Dr. Carson nodded toward the reception room. Dr. Needzak instinctively clenched his fists. He half-rose from his chair, then sank back slowly. "I thought you guys were my friends," he said. "We are, Walt," Dr. Manville said thoughtfully. "But this is business. When someone charges violation of medical ethics, we're the investigation committee. It looks like a simple investigation this time, with those tapes on file." "What does she have against you, anyway?" Dr. Carson asked. "Usually a receptionist will go through hell to cover up little flubs for her boss. Were you mixed up with her in a personal way?" "Mixed up with her?" Dr. Needzak laughed mirthlessly. "She's worked for me fifteen years. I've never made a pass at her." Dr. Manville nodded sadly. "That was your mistake, Walt. Frustration. Disappointment. Worse than jealousy. Now, why not tell us everything?" "There's nothing to tell. Those tapes give a false impression, sometimes. I just take difficult cases back there where I'm sure there won't be any disturbance." "No use," Dr. Carson interrupted. "Things will be harder for you, if we lose patience with you. We know you've been curing illness against the patient's wishes, time after time. We just saw you take out a tumor. The poor kid will probably drag through another hundred years before she develops anything else serious. You prescribed anticoagulants to a man with an obvious blood clot. You even talked a couple with weak lungs into moving to Denver." "All right, it was a tumor," Dr. Needzak admitted. "It was malign and it would have killed her in two or three years. But she's too young to make a decision for herself. Five years from now, she may have a different outlook on her personal problems. I have ethics, and I can't help it if they don't correspond in some details with the association's ethics." "You were given your medical license under an oath to respect the ethics of the profession," Dr. Manville said slowly, emphatically. "The license did not give you the right to practice under ethics of your own invention." "Ethics!" Dr. Needzak looked as if he wanted to spit. "Ethics is just a word. There was a time when physicians spent their time curing diseases and preventing them. They called that ethics. Now that there aren't enough illnesses left to give us work, now that people live long past the time when they want to go on living, now that we make our money helping people commit suicide the legal way, we call that ethics." "You can't annihilate a concept simply by thinking it's only a word," Dr. Manville said. "There was a time when physicians used leeches for almost every patient. They fitted that nasty habit into their ethics. You wouldn't want to introduce leeches into this century, would you? But you should, if you're so consistently opposed to anything that sounds like changes in ethics."