Adam had stopped naming the dogs. It was one thing to go to the animal lab and learn from Kazandjian that Experimental Surgical Procedure No. 37 had been a failure; it was something else to be informed of the death of a living creature called Lovely or Max or Wallace or Flower Child. He forced himself to ignore the canine tongues that sought to kiss his hand and instead to concentrate on the microcosmic wars raging between antigens and antibodies within the dogs.

After months of trusting him to work alone, Kender had begun to haunt the laboratory and was watching him closely.

“Things must be getting very ripe on the faculty appointment,” he said to Gaby one night, telling her about Kender while she basted herself with baby oil under the sunlamp.

“Perhaps it isn’t that,” she said, turning on her stomach and handing him the oil. “He may simply be so interested in the experiments he can’t stay away.”

“He’s always been interested in the experiments without observing me,” Adam said. His oil-carrying palm made liquid sucking noises as it rubbed his favorite spot, the small hollow where her spine ended and the gluteal rise began. He breathed the odor of the oil on warm flesh and neither of them could stand it when he tried to do the backs of her knees. When finally she turned he got greasy stains on his clothing and on the following day when he went to work his shirt chafed the slight burn on his back and his neck.

Two nights later, when Kender asked him to explain a procedure he had already described in detail in the notebook, Adam was certain.

He ran through the experiment orally and then looked at the older surgeon and smiled.

“So far as I’m concerned, you pass,” Kender said.

“How do you think I’ll do with the other people who count?” he said, gambling on an intuitive feeling that this was a moment in which candor was permissible.

Kender unwrapped a cigar. “It’s hard to predict. I can tell you this: it’s a small field. They’re considering only you and one other man. I suppose by now you know who he is?”

“I’m pretty certain.”

“You each have a lot going for you.”

“When will we be notified?”

Kender shook his head. “That isn’t the way it works. Only one doctor is notified, the man who receives the appointment. The other candidate will hear about it through the grapevine as scuttlebutt. He will never be told why he didn’t get the appointment himself, or learn who voted against him.”

Kender shrugged. “That’s the system,” he said. “At least it allows the unsuccessful candidate to console himself with the thought that perhaps he lost out because some prejudiced bastard didn’t like his choice of neckties or the color of his eyes.”

“Is that possibility part of the system, too?”