Lisa turned left into Bradford Road, wondering why they had made so little progress. How much time was actually passing while the cracks in the surface of her being widened and spread? Didshe see what he meant, or was it only the false kind of intuition she sometimes experienced in dreams?

“I see,” she said. “Knockout mice are perfect models of genetic-deficiency diseases, but the efficacy of antibody-packaging systems can only be assessed in the context of a whole population—ideally, a population under stress. And there you were, spending hours every day in a room whose four walls showed stable populations under stress, all of them running smoothly in the same ancient groove. So you decided to convert two of them into experimental populations by introducing your own transformed mice to see how they would get on.”

“Only one,” Chan said. “I wanted to split the replicates two and two, but Morgan insisted that my intervention should be minimal. I introduced the transformed mice into Paris. Technically, it was a criminal act in that it bypassed the university’s Ethics Committee as well as the Departmental Committee, but I thought it criminal in a higher sense that the Mouseworld experiment had been allowed to stagnate. I insisted that you be kept out of it, Lisa, because I knew you could not countenance any such argument in your professional capacity, but I hope you can see that my conviction was deep and sincere.”

“Cut the crap and tell me what happened to the fucking mice,” Lisa instructed him brutally. Bradford Road was giving way to North Road and her rendezvous with Mike was only a few hundred yards away. Her onboard computer still had not registered a single offense.

“They died,” Chan said in a hurt tone. “They could not survive among the citizen mice. The reason, I believe—”

She hadn’t time to listen to speculation. The fact was all that mattered. “So the experiment failed? It was a complete bust—and pleasedon’t feed me that crap about there being no failed experiments in science.”

“It was a failure,” he admitted. “It did not seem significant at the time, when Morgan and I were trying so many different things, but—”

“But when Ed Burdillon roped you into testing hisnew antibody-packaging system, you couldn’t help wondering whether it would run into exactly the same problem. So you—and I do mean you, in the narrow sense—were thrown into paroxysms of doubt as to whether you ought to confess to your ancient crime, on the off chance that it might save the Containment Commission from pinning all its hopes on a nonstarter. Except, of course, you couldn’t quite figure out who to confess it to—and when the lunatics who snatched Morgan also took the trouble to torch the evidence of your ancient crime, you reallygot your knickers in a twist. And that, to cut a long guilt trip short, is when you finally thought of me.” The junction of North End Road and Ralph Allen’s Drive was visible now, and she could see Mike Grundy’s car, parked and waiting.

“I thought you would know what to do,” Chan said lamely. “I did not.”

“For a certified genius,” Lisa said angrily, “you truly are completely fucking stupid. I really used to look up to you, you know?” She was extremely annoyed with herself, because she knew this was a bad time to be fighting back tears of frustration and disappointment. It didn’t make her feel any better to know that neither Peter Grimmett Smith nor Mike Grundy would have had the faintest idea of what she was on the verge of crying about. The only person who could possibly have understood was Morgan.

“Yes,” Chan admitted miserably. “I know.”

“I wish I had time to figure out exactly what the hell you’re talking about, and whether it matters,” she said as she brought the car to a lurching halt at the junction, “but I don’t. I have to spring Morgan, and I only have a couple of hours to do it in. So I’m going to hand you over to Mike, and he’ll take you to Peter Grimmett Smith. You tell Smith everything, except maybe where you saw me last. You can give him my apologies for not being there to translate your explanations for him, and for not being there period. But tell him it really is for the best that I do this now and do it alone. Tell him I’ll be in touch as soon as I can, and that if I haven’t returned by nightfall with Morgan in tow, we’re probably both dead.”

“Do you mean that?” Chan asked anxiously.

“Yes, I do,” she said, although she really wasn’t sure, given that her internal Weather was crazy lemming through and through and that she couldn’t really be sure of anything anymore. “And although it won’t be allyour fault, you certainly won’t have helped. Now come on”

Third Interlude

HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS

By the time she’d been at her new university for a fortnight, Lisa had figured out why Morgan Miller didn’t wear a lab coat. It was, as she’d instantly suspected, far more than any mere absentminded omission or some petty desire to stand out from the crowd by refusing to accept its uniform.

In Morgan Miller’s view, Lisa eventually deduced, wearing a lab coat implied that being a scientist was a kind of job: something that one put on and took off according to a circadian rhythm of work and leisure. He refused to give tacit license to any such implication. It also suggested that the clothes worn underneath it were more precious than the coat itself, requiring protection from the vicissitudes of laboratory life. Morgan Miller regarded clothes in an icily utilitarian light; he bought his outfits as cheaply as possible, and was not above shopping at market stalls and charity shops. If one of his shirts or a pair of flannel trousers were stained by a laboratory accident, he simply threw them away. He never wore a jacket. Nor did he ever wear T-shirts or jeans, even though it would not have been a violation of his utilitarian principles, because he considered such garments to be key components of the image projected by uncommitted students.

In the course of the first few weeks of their acquaintance, Lisa became as fascinated by her new supervisor as she ever had been by any male of the species. She never deigned to consider the hypothesis that the fascination in question might be classifiable as “love,” because she did not consider herself to be the kind of person who might be vulnerable to the horrible indignities of falling or being in love, but that only made its intensity more fascinating. After her own admittedly peculiar fashion, Lisa was as committed a utilitarian as Morgan Miller, and she viewed the fascination that Miller exercised upon her in a conscientiously cold light, as something that would assist her learning.

Lisa’s friends and relatives had, of course, always assured her that she was merely a slow developer, and that she would begin to believe in love as soon as the feeling first took hold of her, but she had never taken platitudinous advice seriously and her response to her supervisor could not change her mind. She had always retorted, in the face of such obviously misconceived advice, that “love” was merely a species of psychological dependence, cultivated as much by anxiety as hormonal flux. She had no intention of becoming dependent on Morgan Miller, who was probably not a dependable person in any other respect than the purely professional.

Her observations to date had suggested to her that other women fell in love purely because they cared too much about what men thought of them, suffering adrenaline rushes whenever they thought they were being ignored or insulted: rushes that were not chemically different from those they felt when they became the focus of attention or received a compliment, but which they interpreted very differently when sensation became thought. Lisa cared only about what Morgan Miller thought about her ability as a scientist, and she construed his occasional compliments and insults as mere witticisms of no personal consequence.