“What time?”

“Oh, say ten o’clock. When you’re through with the machine I want you to have a blood transfusion.”

It was a statement, not a request; Kender was speaking to a patient, he realized.

“We don’t think the machine is the permanent answer for you,” Kender was saying. “We’re going to try to get you another kidney.”

“I know how difficult it is to choose kidney recipients,” Dr. Longwood said stiffly. “I don’t want any special favors.”

Dr. Kender smiled. “You’re not getting any. Your case was selected on its teaching merits by the Transplant Committee, but you have a rare blood type, and of course it may take a long while for us to find a cadaver donor. In the meantime, you’ll have to be dependable and show up here twice a week for the machine.”

Dr. Longwood nodded. “Good night,” he said.

Outside the laboratory, the closed doors shut off the sound of the machines and it was quiet. He had almost reached the elevator when he heard the door open and close and the sound of the hurrying footsteps.

He saw when he turned that it was Silverstone.

“You left this on Dr. Kender’s desk,” Adam said, holding out the bottle of sleeping pills.

Longwood searched the younger man’s eyes for pity but found only watchful interest. Good, he thought, this one might make a surgeon.

“Thank you,” he said as he took the bottle. “That was quite careless of me.”

4

Adam Silverstone

The thirty-six hour shifts made the days and the nights run into one another curiously, so that during periods of overwork sometimes if Silverstone didn’t look out a window he was uncertain whether it was dark or light outside.

He found that Suffolk County General was something he had been seeking for a long time without knowing it.

The hospital was old and shabby, not as clean as he would have liked; the unwashed poverty of the patients was nerve-wracking; the administration pinched pennies in nasty little ways like not issuing clean whites to the house officers often enough. But the Service practiced a tremendously exciting brand of university surgery. From the beginning he operated often, cases of more interesting variety during the first month than he had done in half a year in Georgia.

He had experienced a sinking feeling when he had first heard that Rafe Meomartino was married to the Old Man’s niece, but he had to admit that the good cases were divided impartially between the two of them. He recognized that there was an inexplicable coldness between Meomartino and Longwood, and he had come to realize that Rafe might actually be at a disadvantage because of the relationship.

The only uncomfortable portion of his existence occurred when he found himself on the sixth floor, which in a moment of absent-minded stupidity he had turned into a cold and lonely place.

The worst part of the whole soap episode was that he really liked Spurgeon Robinson.