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Kelly, whose own heart had been transformed over the years into a flabby, booze-soaked sac. Though afraid, Tommy felt lucky as he lay waiting in the outer corridor. In the recent, past a small but vocal social-consciousness group had focused its collective eye on the system of recipient determination. Their findings, though erroneous, received full media coverage, suggesting that members of a certain social stratum (namely the underprivileged) were being overlooked when it came to recipient selection. Unwilling to engage himself in what he knew would prove a ludicrous argument, the program director decided—against his own better judgment—to go ahead with the surgery on Tommy Kelly. He fully expected to see the man back again inside of a year, with a quarter of a million of the taxpayers' dollars pickling inside of his chest—but his hands were tied. The organ was available, but a more appropriate recipient was not. The woman he had hoped to graft this heart into had expired only a half-hour before.
    To Tommy, that meddling group was a Godsend. He did not want to die. . . and he sensed that without this transplant, he almost certainly would.
    Presently, when a gowned-and-masked nurse swept down on him with all the compassion of an alien anthropologist, Tommy Kelly blessed himself.
    And secretly looked forward to his next drink.
    At the Children's Hospital across the city, a helicopter settled smoothly onto the rooftop heliport. A door slid open and the perfusionist stepped out, the cooler containing the donor kidney clasped tightly in one hand. He strode quickly across the tarmac, head bowed below the sweep of the blades, shielding his eyes against the dust-devils the rotors threw up. Once clear, he paused for the space of an eyeblink to glance eastward, where a thin wedge of crimson thickened in forecast of the coming dawn.
    Then he hurried inside.
    In a waiting room papered with tumbling clowns, Bob and Mary Bleeker sat in orange vinyl chairs and waited. A half hour earlier they had stood watching as the gurney carrying their seven-year-old daughter diminished along a white-tiled corridor, then vanished around a corner.
    Mary Bleeker's eyes were puffy with tears. Bob Bleeker's chest heaved with failing efforts to avert tears of his own. They did not speak, though their thoughts were the same. To have their child free at last of the dialysis machine would be a miracle, a gift from a merciful God.
    The Bleekers had divorced four years ago, amicably enough, but even then the sole thing binding them after five mostly bad years of marriage had been Shirley, their only child. Born with a rare and progressive renal disease, Shirley's love and courage knitted the three of them into an eternal weave.
    When Bob's tears finally came, Mary took his hand and held it.
    And the wait wore on.

Chapter 4

    As he worked, the surgeon's recurring regret was that he would not be there when Karen first beheld herself in a mirror. He would be returning to Germany long before that way, wondrous occasion and, in a vaguely, paternal sort of that disappointed him. He had been present with all of the others, back home, and the rewards had been incalculable. But there would be others still, many with stories more tragic than Karen's
    As a newborn, Karen Lockhart had been the victim of an acquired condition with a name as cumbersome as the disease was tragic: retrolental fibroplasia. Born nine weeks prematurely, Karen had developed a respiratory complication known as RDS, predictable in the premature, yet potentially devastating. By rights, she should have been transferred to a major pediatric center, Toronto or Ottawa, where the treatment of such problems was commonplace. But, through either negligence or gross inexperience, the rural doctor responsible for the infant's care insisted on treating her himself. Hanussen knew the type. Young and headstrong, full of good intentions, they inevitably got their egos mixed up with sound clinical sense.