“I’ll be available. I’m broke.”

Meomartino nodded without surprise. “I haven’t the authority to assign you a room. But I can help you find a place to flop. For what’s left of the night.”

The elevator was old and slow. In Case of Emergency Ring Three Times, a sign by the bell advised. Adam thought of waiting for this creaking monster in an emergency and felt doubt.

It arrived finally and carried them to the sixth floor. The hallway was especially narrow and dark. The room number was 6-13, which could not be a portent, he told himself. The ceiling slanted; the room was under the old building’s eaves. The shades were drawn. In the dim light he could see a terrifying crack in one of the plaster walls, which appeared to be feces-colored. Under the crack and facing the two beds there was a wooden chair flanked by a bureau and a desk, all the color of old mustard. On one of the beds a man in whites was sprawled, the New England Journal of Medicine spread open on his chest and abandoned in favor of sleep.

“Harvey Miller. Rotating from that fancy institution across town,” Meomartino said, making no attempt to whisper. “Not a bad hombre for that place.” His tone dismissed all outsiders. Yawning, he waved his hand and went out the door.

The air in the room was stale. Adam went to the window and raised the bottom four inches. Immediately the blind began to flap; he raised it to conform to the window and the flapping stopped. The man on the bed stirred but did not waken.

He lifted the New England Journal from Harvey Miller and lay down. He tried to remember what Gaby Pender looked like, but he found that he could not reconstruct the parts; he recalled only a very deep tan and a marvelous mole on her face, and that the whole was a girl he had liked very much. The mattress was thin and lumpy, a reject from the wards. Wafting up into his open window from the open window below came a sound of pain, more than a groan but less than a scream. Harvey Miller patted his groin in his sleep, unaware that his privacy had been violated. “Alice,” he said clearly.

Adam turned to the classified advertising pages of the journal, fantasizing about a future that would offer all the things of life he had never been able to afford as well as sufficient money so that Myron Silberstein’s outstretched palm no longer would be a threat to survival. Certain ads he skipped or read scornfully, the invitations to applicants for post-doctoral study, expenses paid with little or no stipend; the notices of research fellowships worth $7,000 a year; the university instructorships that paid a big ten thousand; the deceptively juicy descriptions of inexpensive practices for sale in the large medical centers, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles, where there were established practitioners to tie a beginner’s hands and send him, tin cup in hand, seeking piece work with the insurance companies at six dollars an hour.