He floated around the Charleston docks for a year, but breaking his back for survival was not his game. One night, by himself, he climbed into a window of a doctor's office where he knew a large supply of morphine was kept. He could sell it big in New Orleans, while the police would undoubtedly look for a black man traveling north.

He was caught. An elderly white man with a pistol interrupted the thrust of a bottle into Robert's brown paper bag. He did it with a bullet.

Then he moved Robert to a table, turned on the lights, and proceeded to remove the bullet.

"Why are you taking it out?" Robert asked. "If you leave it in, there'd be one less nigger to dirty up your world."

"If I don't take it out," said the doctor, "there'd be one more doctor who has violated the Hippocratic oath."

"That Greek guy, huh?"

"That Greek guy."

"Well, I've seen it all now," said Robert, who suddenly discovered he would live. "A white man who does what he says he believes in. Wowee. Oh boy. I gotta tell this to the folks." He made obscene noises.

"We're no worse than any other race," the doctor said evenly.

"And better than mine, right? You think you're better than me, don't you?"

"Not necessarily. But for the sake of what I know, I'll say yes."

"Thought you would," Robert sneered.

"You were stealing from me, not me from you."

Robert straightened up. "Okay. I'll buy that, Doc. But why was I stealing from you? Because you had what I wanted. Why did you have it? And not me? Because I'm black, that's why."

"I had morphine in my possession because I'm a doctor. You obviously wanted it to sell. Your body has no needle marks."

"Well, why ain't I a doctor?"

"Because you never went to school to become a doctor. And don't say ain't."

"Well, why didn't I get to school to be a doctor?"

"Because you never applied, I imagine."

"Bullshit. Schools stink. I never applied because I never had the money. And if I did have the money, I wouldn't spend it on any damn doctor's school because a black doctor is just as poor as a black lawyer or a black anything else."

"Lie still. You're opening the wound."

"I'm opening a lot more," Robert said. "Now, I'm the smartest, toughest guy I know. And I know I could be a better doctor than you. That is, if my skin was white."

"Is that so?" the doctor said, smiling so small a show of amusement that Robert had never felt more insulted, not even when some people called him "boy."

"Yes, that's so. You just give me one of your fancy medical books and I'll show you. That green one, up there on the top shelf."

"Turn my back on you, son? With that scalpel you're hiding under your shirt?"

Robert glared.

"Give it back handle first. That's the right way."

Offering a scalpel the correct way was the first thing Robert Hansen Jackson learned about medicine. The second was that the green book contained a lot of words that didn't make sense. The third was that with a little bit of explanation they did.

The doctor was so impressed that he did not surrender Robert to the police. Robert was so grateful that he hid only one bottle of morphine in his trousers when he left, just enough for money to get to New York, where he expanded his drug distribution long enough for him to be the first Negro to graduate from the Manhattan School of Medicine; the first Negro to practice at the Manhattan General Hospital; the first Negro to have an operational procedure concerned with the suturing of blood vessels accepted nationally.

That he was simply "the first doctor" to have invented the process was hardly mentioned. By the time World War II blossomed into American participation, he was tired of being "the first Negro."

He didn't wait for the draft. He volunteered. Not because he cared which white nation won the war, but because it gave him an excellent, conscience-salving excuse to leave his wife and other people who were ashamed of being born black.

His perfect knowledge of Spanish, the language of his childhood, his knowledge of medicine, especially surgery, got him rank in the young OSS. And he stayed on, into the years of the cold war.

The color of his skin got him to South America where he could blend in with other brilliant Negro surgeons, namely none. Doc Jackson didn't blend, least of all where there was an absence of medical brilliance of any variety, black or white.

He stood out as he had stood out all his life, as "the best damned man around."

For four months once, on a jungle assignment in Brazil designed to make contact with a primitive tribe and show them, as one of the chiefs put it, "the white man's medicine and let them know where favors come from," Doc was struck with a comparatively sensitive agent with an extraordinary ability to care about what happened to people, including himself.

Other than that, Bernard C. Daniels was sober, industrious, and conscientious, as well as reliably and thoroughly sneaky. He was white.

It was dislike at first sight. Then it became hatred. Then grudging tolerance, and finally the only friendship Doc Jackson ever had in his life.

When Daniels finally left military service, so did Jackson, leaving behind them scores of dead bodies of men who had interfered with their missions. Doc picked up a few routine and boring threads of his past, establishing a clinic in Harlem because he was tired, lest he become "the first Negro" again.

Daniels joined the CIA. Doc heard from him only once, in a letter brimming with happiness, announcing his impending marriage.

He did not hear from Daniels again, even though he had mailed him his phone number and address several times after reading about Barney's bizarre turnaround on the island of Hispania.

He had wanted to see Barney, to visit his house in Weehawken and force his friendship back on a man who needed a friend. But Jackson would not force Barney to lean on him. He respected his own privacy too much to invade another's, especially that of a man as lonely and troubled as Barney Daniels. When Barney needed him, he would call.

And when that call came, from a stranger saying that Barney was dying from curare poisoning on an abandoned pier in the dead of night, Doc Jackson was ready.

Barney's peaceful death was shattered suddenly by blinding lights and nausea. Throbbing nails in the skull. Pain pins in the chest. Breathing hard. So hard.

"Breathe, Barney, damn it, you drunken Irish son of a bitch." The voice was harsh. Two strong hands worked over him. His mouth tasted of salt. That was a curare depressant. Had he been slashed with curare? Where would anyone up here get curare? Was the past following him?

Auca. Inca. Maya. Jivaro. Who still existed? Who used curare? Agony behind his pupils. Both arms numb. No, not numb, Barney realized as he faded into semi-consciousness. His arms were strapped down. So were his legs.

Was he back? Was it the hut in the jungle again, the poker glowing in the fire at the center, the machete poised above him, his arms and legs tied with hemp? Or had he never left? Would it never end?

"Breathe, damn it."

The machete! It was coming down, slowly now, into his arm. He tried to focus.

Not a machete. A tube, a tube from above, sliding painlessly into his left arm.

Then he saw Doc Jackson's face, perspiring and mad, the high black cheekbones, the deepset dark eyes, the rising forehead and short kinky hair. A face without fat, just taut, hard skin, with thick lips now grown tight and hard and cursing. "Damn you, you fucker, breathe, I said."

Doc, Barney wondered. How did Doc find the hut in the middle of the jungle? He'd left long before. Did he come back, just to save him?

The hands worked on his chest as the tube in Barney's arm replaced the poisoned blood in his body with fresh.