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arrived when it was all over and the doctors were back in the locker room.
    “It was very close,” Albeniz said, replying to Martin’s question. “But I’m fairly sure she’ll be all right.” He seemed surprised. “Why, do you know the girl?”
    “No. I was on duty when she came in. I sutured her face.”
    “You did?” There was strong emphasis on the “you.”
    Martin felt quick dread in the pit of the stomach.
    “I’m afraid I’m the culprit.”
    “Culprit?” Albeniz, who was tying his shoes, glanced up.
    “On the contrary, I asked because it’s a superb job. By the looks of it she will have scarcely a scar.”
    Martin swallowed, disbelieving. “I guess I was just lucky then.”
    “You had your nerve, knowing nothing about it!”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “You have good hands. Are you interested in plastic surgery?”
    “Not particularly.” He corrected himself, “No, I’m not.”
    “Well, it was a superb job,” Albeniz repeated.
    Martin flushed, both with pleasure and misgiving. What had he dared to do, knowing so little? He had just been awfully lucky! Very generous, though, of Albeniz to say what he had.
    A week or two later, Albeniz ran past him in a corridor. Speed was his eccentricity. It seemed that all the greats had some eccentricity or other! Jeffers wore rubbers even when the sun was shining. Albeniz never took the elevator, preferring in his haste to run up three flights of stairs. When he saw Martin he stopped.
    “Would you like to know how your patient is getting on?”
    “Oh, yes,” Martin said, pleased at being treated like a colleague.
    “Well, for a while I had my doubts, but she will definitely have usable hands. Also a presentable face, thanks to you.”
    It seemed necessary to say something polite in return. “After what you’ve done for her, my suturing seems unimportant.”
    “Not so. It’s not very good for one’s mental health to have scarred cheeks, you know.”
    “But your work is vital. I’ve seen you work and I’ve been—I guess you could say I’ve been thrilled each time.”
    Albeniz smiled. “Well then, I give you a standing invitation to come and watch whenever you’re free.”
    *  *  *
    The operating room was fitted out in porcelain and stainless steel, gleaming silver-gray. Beyond the great window, the winter sky was a darker gray. Albeniz and his resident, the anaesthesiologist, the nurses, the assistants and the subassistants moved quickly in an ordered pattern, their feet making no sound. It was a subaqueous ballet, a serious dance around the table on which the patient lay, his shaven head firmly clamped. The green curtain hanging on its frame separated his head from the rest of his body. A profusion of tubes was connected to various parts of that body; to someone who didn’t understand them it appeared to be only a tangle of tubes. But they were the weapons of this little army which was fighting for the life of the man on the table.
    The excitement was unlike anything Martin had ever felt before. He stood with the explorers, with Balboa sighting the Pacific Ocean and Magellan rounding the world.
    Bare and exposed lay a human brain. Albeniz looked up from it to the X-ray, hanging directly in his line of vision. There the arteries turned and curved like grapevines or Virginia creeper. There lay the dark blot and clump of tumor. Martin’s heart pounded. He tried to remember what he had learned about the brain; neurons, axons, dendrites—and could only think: There somewhere in that roughly corrugated mass, that lump made of the same stuff as stomach or liver, ran the electricity of thought. Out of it came words, music and commands to clench a fist or kiss beloved lips.
    “Clamp,” said Albeniz.
    His hands in their pale gloves moved inside the patient’s brain, moved among those billions of neurons.
    “Cautery,” he said. “Suction.”
    Five and a half hours later it was over. Albeniz looked up. His eyes, above the mask, were weary.
    “I