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By Root 885 0

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 Repeated queries from Leo got the same e-mailed response: still reviewing—do not publish yet.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.