“You’d need an examining table, a treatment table. Surgical instruments, an autoclave to keep them sterile. Examining lamps. EKG. Diathermy. A couple of stethescopes, an otoscope, a microscope, an ophthalmoscope. Darkroom and developing equipment. Probably a few odds and ends I haven’t thought of.”

“How much?”

Horowitz shrugged again. “That’s hard to say. You can’t always find these things second-hand.”

“Don’t figure second-hand prices. These people haven’t had anything in their lives that was first-class. Old chairs, okay, but figure on new equipment.”

The detail man did some more adding and put away his ballpoint pen. “Nine thousand,” he said.

“Um.”

“And you’d have to be able to keep going once you opened up. Some of your patients would have medical insurance, but most of them wouldn’t. A few would be able to pay a very small fee.”

“And there will be rent and electric bills,” Spurgeon said. “Figure twelve grand to get through the first year?”

“Sounds reasonable to me,” Horowitz said. “Let me know if there’s anything else I can do.”

“Yeah. Thanks.”

He sat there and had a second cup of coffee, and then another. Finally he paid his check and asked Maxie for a dollar’s worth of change. He hummed as he dialed for the operator but his stomach was crampy with nervousness.

He had no trouble placing the call until he reached the final bastion, the icy-voiced English secretary who protected Calvin Priest from mortals.

“Mr. Priest has somebody in with him, Dr. Robinson,” she said in the voice that always sounded disapproving. “Is it terribly important?”

“Well, no,” he said, and immediately felt self-disgust. “Well, yes, as a matter of fact it is important. Will you tell him his son is on the phone and needs his help?”

“Oh, yes, sir. Will you hang on or shall I ask Mr. Priest to return your call?”

“I’ll wait for my father,” he said.

He took Dorothy to see the store the next day. By then he had had a night in which to develop doubts and invent many dragons, some of which he had not been able to slay with reason. The block and the store looked somehow bleaker than it had when he had left it. Somebody had stolen some of the chalk and had drawn on the sidewalk a number of depictions of a couple in the various positions of sexual embrace, or perhaps it was more than one couple, a sidewalk orgy. The artist had left the chalk and now two little girls, ignoring the bacchanal, played tic-tac-toe with a desperate intentness. Inside, the store was less spacious than he remembered, and dirtier.

She listened to him and she looked at the chalk lines on the floor. “It sounds rather long-term,” she said.

“Well, yeah.”