“Man, the fetus is where the whole damn mess is perpetuated. When expectant mothers are undernourished, the fetal brains don’t develop enough to permit adequate learning later on, after the babies are born. And then there’s a general increase in the number of hewers of wood and haulers of water. I decided if I was going into this thing I’d better get to the source.”

Adam nodded, admitting to himself that it made sense.

“Listen, Dorothy found us an apartment,” Spurgeon said.

“Nice?”

“Not bad. Inexpensive, and near the clinic in Roxbury. We’ll have a big housewarming bust the night of August third. Write it down.”

“We’ll be there unless something happens in this wonderful place to keep me away. You know . . .”

“Sure,” Spurgeon said.

In the ambulance the radio crackled.

“That’s us, Dr. Robinson,” Brady said.

Spurgeon got into the ambulance. “Hey, you know what I just realized?” he said, grinning through the window. “I may be able to help deliver your baby.”

“If you do, whistle Bach,” Adam said. “Gaby likes Bach.”

Spurgeon looked pained. “You don’t whistle Bach.”

“Maybe if you ask Gerstein he’ll let you move in a piano,” Adam said as the ambulance began to move. It carried the intern’s laughter out of the yard.

He smiled after them, too tired and too contented to move. He was going to miss working with Spurgeon Robinson, he realized. When things began to get hairy in a large teaching hospital, people on different services might as well be on different continents. They would see one another occasionally but it wouldn’t be the same; they had arrived at the end of a good interlude.

For each of them it was also the beginning of something new that would be very good, he was certain of it.

Tomorrow the new interns and residents would descend on the hospital. The Old Man’s administration was over, but Kender’s was just beginning and Kender would be as satisfying to work under as Longwood, as tough and challenging and probing whenever the Mortality Conference met. Tomorrow all the other staff people would be there and this time he would be one of them. He would teach surgery to the house officers in the ward and in the operating room until September, when his first students would arrive at the medical school.