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A few nights later, Maisie invited the Hartmans and Gladys Peterson to dinner. “That Sidney Rowalski was back for a checkup,” Gladys said. “When I think of the times I’ve seen him lying in an oxygen tent ready to breathe his last, and now. my, he looks good.”

Mrs. Hartman sniffed. “Poor thanks the Tanker family are getting, after all they did for him.”

“The lawyers will have to find a way to take care of that.” Gladys said. “People aren’t going to keep on burying perfectly good hearts and lungs and kidneys, if they got sick kids or relatives that can be kept alive by using them. Stands to reason. People will settle this and settle it right.”

Her certainty impressed Sturbridge. He wanted to finish his sixth article, which he called “On Borrowed Time.” He knew he would have to say a great deal about the medical and legal difficulties associated with transplants, but he did not want to say anything that would keep the work from going ahead. The idea that the people would decide what was right became the keystone. It was wonderfully well received.

Some weeks later the word seeped around that old Judge Cotton was finally going to come up with a decision. Sturbridge met Jennings outside the old courthouse. Together they climbed the dirty wet granite steps, bending their heads to the gusts of wind and rain, until they reached the huge doors, which opened reluctantly into the wind to let them slide through into the lobby.

Sturbridge was struck once again by file contrast between the dream of justice and its working reality. Lawyers and clients were scattered about, dripping from their sodden coats. The marble walls were discolored with smoke and grime. The light from the dirty bulbs in the huge candelabras disappeared into dingy darkness.

The bailiff, red-cheeked and puffy with his moment of importance, was shouting, “Hear ye—Hear ye—” and they scrambled to their feet. The coughing ceased. Judge Cotton was a small man nearly lost behind the huge oaken bench, until he clambered into view on a high stool. He turned and nodded at the bailiff, and Sturbridge noticed the dandruff scattered over the back of his faded robe. “Even though he’s retiring pretty soon, he could loosen up enough to buy a new robe,” Jennings said, as they sat down again.

The judge was perched up there between the flags, which hung listlessly from their poles. Behind and above him a huge gilded eagle had moulted in great white patches. The judge looked up. A sigh and then silence as everyone waited. Then a glut of lawyers and clerks surrounded the bench: the dank audience, condemned to limbo, picked their noses, loosened their ties, and squirmed in the eternal human effort to fit a hard bottom to a hard oak seat.

Then another sigh. The lawyers and clerks had been driven back. The judge was alone. Silence fell.

“I find in the case before us,” he said, in a voice as dry and serene as the whispering of leaves in the early morning, “that the recipients of tissue transplants from John Phillpott Tanker should share with the legitimate heirs in the distribution of his estate. They cannot replace these heirs but they cannot be excluded. The degree of sharing will be determined by future argument before this court.”

Jennings looked at Sturbridge and sighed with relief. “I was scared, Walter, that he might leave the family out entirely. This I can live with. We’ll have to work out a settlement because none of us will want to wait forever. I have to call my wife.”

That night Sturbridge watched Sidney Rowalski on television. Rowalski was asked about the lawsuit. “After all,” he said, “God knows, I’m grateful I got Mr. Tanker’s heart. I’d be dead probably if I hadn’t, because I couldn’t have hung on much longer. I had rheumatic fever when I was a boy and what heart I had left was going to pieces. But still I feel queer. Part of me is really Mr. Tanker and most of the rest of Mr. Tanker is gone. It’s different somehow from having a plastic or a metal heart, I think. I never had one, but you could imagine it being part of yourself, like glasses, or false teeth. But my heart belongs to Tanker and I’m not trying to be funny.”

Later he was asked about the money. “Well, I’m glad,” Rowalski said. “At first, I admit I had a funny feeling. I was being ungrateful somehow.and that just getting Mr. Tanker’s heart should be enough. My wife argued with me, pointing out that although I felt pretty good right now I had no way of telling what lay ahead. And then there was the children. If I was going to keep myself going I had to take care of Mr. Tanker’s heart, and if Mr. Tanker’s heart was going to keep going it had to take care of me. We were both in me together. I never knew Mr. Tanker, but I finally decided he would want his heart and me mighty well taken care of.”

Right on the heels of his column on the court decision, Sturbridge was notified he had won the Pulitzer Prize. Lawrence Jennings told him at work, sent out for sandwiches and coffee for everyone, and gave Sturbridge a cold glass of beer. Sturbridge called Maisie and she cried. There at the paper everyone came up to his office and it was a nice party.

He went home and petted Maisie until she stopped crying. Bill had gone AWOL from military school and thumbed his way home. The afternoon paper carried Sturbridge’s picture and then people started coming. Everybody. Bringing food, bringing liquor, bringing good wishes. They came from the hospital led by the Grubers, from the paper led by Lawrence Jennings, and from the town led by the Hartmans. Sturbridge was completely and utterly satisfied. It was three in the morning before they were gone. He was in a tremendous glow. He could hear Maisie reclaiming her kitchen, which the other women had taken over for the evening. Bill was trying to finish one last piece of chocolate cake. Sturbridge looked at him with great affection.

“You know, Bill,” he said, “if you put a heart and a lung, and a kidney and a liver there on the table I doubt if I could tell them apart. But I’m mighty grateful to them, yes sir, mighty grateful. They sure did all right by me.” He pulled himself up and started for the stairs.

Maisie called from the kitchen, “I’ll be right up, dear.”

“You better be,” Sturbridge said.

And Bill laughed as only a sixteen-year-old can laugh.

Crack!

Six men came charging down the track, elbows churning, legs driving. Two of the blue-clad Tech men took an early lead, but at the halfway mark one of their rivals was gaining fast. The three flashed across the tape in a photo finish that had the little crowd in the Pasadena Rose Bowl yelling its head off.

“I think one might be safe in describing that as an uncommonly rapid hundred,” Alyson said, speaking with that same air of guarded reserve that he ordinarily used for superior themes in his English Lit course. Zinner, his companion, was anything but reserved. At the moment, however, he appeared to be trapped in a stationary state of exceptionally long lifetime.

“Know what the time was for that hundred?” Zinner asked, staring glassy-eyed at his stop watch.

Alyson shook his head. “My waterclock sprung a leak.”

“Eight point nine-two seconds is what I read it.”

“So one of ’em broke the nine-second barrier?”

“One of ’em? Three of ’em!” Zinner retorted. “No wind either.”

The hundred was only the first of a series of incredible performances on the cinder path that April afternoon. By the time the two professors left the Rose Bowl they had witnessed a 20.5-second furlong, a 45.8 quarter mile, and an 8:35.3 two mile. The mile was run in only 4:09.7, but then the winner hadn’t been pushed.