“Thank you, Dr. Connelly.” Matthew obediently swiped his card. He was still not wearing a lab coat, though.
“Professor Bishop needs to swipe in, too. Lab protocol. And please call me Beaker. Everybody else does.”
“Why?” Matthew asked while I fished my ID out of my bag. As usual, it had settled to the bottom.
“Chris finds nicknames easier to remember,” Beaker said.
“He had seventeen Amys and twelve Jareds in his first undergraduate lecture,” I added. “I don’t think he’ll ever recover.”
“Happily, my memory is excellent, Dr. Connelly. So is your work on catalytic RNA, by the way.” Matthew smiled. Dr. Connelly looked pleased.
“Beaker!” Chris bellowed.
“Coming!” Beaker called. “I sure hope he finds Mother Teresa soon,” she muttered to me. “We don’t need another Mussolini.”
“Mother Teresa is dead,” I whispered, running my card through the reader.
“I know. When Chris wrote the job description for the new lab manager, it listed ‘Mother Teresa or Mussolini’ under qualifications. We rewrote it, of course. Human Resources wouldn’t have approved the posting otherwise.”
“What did Chris call his last lab manager?” I was almost afraid to ask.
“Caligula.” Beaker sighed. “We really miss her.”
Matthew waited for us to enter before releasing the door. Beaker looked nonplussed by the courtesy. The door swooshed closed behind us.
A gaggle of white-coated researchers of all ages and descriptions waited for us inside, including senior researchers like Beaker, some exhausted-looking postdoctoral fellows, and a bevy of graduate students. Most sat on stools pulled up to the lab benches; a few lounged against sinks or cabinets. One sink bore a hand-lettered sign over it that said rather ominously THIS SINK RESERVED FOR HAZMAT. Tina, Chris’s perpetually harried administrative assistant, was trying to extricate the filled-out nondisclosure forms from beneath a can of soda without disturbing the laptop that Chris was booting up. The hum of conversation stopped when we entered.
“Oh. My. God. That’s—” A woman stared at Matthew and clapped a hand over her mouth. Matthew had been recognized.
“Hey, Professor Bishop!” A graduate student stood up, smoothing out his lab coat. He looked more nervous than Matthew. “Jonathan Garcia. Remember me? History of Chemistry? Two years ago?”
“Of course. How are you, Jonathan?” I felt several nudging looks as the attention in the room swung in my direction. There were daemons in Chris’s lab. I looked around, trying to figure out who they were. Then I caught the cold stare of a vampire. He was standing by a locked cabinet with Beaker and another woman. Matthew had already noticed him.
“Richard,” Matthew said with a cool nod. “I didn’t know you’d left Berkeley.”
“Last year.” Richard’s expression never wavered.
It had never occurred to me that there would already be creatures in Chris’s lab. I’d visited him only once or twice, when he was working alone. My messenger bag suddenly felt heavy with secrets and possible disaster.
“There will be time for your reunion with Clairmont later, Shotgun,” Chris said, hooking the laptop to a projector. There was a wave of appreciative laughter. “Lights please, Beaker.”
The laughter quieted as the lights dimmed. Chris’s research team leaned forward to see what he had projected on the whiteboard. Black-and-white bars marched across the top of the page, and the overflow was arranged underneath. Each bar—or ideogram, as Matthew had explained to me last night—represented a chromosome.
“This semester we have an all-new research project.” Chris leaned against the whiteboard, his dark skin and white lab coat making him look like another ideogram on the display. “Here’s our subject. Who wants to tell me what it is?”
“Is it alive or dead?” a cool female voice asked.
“Good question, Scully.” Chris grinned.
“Why do you ask?” Matthew looked at the student sharply. Scully squirmed.
“Because,” she explained, “if he’s deceased—oh, the subject is male, by the way—the cause of death might have a genetic component.”
The graduate students, eager to prove their worth, started tossing out rare and deadly genetic disorders faster than they could record them on their laptops.
“All right, all right.” Chris held up his hand. “Our zoo has no more room for zebras. Back to basics, please.”
Matthew’s eyes danced with amusement. When I looked at him in confusion, he explained.
“Students tend to go for exotic explanations rather than the more obvious ones—like thinking a patient has SARS rather than a common cold. We call them ‘zebras,’ because they’re hearing hoofbeats and concluding zebras rather than horses.”
“Thanks.” Between the nicknames and the wildlife, I was understandably disoriented.
“Stop trying to impress one another and look at the screen. What do you see?” Chris said, calling a halt to the escalating competition.
“It’s male,” said a weedy-looking young man in a bow tie, who was using a traditional laboratory notebook rather than a computer. Shotgun and Beaker rolled their eyes at each other and shook their heads.
“Scully already deduced that.” Chris looked at them impatiently. He snapped his fingers. “Do not embarrass me in front of Oxford University, or you will all lift weights with me for the entire month of September.”
Everybody groaned. Chris’s level of physical fitness was legendary, as was his habit of wearing his old Harvard football jersey whenever Yale had a game. He was the only professor who was publicly, and routinely, booed in class.
“Whatever he is, he’s not human,” Jonathan said. “He has twenty-four chromosome pairs.”
Chris looked down at his watch. “Four and a half minutes. Two minutes longer than I thought it would take, but much quicker than Professor Clairmont expected.”
“Touché, Professor Roberts,” Matthew said mildly. Chris’s team slid glances in Matthew’s direction, still trying to figure out what an Oxford professor was doing in a Yale research lab.
“Wait a minute. Rice has twenty-four chromosomes. We’re studying rice?” asked a young woman I’d seen dining at Branford College.
“Of course we’re not studying rice,” Chris said with exasperation. “Since when did rice have a sex, Hazmat?” She must be the owner of the specially labeled sink.
“Chimps?” The young man who offered up this suggestion was handsome, in a studious sort of way, with his blue oxford shirt and wavy brown hair.