Behind the door waited four Campbell’s Soup cartons he had begged from the supermarket on Charles Street three days before, and he used them as receptacles for the books and journals on the shelves and then, with dread, faced up to the task of cleaning out the desk, each crammed drawer the result of his pack-rat tendencies. The decisions about what to save and what to discard were difficult, but he took a hard line and the level of the waste basket rose. The final item to emerge from the last drawer was a small, smoothly-polished white rock, a gift from one of his patients when he had given up smoking. It was called a stress stone, rubbing it was supposed to relieve tension when nicotine addiction nagged. He was confident it was worthless but he enjoyed the weight and texture, its message that things survived the ages. Now it backfired; he was reminded by it and ridden by the insistent urge for a cigarette.

Some fresh air would be good while he had the opportunity, he decided.

Downstairs in the ambulance yard Brady, the tall, skinny man who had replaced Meyerson, was caressing his ambulance with a chamois. “Evening, Doc,” he said.

“Evening.”

Darkness was falling. As he stood there the outside lights flickered and flashed on, and almost immediately great moths made the exodus out of the gloom to dance around the bulbs. From nearby neighborhoods they could hear the war-movie sound of firecrackers, a rattling like rapid-fire from remote sectors of the front, and he thought with guilt and wonder of Meomartino already heading for a place with a name like Ben Soi or Nha Hoa or Da Nang.

“Fourth of July still four days away,” the ambulance driver said. “You wouldn’t know it to listen to those stupid bastards. Fireworks illegal, too.”

Adam nodded. The patient census in Emergency would be up for the rest of the week because of the holiday, he thought idly.

“Hey,” Spurgeon Robinson said, drawn out of the building to the ambulance.

“What do you know, Spur?”

“I know I’m about to take my last rides in this damn thing,” Spurgeon said.

“A full-fledged resident in the morning,” Adam said.

“Well, yeah. I’ve got to tell you something about that. A funny thing happened to me on the way to the residency. I left the Surgical Service.”

It jolted him; he had invested a lot of his professional faith in Spurgeon. “Where are you going?”

“Obstetrics. I asked Gerstein yesterday and luckily he has a place for me. Kender released me with his blessing.”

“Why? Are you sure it’s what you really want?”

“It’s something I can’t do without. I have to know things surgery can’t teach me.”

“Like what?” Adam said, ready to argue.

“Like everything I can learn about contraception. And the embryo.”

“What for?”