Free Saving St. Germ by Carol Muske-Dukes Page B

and swirled as batter.
    “Prof, I have to ask you something. Do you think you swear a lot—I mean, for a woman?”
    “I do, Donald. I do swear a lot, it’s true. So often I forget I’m around sensitive ears like yours.”
    I smiled at him; the look of hatred on his face was riveting.
    “Wait a minute, Donald—now don’t be coy! Have you actually found me out ? I mean, my thing for testosterone. So I take a little in a vein every now and again, so what, huh?”
    His eyes narrowed. “Is this supposed to be one of your famous jokes?”
    “Donald, Donald, Donald. You really need to develop a sense of humor. As a matter of fact, that’s exactly why I added the synthetic estrogens to the stopcock joint grease you ended up smearing all over the taper joint! I just had a feeling you’d end up ... coating yourself. You don’t have to worry, Donald. The changes you’ll notice at first will be small —subtle tapering, developing curves, trill in the voice, that sort of ...”
    He cursed under his breath.
    “ What, Donald? Now don’t get upset, sweetie. If you need help from one of the guys cleaning this up, let me know!”
    I smiled and turned away. There was a great deal of banging and crashing as he swept up the glass. When he’d finished, he tore his goggles off and hurled himself through the lab’s double doors and out into the hall.
    “My, my,” I said, looking up. “Grignard seems to have gotten everybody wild today.”
    Later that day I was called into the department chairman’s office. I’d been expecting this summons: One of my students had reported back to me that Donald Brandeman had “gone to the top” about my conversation with him in the lab.
    The chairman was on the phone as I came in, and he indicated a chair. I faced him across the large, littered expanse of his desk. At the edge of the desk was a cluster of tiny glass beakers filled with synthetic flowers. I liked this touch. There were photographs of children, framed degrees, an Escher print, an African mask, a photo of Heinz Pagels shaking someone’s hand. I looked at each wall hanging three times as his phone conversation droned on. It was getting late. I had to be at the nursery school at four-thirty to pick up Ollie. I glanced at my watch and shifted in my chair.
    He signaled to me that he would be just another second and I smiled stiffly at him. His name was Walter Faber and he headed a department that he described, at faculty meetings, as a “department for the millennium.” Teaching and research went hand in hand, he said. Publication and research went hand in hand, and grants and research also went hand in hand. I began to wonder if research was an octopus—how many hands did Chairman Faber think it had?
    He hung up the phone and nodded at me. Then he opened a drawer and pulled a cigarette from a leather pack, which he held out to me.
    “No thanks,” I said, though I would have liked one. I didn’t want to relax too much here. The old nervous pain in my chest was back anyway, and if I looked too long in Chairman Faber’s eyes, especially his left, wandering eye, I began chemically deconstructing the whole ocular structure. No, it was better that I didn’t smoke.
    “I hope you don’t mind if I do ,” he said. “The wife goes crazy if I smoke at home, so I indulge myself once in a while here.”
    “Please go ahead.”
    I found myself staring involuntarily at his eye. It was clearly a neuromuscular problem. Maybe the nerves controlling his ocular muscles had been wired all wrong in a developmental screwup. I pictured Faber as an embryo with a huge bulging eye, sealed shut. Then his developing neurons extended, pale tendrils from the nascent brain tissue, feeling around for the bits of protoplasm needed to form ocular muscle. I noticed that the glycosylated road maps drawn glittering through the lobe (cells migrate along the sugar trails!) looked a bit askew; one or two neurons weren’t going to connect right! A microscopic