“You want another case? Dr. George Minot. Brilliant young Boston medical researcher, nearly dead of diabetes back when there was no effective treament. Then, just before the end, he got one of the earliest batches of a brand-new hormone discovered by two Canadians named Dr. Frederick C. Banting and Dr. Charles H. Best—insulin. He didn’t die. And because he didn’t die, he went on to win the Nobel Prize for working out the cure for pernicious anemia, and an untold number of other people were saved, who knows how many of them in the nick of time.” He slapped Adam heavily on the thigh and blew cigar smoke in his face. “That’s why I don’t buy genteel concessions to easy death, sonny. That’s why I prefer to fight right down the line, even though it’s ugly and it hurts.”

Adam shook his head, unconvinced. “There remains a lot to say for not prolonging terrible pain and ugliness in the face of inevitable defeat.”

Kender looked at him and smiled. “You’re young,” he said. “It will be interesting to see if your views change.”

“I doubt if they will.”

Kender blew a cloud of stinking cigar smoke at him. “We’ll see,” he said.

In the middle of the night, running in sweat-suit and gloves and muffler and arctic boots over soft new-fallen snow that glittered like ground glass under the street lamps, orbiting round and round the hospital, his sun, until the cold of outer space corroded his lungs and speared his vital center, he knew that Spurgeon Robinson was right: the Silverstone Greater Scheme of Things was bullshit and cow dung. Liz Meomartino was offering him the Silverstone Greater Scheme of Things on a platter, and he recognized at once that it was not at all what he wanted. What he yearned desperately to become in twenty years was a mixture of Lobsenz and Sack and Kender and Longwood, and that transformation wasn’t going to occur in Cuernavaca or anyplace else with Liz Meomartino.

He called her in the morning and told her as gently as he was able.

“You’re certain?”

“Yes.”

“Meet me, Adam.”

She thought she could change his mind, he knew. “I don’t think so, Liz.”

“Rafe is home tonight, but I’ll get away. All I want to do is say goodbye.”

“Goodbye, Liz. Good luck,” he said.

“Be there. Please.” She broke the connection.

He worked all day like an emancipated slave now in business for himself. Off-duty at six, he consumed dinner with fine appetite and put in several good hours in the animal lab.