Dr. Kender nodded. “You simply hadn’t seen a sufficient number of transplant patients. You can’t be blamed for that.” He shook his head. “I wish to make it clear, though, that in the future when you’re faced with something inexplicable in one of my patients, you are to summon one of the staff men. Any Visiting Surgeon on this Service would have known immediately what was taking place. We could have given her blood, gone in like Flynn and attempted to repair the artery, placed a deep drain behind the kidney and shot her full of antibiotics. Even if the kidney had been irreparable, we could have removed it.”

And Susan Garland would be alive now, Adam thought. He was numbly aware he had been walking around with the subconscious knowledge that he should have called in a Visiting Surgeon that night. It was why he had been consulting Visitings lately even for the routine things.

He nodded at Kender.

The transplant specialist sighed. “The damned rejection phenomenon is still the thing that’s plaguing us. We’re good enough surgical mechanics to transplant anything, physically—hearts, limbs or puppy-dogs’ tails. But then the recipient’s antibodies go to work to reject the transplant, and to prevent this we poison the system with chemicals and leave the patient wide open to infection.”

“When you do the next transplant—the kidney for Mrs. Bergstrom—do you plan to use lighter dosages of the drugs?” Dr. Sack asked.

Dr. Kender shrugged. “We’ll have to go back to the lab. We’ll do more animal studies and then decide.”

“Let’s return to the Garland case,” Dr. Longwood said calmly. “How would you classify the death?”

“Oh, my, preventable,” Dr. Parkhurst said.

“Preventable,” Dr. Kender said, sucking at his cigar.

“By all means,” Dr. Sack said.

When it was Meomartino’s turn he had the grace merely to nod silently.

The Old Man fixed Adam with those huge eyes. “On this Surgical Service, Dr. Silverstone, whenever a patient bleeds to death it will be assumed that the mortality could have been avoided.”

Adam nodded again. There seemed to be no point in saying anything.

Dr. Longwood rose and the meeting was over.

Adam scraped his chair back from the table and got the hell out of the amphitheater.

When he came off duty that evening he traced Dr. Kender to the animal lab and found him setting up a new series of drug experiments with canines.

Kender greeted him genially. “Pull up a chair, son. You seem to have survived your ordeal by fire.”

“Not without getting singed,” Adam said.

The older man shrugged. “You deserved to get your ass singed, but it was a mistake most of us would have made with your inexperience in transplantation. You’re doing fine. I happen to know Dr. Longwood has his eye on you.”

He found himself tingling with pleasure and relief.