Three evenings later Adam was back in the animal lab, this time to watch Kender transplant a canine kidney and to exchange the two books for a third. His next visit was delayed by greed and the opportunity to sell his free time in Woodborough. But a week later, coming off duty one night, he found himself walking to the lab and pushing open the old, paint-chipped door. Kender gave him an unsurprised greeting and coffee and talked with him about a new series of animal experiments he wanted begun.

“. . . Do you think you understand all that?” he asked finally.

“Yes.”

He grinned and reached for his hat. “Fine and dandy. Then I’ll go home and shock my wife.”

Adam looked at him. “You want me to start it alone?”

“Why not? A medical student named Kazandjian will be here in half an hour. He works as a technician and knows where to find everything.” He picked a notebook from the shelf and slapped it down on the desk. “Keep careful notes. If you get confused, the whole shmeer is outlined here.”

“Fine and dandy,” Adam said faintly.

He sank into a chair, remembering that he was scheduled to cover the Emergency Room in Woodborough the next day.

But by the time the medical student arrived he had studied the notebook and was happy about being there. When he helped Kazandjian to prep a bitch named Harriet, mostly collie with lustrous brown eyes and terrible breath, she licked his hand with a warm, rough tongue. He wanted to buy a bone and sneak her into the room on the sixth floor but he remembered Susan Garland and instead steeled himself and put her under with a stiff jolt of Pentothal. He scrubbed and got ready just the way he would have for a human patient and while Kazandjian prepped a German Shepherd named Wilhelm he removed a kidney from Harriet and then while Kazandjian perfused Harriet’s kidney he removed a kidney from Wilhelm and from that moment he forgot they were dogs. The veins were veins and the arteries were arteries, and he knew only that he was performing his first kidney transplants. He worked very carefully and cleanly and when finally Harriet owned one of Wilhelm’s kidneys and Wilhelm owned one of Harriet’s it was almost one a.m., but he could feel Kazandjian’s silent respect, which pleased him more than if the student had put it into words.

They gave Harriet a minimum dose of Imuran and Wilhelm a maximum dose; it was not one of the new agents—in fact it was the one they had used on Susan Garland—but Kender wanted to do studies with the established drugs first, in order to be ready for the upcoming transplant on Mrs. Bergstrom. Kazandjian asked some intelligent questions about immunosuppression, and after they had returned the dogs to their pens the student brewed coffee over a Bunsen burner while Adam explained how the antibodies in the recipient’s system were like defensive soldiers reacting as though the transplanted tissue were an invading army, and how the function of the immunosuppressive drug was to strike a hard enough blow against the defensive forces so they wouldn’t be able to fight off the foreign organ.