“He’s gone,” Schneider said into the telephone.

They waited in silence. In a very little while Schneider listened intently and then turned from the telephone.

“She signed it,” he said.

Spurgeon went back into OR-3 and nodded to Meomartino. While Dr. Kender watched, the Surgical Fellow picked up a scalpel and made the transverse incision which would allow him to remove the kidney from the cadaver.

Meomartino worked with extreme care, aware that his nephrectomy was clean and right because of Dr. Kender’s approving silence. He was accustomed to operating before the judging eyes of senior men and was never upset by them.

Still, his self-assurance cracked for a split second when he looked up and saw Dr. Longwood seated in the gallery.

Was it the shadows? Or in his moment of observation were the puffy dark signs of uremic poisoning already discernible beneath the Old Man’s eyes?

Dr. Kender cleared his throat and Meomartino bent over the cadaver again.

It took him only sixteen minutes to remove the kidney, which appeared to be a good one, with a single, well-defined artery. While he searched the abdomen with gloved fingers to make sure no occult tumor was present, the communications team, each member by now scrubbed and waiting, took the freed kidney and hooked it to a perfusion system which pumped icy-cold fluids through the organ.

Before their eyes the big red bean of flesh whitened as the blood was washed out of it, and shrank with cold.

They carried the kidney to OR-4 on a tray and Adam Silverstone assisted as Dr. Kender made it part of the girl’s body and then removed both of her own kidneys, wasted and wrinkled bits of spoiled tissue that had not functioned for a long time. Even so, as Adam dropped the second one from the forceps to the towel he was newly aware that now Susan Garland’s only lifeline was the artery joining her blood supply to Paul Connors’ kidney. By that time the transplanted organ was already pinking healthily, warmed by the rush of her young blood.

Less than half an hour after the transplant was begun, Adam closed the abdominal incision. He helped the orderly move Susan Garland to the sterile recovery room and so he was the last man to get to the junior surgeons’ room. Robinson and Schneider already had changed from OR greens to whites and had returned to the wards. Meomartino was in his underwear.

“It looked like a score,” Meomartino said.

Adam held up crossed fingers.

“Did you see Longwood?”

“No. The Old Man was there?”

Meomartino nodded.

Adam opened the metal locker which contained his own whites and began to pull off the black non-static OR boots.

“I don’t know why he would want to watch,” Meomartino said in a little while.

“He’ll be getting one himself, soon, if we’re lucky enough to get a B-negative donor.”

“That’s not going to be easy. B-negatives are rare.”

Adam shrugged. “I suppose Mrs. Bergstrom will get the next transplant,” he conceded.