He gripped her naked arm, roughened by the March waters of Lake Michigan, bent it around his neck and struck off for the shore. His lungs were bursting in his chest and the world was turning gray-black before his burning eyes. He heaved his tired arm through the water as though each stroke would be his last, but the last stroke, by some miracle, never was the last. XIX It hadn't been easy to get time off from the oil-painting factory. Ken Oliver was a little late when he slid into the aseptic-smelling waiting room of the Michigan City Medical Center. A parabolic mike in the ceiling trained itself on the heat he radiated and followed him across the floor to a chair. A canned voice said: "State your business, please." He started a little and said in the general direction of the mike: "I'm Ken Oliver. A figure man in the Blue Department, Picasso Oils and Etching Corporation. Dr. Latham sent me here for--what do you call it?--a biopsy." "Thank you, please be seated." He smiled because he was seated already and picked up a magazine, the current copy of the _Illinois Sporting News_, familiarly known as the Green Sheet. Everybody in Mob Territory read it. The fingers of the blind spelled out its optimism and its selections at Hawthorne in Braille. If you were not only blind but fingerless, there was a talking edition that read itself aloud to you from tape. He riffled through the past performances and selections to the articles. This month's lead was--_Thank God I am Dying of Throat Cancer_. He leaned back in the chair dizzily, the waiting room becoming gray mist around him. _No_, he thought. _No._ It couldn't be that. All it could be was a little sore on the back of his throat--no more than that. Just a little sore on the back of his throat. He'd been a fool to go to Latham. The fees were outrageous and he was behind, always a little behind, on his bills. But cancer--so much of it around--and the drugs didn't seem to _help_ any more.... But Latham had almost promised him it was non-malignant. "Mr. Oliver," the loudspeaker said, "please go to Dr. Riordan's office, Number Ten." Riordan was younger than he. That was supposed to be bad in a general practitioner, good in a specialist. And Riordan was a specialist--pathology. A sour-faced young specialist. "Good morning. Sit here. Open your mouth. Wider than that, and relax. _Relax_; your glottis is locked." Oliver couldn't protest around the plastic-and-alcohol taste of the tongue depressor. There was a sudden coldness and a metallic _snick_ that startled him greatly; then Riordan took the splint out of his mouth and ignored him as he summoned somebody over his desk set. A young man, even younger than Riordan, came in. "Freeze, section and stain this right away," the pathologist said, handing him a forceps from which a small blob dangled. "Have them send up the Rotino charts, three hundred to nine hundred inclusive."