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dinner.
Resourceful. D Agostaslid a cigar into his mouth. No-body could complain about a little smoke with a
reek like this.
Sorry, saidMargo, grinning sheepishly. No smoking. Possibility of methane in the air.
D Agostaput the cigar back in his pocket as the elevator door slid open. Methane. Now there was
something to think about.
They stepped out into a sweltering basement corridor lined with steam pipes and enormous packing
crates. One of the crates was open, exposing, the knobby end of a black bone, big as a tree limb.Must
be a dinosaur, D Agostathought. He struggled to control a feeling of apprehension as he remem-bered
the last time he d been in the Museum s basement.
We tested the drug on several organisms, Margo said, walking into a room whose bright neon lights
stood in sharp contrast to the dingy corridor outside. In one corner, a lab worker was bending over an
oscilloscope. Lab mice,E. coli bacteria, blue-green algae, and several single-celled animals. The mice
are in here.
D Agostapeered into the small holding area, then stepped back quickly. Jesus. The white walls of the
stacked cages were flecked with blood. Torn bodies of dead mice littered the floors of the cage,
shrouded in their own entrails.
Margopeered into the cages. You can see that of the four mice originally placed in each cage, only one
remains alive.
Why didn t you put them all in separate cages? D Agostaasked.
Margoglanced up at him. Leaving them together was the whole point. I wanted to examine behavioral
as well as phys-ical changes.
Looks like things got a little out of hand.
Margonodded. All of these mice were fed the Mbwun lily, and all became massively infected by the
reovirus. It s highly unusual for a virus that affects humans also to affect mice. Normally, they re very
host-specific. Now watch this.
AsMargo approached the topmost cage, the surviving mouse leapt at her, hissing, clinging to the wire, its
long yel-low incisors knitting the air.Margo stepped back.
Charming, said D Agosta. They fought to the death, didn t they?
Margonodded. The most surprising thing is that this mouse was badly wounded in the fight. But look at
how thor-oughly its cuts have healed. And if you check the other cages, you ll see the same
phenomenon. The drug must have some powerful rejuvenative or healing properties. The light probably
makes them irritable, but we already know that the drug makes one sensitive to light. In fact, Jen left one
of the lights on and by morning the protozoan colony directly beneath it had died.
She stared at the cages for a moment. There s something else I d like to show you, she said at last.
Jen, can you give me a hand here?
With the lab assistant s help,Margo slid a divider across the topmost cage, trapping the live mouse on
one side. Then she deftly removed the remains of the dead mice with a long pair of forceps and dropped
them intoa Pyrex basin.
Let s take a quick look, she said, carrying the pieces into the main lab and placing them on the stage of
a wide-angleStereozoom. She peered through the eyepieces, probing the remains with a scapula. As D
Agostalooked on, she sliced open the back of a head, peeled the skin and fur away from the skull, and
examined it carefully. Next, she cut open a sec-tion of spinal cord and peered closely at the vertebrae.
As you can see, it looks normal, she said, straightening up. Except for the rejuvenative qualities, it
seems the primary changes are behavioral, not morphological. At least, that s the case in this species. It s
too early to be sure, but perhaps Kawakita did succeed in taming the drug in the end.
Yeah, D Agostaadded. After it was too late.
That s what s been puzzling me. Kawakita must have taken the drugbefore it reached this stage of
development. Why would he take such a risk, trying the drug on himself? Even after testing it on other
people, he couldn t have been sure. It wasn t like him to act so rashly.
Arrogance, said D Agosta.
Arrogance doesn t explain turning yourself into a guinea pig. Kawakita was a careful scientist, almost to
a fault. It just doesn t seem in character.
Some of the most unlikely people become addicts, D Agostasaid. I see it all the time. Doctors.
Nurses. Even police officers.
Maybe. Margo sounded unconvinced. Anyway, over here are the bacteria and the protozoans we
inoculated with the reovirus. Strangely enough, they all tested negative: the amoebas, paramecia, rotifers,
everything. Except for this one. She had open an incubator, exposing rows ofPetrie dishes covered with
purple agar. Glossy, dime-sized welts in each dish of agar indicated growing colonies of protozoans.
She removed a dish. This isB. meresgerii, a single-celled animal that lives in the ocean, growing in
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