"You think that, do you?" Billingsgate said, his voice starting to shade from annoyed to intimidating. "Tell me, Doctor, have you ever performed this operation yourself?"

"You know I haven't," Melinda said. "But I've consulted on five similar operations."

Billingsgate's eyebrows lifted slightly. "For five different surgeons, no doubt?"

Melinda looked him straight in the eye. "That's unfair," she said. "And you know it. The two operations weren't identical—no two operations are. Trying to bypass me that way and just blindly following the first plan was totally irresponsible. And it could have been fatal."

"It most likely wouldn't have been," Billingsgate pointed out.

"Would you have wanted me to take that chance?" Melinda countered.

Billingsgate's lips pursed tightly together. "You didn't have to humiliate Mueller publicly."

"I tried talking to him privately. He wouldn't listen."

Billingsgate turned back to his plate, and for a minute the room was silent. "So you think we should cut the markinine by ten percent, do you?" he asked.

"Yes," Melinda said. "The lower dosage should do the job perfectly well. Particularly given the patient's metabolic baseline."

"I was going to ask if you'd checked on that," Billingsgate said. "All right; but if the blood pressure doesn't respond properly, we're going to jack the dosage back up. Fair enough?"

"Fair enough," Melinda agreed. "Now, what about the neurobinders?"

The discussion was short and civilized, and in the end he acquiesced with reasonably good grace. Like most surgeons Melinda had dealt with, Billingsgate had strong proprietary feelings toward his operation designs, but he was also experienced enough not to simply ignore the recommendations of a good consultant. With more and more routine operations being handled by semisentient computerized systems, the only ones that still required human surgeons were those that were as much art as they were science. Writing required editors; sculpture required texturers; surgery required design consultants. Or so the theory went.