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unspoken sentiment that this work was safer here, under the earth.
    At a bank of lockers in the hall, Marion donned a clean pale blue lab coat. All personnel had to wear them in the animal facility. She slipped aqua disposable paper booties over her shoes and a matching cap over her hair. Then, briskly, she made her way toward the numbered doors where the Philpott's mice were kept. Each door had a window tinted red. From the outside looking in, each holding area looked like a little room in hell, but the devilish red glow in Philpott's animal rooms was actually a precaution. The animals needed rest, and the red windows shielded them from the hall lights at night.
    Marion was an attentive and compassionate investigator, almost fond of her small charges, proud and careful of them—not as if they had rights or souls, but as a craftsman might treat precious tools. She had worked with many strains of mice in her time and knew their particular traits. She knew the sleek albinos, their fine white hair and timid manner, their ruby eyes like the tiny birthstones in children's jewelry. She knew a particular strain of black mice, always agitated, jumping and flipping over constantly, like dark socks in a Laundromat dryer. Those animals knocked food pellets from their wire holders. Their fur was spiked and greasy with their rations, their manner mischievous. They looked like little punks. She knew a gray strain that fought, and others that wouldn't breed. She knew the strains that habitually ate their own pups—although all the mice ate their young to some extent. She had seen mice rip each other to pieces, and watched, as well, as three or four slept together, breathing delicately, in one soft mossy heap. These and others lived at the Philpott: some thin, some fat, some drug addicted, some healthy, some sick by design. She knew them all well, but these days she worked with mice the color of pink rubber erasers; they lacked a thymus gland, and because of this condition, they were hairless. They were called nude.
    Nude mice lack a normal immune system. They cannot reject grafts of foreign tissue. Like quivering pink agar they would accept tissue from a lizard or a cat or even a patch of chicken skin complete with tiny feathers. Nude mice accept these xenografts and support the tissue as if it were their own. Marion's mice harbored human cancer cells. With her athymic mice, she could study tumors in vivo.
    Nude mice were, in many ways, ideal vessels for Marion's experiments, but their great utility was also their weakness. They could not fight off contaminants as ordinary mice might, and so they were a target for disease. The Philpott maintained strict rules for the care of these animals. Their water and food, bottles and cages, were all sterilized. Food pellets for nudes had a soggy, cooked texture from the autoclave. Entering the athymic mouse room after handling other animals was strictly prohibited.
    Peering through the red window in the door of the lab's animal room, she was pleased to see that Feng had come in before her. Each postdoc had lab duties, and Feng managed the colony record keeping. He often came in on weekends, and, like her, he'd come to check up on each group of the lab's experimental mice.
    His full name was Xiang Feng, but he went by Feng, which Marion only gradually realized was pronounced Fung. Feng himself had been too polite to correct her. He'd been born in Beijing, but had grown up in the north, where his professor parents had been reeducated to grow soybeans. Despite his father's transformation from molecular biologist to farmer, and his mother's parallel metamorphosis from historian to productive member of the proletariat, Feng had excelled in academic subjects and placed high enough on his national exams to earn admittance to Beijing University. In his graduate work he had excelled again, and after several years of research and teaching had petitioned successfully to come to the United States to train with