Dr. Longwood glanced at Dr. Kender.

“Preventable,” the Associate Chief said through the cigar.

At Dr. Sack.

“Preventable.”

At Dr. Paul Sullivan, a Visiting Surgeon.

“Preventable.”

At Dr. Parkhurst.

“Preventable,” she said.

Spurgeon sat there as the word rolled like a cold stone around the perimeter of the room, no longer able to look at either of the pediatric residents.

God, he thought, don’t ever let this happen to me.

He was assigned to Quincy Ward with Silverstone, and they walked there together. It was a busy hour for the nurses, the time of scut work, of changing simple dressings and of taking temperatures, of serving juice and carrying bedpans, of delivering pills and completing records. They stood in the corridor while the resident looked at the notes he had made during morning rounds and Spurgeon watched two giggling student nurses making beds until finally Dr. Silverstone looked up.

And the Lord spake, Spurgeon thought, saying . . .

“Harold Krebs, post-op prostatectomy, Room 304, needs two units of whole blood. Start an I.V. on Abraham Batson in 310. And then pick up a cut-down kit and we’ll place a central venous catheter in Roger Cort, 308.”

There was a spare, wispy-haired old woman, with the head nurse’s stripe on her cap, sitting in the records station. Spurgeon reached past her with a muttered apology and took the telephone.

“Do you have the number of the blood bank?” he asked her.

Without looking at him she handed him a telephone directory.

When he dialed it, the number was busy.

A very pretty brunette nurse with a good body displayed in a nylon uniform came into the station and began to write a message on the blackboard: Dr. Levine please call W Ayland 872-8694.

He dialed the blood bank again. “Damn.”

“Can I help you, Doctor?” the young nurse said.

“I’m just trying to get the blood bank.”

“That’s the hardest number in the hospital to get. Most of the interns just go down and pick up the bloods themselves. The person to see down there is Betty Callaway.”

He thanked her and she hurried out of the station. He leaned past the head nurse again and replaced the telephone. Old white witch, he thought, why didn’t you tell me? Hell, I don’t even know how to find the damn blood bank, he realized in dismay.

He leaned over and looked at the head nurse’s name tag. “Miss Fultz,” he said. She continued to write in her records.

“Can you direct me to the blood bank?”

“Basement,” she said, without looking up.

He found it after three inquiries and ordered the bloods from Betty Callaway, waiting impatiently while she looked up Harold Krebs’s blood type. Riding back upstairs in the slow elevator he cursed himself out for a jackass, fighting landlords like a little tin version of Stokely when he should have been wandering around the hospital, learning where everything was.

The way things had started he would not have been surprised to discover that the patient in 304 had invisible veins, but Harold Krebs turned out to be a man with a good, well-defined venous system made for accepting catheters, and he got the transfusion going without trouble.