Almost unbelievingly he felt a once-familiar pressure growing in his bladder.

Perhaps it was the wine, he thought with a rising excitement.

He left the car and walked to a point midway between the car and the big tree. Facing the old stone wall he unzipped and took himself out and concentrated.

After a long while two drops emerged and fell, as if from a turned-off faucet.

Headlights appeared and approached and he jerked himself back into his trousers like a little boy surprised by an opening door. The car flared past and he stood trembling, an idiot, an idiot, he thought in outrage, trying to pee in the dark on a bed of lily-of-the-valley he had planted there a quarter of a century before.

A raindrop kissed him coldly on the forehead.

He wondered whether, when the time came, the Death Committee would decide that the failure of Harland Longwood had been Preventable or Unavoidable.

If through some trick of reincarnation he were to preside at that meeting, he would place the responsibility squarely on Dr. Longwood, he thought.

For so many wrong decisions.

Awed, he saw it with perfect clarity.

All of life was a Mortality Conference.

The case history began with the first moment of responsible existence.

And sooner or later—at first creeping up and then with stunning swiftness—the moment when the history was about to be completed came to every man. And he was confronted with the sum of his own imperfect performance.

And so vulnerable, so terribly vulnerable.

Gentlemen, let us consider the Longwood case.

Preventable or Unavoidable?

By the time he got back into the car the rain was falling steadily, as if drawn from the sky by his pelvic muscles.

When he turned the car around, the light of his headlamps illuminated the sign at the end of the driveway and he saw that the Bancrofts had sold the place to people named Feldstein.

He hoped the Feldsteins were as nice as the Rosenfelds.

In a little while he began to laugh, and soon he was laughing so hard he had to pull the car to a stop again by the side of the road.

Oh, Frances, he said to her, how without knowing it could I have turned into this stupid malfunctioning old man?

Remembering, he still felt inside like the young man who had knelt naked before her the first time they had made love.

And after worshiping all his life at a shrine like that, he thought, he couldn’t suddenly begin to believe in a saving God simply because now he needed to be saved.

Nor, he knew with sudden frightened clarity, after fighting death all his life could he now help himself to die.

When he reached the hospital he found Kender still in the Kidney Lab, going over x-rays with young Silverstone.

“I’d like to go back on the machine,” he said.

Kender peered up at a film. “They’re busy for the rest of the night,” he said. “I can’t get you on until morning.”