PHILLIP ROBINSON was a very happy man on this Monday. The clouds in the sky were coalescing into black anvil shapes, promising rain. As chief resident of Whicock County Hospital, it was his pleasure to guide the four young interns new to the hospital as they began their careers. It did not bother Robinson that he had graduated from med school twenty years ago, or that medicine had made so many advances that his schooling had become archaic. He read the medical journals on a regular basis and considered himself up-to-date. He had even published an article or two in the Journal of American Medicine, articles that dealt with the treatment of radically burned patients. It was his specialty, his obsession. If two or three weeks passed without a single new patient in the burn ward, he became morose and irritable. But three days before, a certain John Doe was admitted, a hideously burned man fished out of the river by a couple of teenage boys looking for crawdads. An ambulance had picked him up after the boys called, and he was put under Dr.
