A Case Of Need

Being on the "Hold" is the technological equivalent of purgatory.

Sanderson laughed. "There's no problem," he said. "Yet. I've got a pretty tough old neck. I can keep it stuck out a while longer."

In a sense that is a part of the training: surgeons are lonely men.

Leland Weston: "Never take a position unless you are certain it can be defended any onslaught. That may sound like good advice to a general, but then, a courtroom is nothing more then a very civilized war."

As I went down to my car, [Peter Randall] said, "If you don't want to get involved I'll understand" I looked back at him. "You know damn well I'd have no choice." "I didn't," he said. "But I was hoping."

I smiled, remembering Art's line about doctors being illpolitical. He meant it the way you used words like illiterate. Art always said doctors not only held no political views, but also were incapable of them. "It's like the military," he had once said. "Political views are considered unprofessional."

I tried to tell which was Randall, but I could not; in their gowns and masks, they all looked the same, impersonal, interchangeable. That was not true of course. One of those four men had responsibility for everything, for the contact of all sixteen workers present. And responsibility for the seventeenth person in that room, the man whose heart was stopped.