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on the maintenance staff maybe or perhaps someone connected with the refrigeration firm.
    Saracen permitted himself the luxury of a second drink and lingered over the pleasing thought that he did not have to go out tonight. There were no patients to consider, he could get stoned out of his head if he had a mind to. He did not intend to but it was nice to know that he could. He added a little water to the whisky and sat down with the glass between his palms. Good whisky was one of the few luxuries that he allowed himself, not a single malt for he had no real liking for malt whisky but a deluxe blended whisky, The Antiquary.
    He sipped it from a crystal glass, one of a set of six that he had won a long time ago as a prize in an essay competition at medical school.
    Saracen followed the engraving in the crystal with his thumb nail and remembered how different his world had been then. It seemed like a hundred years ago. He had been bright eyed, bushy tailed and ready to take on the whole world but instead he had taken on the medical establishment and come a poor second.
    Saracen had been a very new doctor in his first residency having obtained a position in a world famous professorial unit as befitting the top student of his year. He had set out to impress his chief, Sir John MacBryde with his capacity for study and hard work but it was this zeal that had led him to probe a little too deeply into the case histories of a group of MacBryde’s patients being used to illustrate a point being made by the great man.
    MacBryde had submitted a paper to The Lancet and Saracen had discovered that he had falsified certain aspects of the data in order to make his proposed ‘MacBryde Effect’ even more pronounced. No one had been at risk over the misrepresentation and no one would have come to any harm but Saracen, with all the holier than thou rectitude of the young, had exposed the misdeed publicly. MacBryde’s reputation had been destroyed and he had retired a broken man.
    While outwardly praising his vigilance in the matter, the medical establishment had never forgiven Saracen for putting feet of clay under John MacBryde. Nothing had ever been said to that effect; he had been left to figure it out for himself as one career avenue after another had closed in front of him and all applications for research grants and fellowships were now politely declined where before he had appeared to have had the Midas touch.
    When he had finally realised what was going on, Saracen had been filled with impotent anger, impotent for there was nothing to be done about it. No one would ever tell him to his face why he had not been appointed to a particular position. That was not the way things were done. He had been black- balled by a club that would not even admit its existence. The affair also destroyed his marriage. Being married to a loser had not figured in Marion’s plans.
     
    Saracen had been captivated by Marion from the day he had first met her. She was beautiful, she was charming and she was vivacious to the point of being larger than life. Other women paled into insignificance in her presence. She had all the assurance and confidence that stemmed from being the daughter of a career diplomat and for some strange, but wonderful reason, she had always made Saracen feel that he belonged where, without her, his much more humble origins as the only son of an insurance clerk, would have said that he did not.
    Saracen had been beside himself with joy when Marion had agreed to marry him in the face of all the odds, for Marion captured the hearts of all the men who met her - and was loathed by just about as many women for the same reason. They had been married in the university chapel on the day after Saracen had graduated first in his year and Saracen had felt that there was nothing he could not do, no goal was beyond reach. With Marion at his side he could ride the wind, catch the stars, and talk to the angels.
    True, money had been a consideration,