The foreman chewed his unlighted cigar and looked at the injured man. “His name is Paul Connors. Again and again I’ve told these bastards wear your helmets. Is he going to die?”

“We can’t tell much from here,” Spurgeon said. He lifted a closed eyelid and saw that the pupils were dilated. The pulse was very thready.

The fat man looked at him with suspicion. “Are you a doctor?”

Black boy?

“Yes.”

“You going to give him something for pain?”

“He doesn’t feel any pain.”

He helped Maish bring out the litter and they loaded Paul Connors into the ambulance.

“Hey!” the foreman yelled as he started to close the door. “I’ll ride with you.”

“Against the rules,” he lied.

“I’ve done it before,” the man said uncertainly. “What hospital are you from?”

“County General.” He pulled at the door and let it slam. Up front, Meyerson started the motor. The ambulance lurched forward. The patient was breathing in shallow gasps, and Spurgeon fixed the black rubber otopharyngeal airway tube in his mouth so it wouldn’t let his tongue interfere and then turned on the respirator. He placed the mask over the patient’s face and the positive pressure oxygen began to be fed in quick short bursts that made noises like a baby burping. The siren gave a small groan of resumption and once more began to unwind a thick ribbon of electronic sound. The ambulance tires whirred against the roadbed. He began to think of how he could orchestrate the incident as a piece of music. Drums, horns, reeds. You could use everything.

Almost everything, he thought as he adjusted the oxygen flow.

You wouldn’t want violins.

Dozing with his head on his arms, Adam Silverstone leaned against the hard desk-top in the Chief Resident’s office and dreamed it was a bed of dry, tight-curled leaves, the accumulation of many past leaf-falls, on which once he had lain as a boy and peered into a quiet brook-pool in the woods. It was in the late spring of the year he was fourteen, a bad time for him because his father had taken to answering his grandmother’s indignant Italian curses with drunken Yiddish insults of his own, and to flee both Myron Silberstein and the old vecchia he had simply taken to the highway one Saturday morning and traveled three hours by thumb, without destination, heading only away from the smoke and grit of Pittsburgh and what it represented, until he was dropped off by a motorist on a section of road which ran through woods. Later he had tried half a dozen times to find the place, but he could never remember exactly where it had been, or perhaps by the time he had gotten back to it the forest had been raped by a bulldozer and had spawned houses. Not that it had been anything special; the woods were sparse and scraggly with fallen trees, the trickle of a stream had never housed a trout, the pool was a deep clear puddle. But the water was cold and sun-dappled. He had stretched out on his stomach in the leaves, smelling the odors of cool forest mold, his stomach beginning to feel hunger, conscious of the fact that soon he would have to begin hitch-hiking back, but caring about nothing as he lay and watched little Jesus-bugs walking on the water. What had he experienced in the half hour he had stayed—before the insistent spring dampness crept up through the dry leaves and made him take his shivering leave—that would cause him to dream of the little pool for the rest of his life?