But it was no joke, even though the mice existed to be killed, even though they were killed mercifully, and usually only some few months before they would have died naturally. There was no real reason to have qualms, and yet still there was no joking about it. Maybe Brian would joke about Marta (if she couldn’t hear him), but he wouldn’t joke about that. In fact, he insisted on using the word “kill” rather than “sacrifice,” even in write-ups and papers, to keep it clear what they were doing. Usually they had to break their necks right behind the head; you couldn’t inject them to “put them to sleep,” because their tissue samples had to be clear of all contaminants. So it was a matter of breaking necks, as if they were tigers pouncing on prey. Marta was as blank as a mask as she did it, and very deftly too. If done properly it paralyzed them so that it was quick and painless or at least quick. No feeling below the head, no breathing, immediate loss of mouse consciousness, one hoped. Leaving only the killers to think it over. The victims were dead, and their bodies had been donated to science for many generations on end. The lab had the pedigrees to prove it. The scientists involved went home and thought about other things, most of the time. Usually the mice deaths occurred in the mornings, so they could get to work on the samples. By the time the scientists got home the experience was somewhat forgotten, its effects muted. But people like Marta went home and dosed themselves with drugs on those days she said she did and played the most hostile music they could find, 110 decibels of forgetting. Or went out surfing. They didn’t talk about it to anyone, at least most of them didn’t this was what made Marta so obvious, she would talk about it but most of them didn’t, because it would sound both silly and vaguely shameful at the same time. If it bothered them so much, why did they keep doing it? Why did they stay in that line of business?

But that line of business was doing science. It was doing biology, it was studying life, improving life, increasing life! And in most labs the mouse-killing was done only by the lowliest of techs, so that it was only a temporary bad job that one had to get through on the way to the good jobs.

Someone’s got to do it, they thought.

In the meantime, while they were working on this problem, their good results with the HDL “factory cells” had been plugged into the paper they had written about the process, and sent upstairs to Torrey Pines’ legal department, where it had gotten hung up. Repeated queries from Leo got the same e-mailed response: still reviewing do not publish yet.

“They want to find out what they can patent in it,” Brian said.

“They won’t let us publish until we have a delivery method and a patent,” Marta predicted.

“But that may never happen!” Leo cried. “It’s good work, it’s interesting! It could help make a big breakthrough!”

“That’s what they don’t want,” Brian said.

“They don’t want a big breakthrough unless it’s our big breakthrough.”

“Shit.”

This had happened before, but Leo had never gotten used to it. Sitting on results, doing private science, secret science it went against the grain. It wasn’t science as he understood it, which was a matter of finding out things and publishing them for all to see and test, critique, put to use.

But it was getting to be standard operating procedure. Security in the building remained intense; even e-mails out had to be checked for approval, not to mention laptops, briefcases, and boxes leaving the building. “You have to check in your brain when you leave,” as Brian put it.

“Fine by me,” Marta said.

“I just want to publish,” Leo insisted grimly.

“You’d better find a targeted delivery method if you want to publish that particular paper, Leo.”

So they continued to work on the Urtech method. The new experiments slowly yielded their results. The volumes and dosages had sharp parameters on all sides. The “tourniquet injection” method did not actually insert very many copy DNAs into the subject animals’ endothelial cells, and a lot of what was inserted was damaged by the process, and later flushed out of the body.

In short, the Maryland method was still an artifact.

By now, however, enough time had passed that Derek could pretend that the whole thing had never happened. It was a new financial quarter; there were other fish to fry, and for now the pretense could be plausibly maintained that it was a work in progress rather than a total bust. It wasn’t as if anyone else had solved the targeted nonviral delivery problem, after all. It was a hard problem. Or so Derek could say, in all truth, and did so whenever anyone was inconsiderate enough to bring the matter up. Whiners on the company’s website chat room could be ignored as always.

Analysts on Wall Street, however, and in the big pharmaceuticals, and in relevant venture capital firms, could not be ignored. And while they weren’t saying anything directly, investment money started to go elsewhere. Torrey Pines’ stock fell, and because it was falling it fell some more, and then more again. Biotechs were fluky, and so far Torrey Pines had not generated any potential cash cows. They remained a start-up. Fifty-one million dollars was being swept under the rug, but the big lump in the rug gave it away to anyone who remembered what it was.

No. Torrey Pines Generique was in trouble.

In Leo’s lab they had done what they could. Their job had been to get certain cell lines to become unnaturally prolific protein factories, and they had done that. Delivery wasn’t their part of the deal, and they weren’t physiologists, and now they didn’t have the wherewithal to do that part of the job. Torrey Pines needed a whole different wing for that, a whole different field of science. It was not an expertise that could be bought for fifty-one million dollars. Or maybe it could have been, but Derek had bought defective expertise. And because of that, a multibillion-dollar cash-cow method was stalled right on the brink; and the whole company might go under.

Nothing Leo could do about it. He couldn’t even publish his results.

THE QUIBLERS’ small house was located at the end of a street of similar houses. All of them stood blankly, blinds drawn, no clues given as to who lived inside. They could have been empty for all an outsider could tell: no cars in the driveways, no kids in the yards, no yard or porch activity of any kind. They could have been walled compounds in Saudi Arabia, hiding their life from the desert outside.

Walking these streets with Joe on his back, Charlie assumed as he always did that these houses were mostly owned by people who worked in the District, people who were always either working or on vacation. Their homes were places to sleep. Charlie had been that way himself before the boys had arrived. That was how people lived in Bethesda, west of Wisconsin Avenue west all the way to the Pacific, Charlie didn’t know. But he didn’t think so; he tended to put it on Bethesda specifically.

So he walked to the grocery store shaking his head as he always did. “It’s like a ghost town, Joe, it’s like some Twilight Zone episode in which we’re the only two people left on Earth.”

Then they rounded the corner, and all thought of ghost towns was rendered ridiculous. Shopping center. They walked through the automatic glass doors into a giant Giant grocery store. Joe, excited by the place as always, stood up in his baby backpack, his knees on Charlie’s shoulders, and whacked Charlie on the ears as if he were directing an elephant. Charlie reached up, lifted him around and stuffed him into the baby seat of the grocery cart, strapped him down with the cart’s little red seat belt. A very useful feature, that.

Okay. Buddhists coming to dinner, Asians from the mouth of the Ganges. He had no idea what to cook. He assumed they were vegetarians. It was not unusual for Anna to invite people from NSF over to dinner and then be somewhat at a loss in the matter of the meal itself. But Charlie liked that. He enjoyed cooking, though he was not good at it, and had gotten worse in the years since the boys had arrived. Time had grown short, and he and Anna had both cooked and recooked their repertoire of recipes until they were sick of them, and yet hadn’t learned anything new. So now they often did takeout, or ate as plainly as Nick; or Charlie tried something new and botched it. Dinner guests were a chance to do that again.