didn’t tell me a damn thing, man. He just asked me if I really needed him and I said I could handle it myself.”

“But you called him,” Adam said. “It was his responsibility to tell you to hold the patient until he could get down there. The committee would have known that.”

Spurgeon shrugged.

“I’ll go to the Old Man.”

“I’d rather you didn’t. He looks so bad I’m not sure he’s capable of handling this kind of situation.”

“Then go to Kender.”

He shook his head.

“Why not?”

“Because,” he said, “there is a rule that interns shouldn’t release patients, and I did break that rule. Because Meomartino did not tell me to send her home. Because if I was going to do any complaining I should have done it at the conference.”

“Robinson, you are the most stupid person I ever met in my entire life,” he heard Adam call after him as he left.

Meomartino had revealed himself to be less than a man, he told himself as he clumped in misery to the elevator.

But during the torturous ride from the sixth floor to the basement, with an old sick dread he forced himself to recognize the reason he had not called attention to the telephone call during the committee meeting.

He had been terrified of all those white, white faces.

The day continued as it had begun.

Disastrously.