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cut very short.
    “I thought an O.R. had to be sterile,” he said.
    “Scrupulous cleanliness is far more important, Lieutenant. I’ve known O.R.s more sterile than a zapped fruit fly, but no one ever really cleaned them.”
    “So you’re a neurosurgeon?”
    “No, I’m a technician with a master’s. Neurosurgery is a man’s field, and they give women neurosurgeons hell. But at the Hug I can do what I love to do without that kind of trauma. Due to the size of my patients, it’s very high-powered neurosurgery. See that? My Zeiss operating microscope. They don’t have one in the Chubb neurosurgery O.R.s, not one,” said the lady with great satisfaction.
    “You operate on what?”
    “Monkeys for Dr. Chandra. Cats for him and Dr. Finch. Rats for the neurochemists upstairs, and cats for them too.”
    “Do they die on the table often?”
    Sonia Liebman looked outraged. “What do you think I am, hamfisted? No! I sacrifice animals for the neurochemists, who don’t often work on live brains. Neurophysiologists work on live brains. That’s the main difference between the two disciplines to me.”
    “Uh, what do you sacrifice, Mrs. Liebman?” Tread carefully, Carmine, tread carefully!
    “Rats in the main, but I do Sherringtonian decerebrations on cats too.”
    “What’s that?” he asked, writing in his notebook, but not really wanting to know — more abstruse details coming up!
    “Removal of a brain from the tentorium up under ether anesthesia. The moment I shell the brain out, I inject Pentothal into the heart and wham! the animal’s dead. Instantaneous.”
    “So you put fairly large animals into bags and take them to the refrigerator for disposal?”
    “Yes, on decerebration days.”
    “How often do these decerebration days happen?”
    “It depends. If Dr. Ponsonby or Dr. Polonowski asks for cat fore-brains, about every two weeks for a couple of months, at the rate of three to four cats on any one day. Dr. Satsuma doesn’t ask nearly as often — maybe once a year, six cats.”
    “How big are these decerebrated cats?”
    “Monsters. Males about twelve to fifteen pounds.”
    Right, two floors down and two to go. Utilities, workshops and neurophysiology done. Now it’s up to see the office staff on the fourth floor, then down to the third and neurochemistry.
    There were three medical typists, all with science degrees, and a filing clerk who had nothing more imposing than a high school diploma — how lonely she must feel! Vonnie, Dora and Margaret used big IBM golfball typewriters, and could type “electroencephalography” faster than a cop could type “DUI.” Nothing there; he left them to it, Denise the filing clerk sniffling and mopping her eyes as she peered into open drawers, the typewriters clattering like machine guns.
    Dr. Charles Ponsonby was waiting for him at the elevator. He was, he said to Carmine as he escorted the visitor to his office, the same age as the Prof, forty-five, and filled in for the Prof when he was away. They’d gone to the Dormer Day School together, did their premed at Chubb together, then their medical degrees at Chubb. Both, Ponsonby explained gravely, were Connecticut Yankees back to the beginning. But after medical school their paths had diverged. Ponsonby had preferred to stay at Chubb to do his neurological residency, while Smith had gone to Johns Hopkins. Not that the separation had been a long one: Bob Smith came back to head up the Hug, and invited Ponsonby to join him there. That had been in 1950, when both were thirty years old.
    Now why did you stay home? Carmine wondered, studying the chief of neurochemistry. A medium-sized man of medium height, Charles Ponsonby had brown hair streaked with grey, watery blue eyes above a pair of half glasses perched on a long, narrow nose, and the air of an absentminded professor. His clothes were shabby and tweedy, his hair wisped about, and his socks, Carmine saw, were mismatched: navy on the right foot, grey on the