Thou hast been called, O Sleep! the friend of woe, but ’tis the happy that have called thee so. Southey, the computer said.

From one of the beds came the sound of a woman weeping. He stopped. “What is it?” he asked gently. Her face was hidden.

“I am full of fear.”

“There is no need to be,” he said. Get the hell out of here, he told himself furiously. For all you know, there is every need to be.

“Who are you?”

“I’m a doctor.”

The woman nodded. “So was Jesus.”

It gave him pause as he walked away.

In the nurse’s station he found an elderly R.N. who was accustomed to new doctors. She gave him coffee and fresh hard rolls and butter from the kitchen ward, deliciously free. “All you want, Doctor, it’s a rich county. I’m Rhoda Novak.” She laughed suddenly. “You’re lucky Helen Fultz wasn’t on tonight. She wouldn’t give anyone spit.”

She left before he finished his rolls. He wanted another, but was thankful for little things. A huge man in OR greens came into the station and sighed as he hid a chair beneath his haunches. He had red hair under the operating room cap and despite its size his face was soft and unformed, a boy’s face. He nodded to Adam and reached for the coffee pot just as the little signaling device on his uniform buzzed. “Ah,” he said. He went to the wall telephone and called in, spoke a few fast words and hurried away.

Adam left his coffee dregs and went after the huge green shape, down a labyrinthian series of corridors to the surgical suite.

The surgery in the Georgia hospital had been clean, brightly lighted, uncluttered and unobstructed. This lighting was dim at best. The corridors seemed to be repositories for extra furniture, spare stretchers, bookcases and random pieces of equipment; during peak hours they probably stacked pre-operative and postoperative patients here as well. The swinging doors to the operating rooms were worn three inches on each side, where the edges of innumerable beds had struck and rubbed, uncovering successive layers of laminated wood like counters of time, the rings within a tree.

There was a stairway and he climbed it to the observation gallery, which was dark and filled with a strange, loud breathing. The sound was the panting of the patient over the intercom, which had been left on and turned up too loud. Unable to find the light switch, he groped his way to a front row seat and dropped into it. Through the glass he could see the man on the table, balding and trapped looking, about forty years old and in obvious pain, watching a nurse set out instruments. His eyes were dull; he would have received a sedative before coming in, and probably scopolamine.

In a few minutes the fat boy who had been drinking coffee in the kitchen came into the OR, scrubbed and gloved.

“Doctor,” the nurse said.

Fat boy nodded without interest and started to anesthetize. His sausage fingers toyed with the left arm, finding the antecubital vein without any trouble and slipping in the intravenous catheter. He placed cuffs on the other arm and began to take pressure readings.