How much was in his wallet? Less than ten, he knew. Eight, nine. And a month until pay-day. “Take me for a dollar?”

A look of disgust.

He picked up the B-4 bag and walked down the street, getting to BENJ. MORETTI & SONS PRODUCE when the cab passed him and stopped.

“Get in the back seat,” the cabby said. “I cruise all the way, if I pick up somebody else, you get out. For a buck.”

He climbed in gratefully. The cab crawled through the streets and he gazed out the open window, perceiving the kind of hospital it would be. The streets were old and sad, lined with tenement houses with broken steps and dribbling ashcans, neighborhoods of poor people crammed together in a glut of poverty. It would be a hospital whose clinic benches were filled each morning with the sick and maimed of one of society’s self-built traps.

Tough for you, he said silently to the sleeping victims behind blank windows as the taxi rolled past. But good for me, a teaching hospital where maybe I can learn some surgery.

The hospital complex loomed like a monolith in the early morning light, big parking lamps still burning yellow around the square emptiness of the ambulance yard.

Inside, the entry was gloomy and old-fashioned. An elderly man with sagging wrinkled cheeks and improbable jet-black hair sat behind the reception counter. Adam consulted the letter he had received from the administrator four weeks before and then asked for the Surgical Fellow, Dr. Meomartino. Ah, Italians of the world, we are everywhere.

The man consulted a hospital directory. “Fourth Surgical Service. He might be asleep,” he said doubtfully. “Shall I ring him?”

“God, no.” He thanked him and wandered outside. Across the street a light flared in a coffee shop and as he walked toward it he could see behind the counter a short dark man adding water to the coffee urn; but the door was locked and the little man didn’t look up when he rattled it. He went back into the hospital and asked the man with dyed hair how to get to a Fourth Surgical Service ward.

“Down the hall there straight past Emergency and take the second stairs up one flight. Quincy Ward. Can’t miss.”

As he approached the Emergency Ward he half-considered volunteering his services. Happily the impulse passed, even before he peered into the big room and saw that it was empty of patients. An intern slumped in a chair reading. A nurse sat across the room and squinted sleepily at her knitting. On a litter in a corner an orderly lay like a sleeping bear, his mouth slightly open.

He climbed the stairs into Quincy Ward, passing in the quiet halls only a skinny blond intern whose open collar drooped beneath his acned chin like a flag on a windless day.

Except for the night lights the ward was dark. The patients lay in rows, some like lumps but others restless and ridden in slumber by devils.