Tom was calm. He hadn't spent his forenoon staring from an airplane window at the landscapes of New York and New Jersey, but seeing only a reflection in a bathroom mirror. A reflection of his face, yawning unpleasantly in the lavender fluorescence, the vertical tubes of light, and there, on his throat's arch, a foreign tissue like a clot of paint scraped from a bright palette. He had merely shaved, as the rest of us had shaved on thousands of mornings, thinking of this and that. Now he switched on a light, tilted the circular reflector above his forehead and removed his gold spectacles. I yawned. He said, "Hunh." So I knew. We'd been friends, after all, for thirty-four years; by the inflection of a syllable, we could make lucid assertions. He thought--what I thought. "Phil," he said, "we better get a biopsy right away." "It's in a bad spot." His instruments gagged me for a minute or two, brought tears in my eyes, probed at revolted mucosae. "Yes, Phil. And there's a lot of it. You didn't notice--anything--?" "Earlier? Nope. This morning. I was flying down anyhow. I have a serial to correct." "Of course," Tom said, "I'm not sure. It could be one of those rank lymphoid things. Radium blots them out. X-ray. Radioactive cobalt, these days, perhaps. But--" But. We looked at each other for a while. He said a kind thing: "We're both--forty-six." He meant that we shared the hazards of time together. He also intended to start me thinking of all I had been and done, seen and known, felt and expressed, in four and a half decades of life. His clock ticked. His phone rang. The receiver brought to my age-dulled ears the emery of a woman's voice. And Tom, with the cultivated patience that masks a physician's irritation, told her to take the "pink medicine" every two hours instead of every four. The elixir alurate, I thought. That brickbat on the safety valve of America: barbital. I would soon be on morphine myself.... "How long?" I asked, when Tom hung up. His pale eyes peered affectionately from behind his spectacles. I felt sorry for him. "Let's get that biopsy, first." "No fooling, Tom. You're nine-tenths convinced. The learned goons in your profession have told me my number was up, several times, before this. Sooner or later, one of you is bound to be right. And I don't feel lucky today. How long?" He picked up a letter he had dictated, read it, and put it in a tray. He straightened his prescription pad so it was square with the tooled leather corner of his desk blotter. He glanced at the photograph of Aileen, his wife, Joy and Lee, his daughters. "If it's malignant--it's where you can't operate." "How long will I be--able to write?" "Month. Two. Three. Maybe more. No way to tell." "Radiation--won't slow it down?" "Can't use strong doses that near your brain, Phil." He grasped his telephone again. He told his nurse to arrange the biopsy. Immediately. He wrote an address.