

### DEATH OF THE MAGPIE

### William McMurray

### Copyright 2011 by William McMurray

### Smashwords Edition

"And chattering pies in dismal discords sing."

### Henry VI, Part III, Act V, Scene VI, p 48.

It is rare that one can date precisely the death of a scientific career: in the usual case the decline is gradual rather than precipitous. The crime of scientific theft, a rarity in itself, is even more rarely apprehended in the act of commission: abrogation of credit for discoveries, a sort of scientific theft by conversion, has been known to require a subsequent generation of academic inquiry to sort out the property rights for the ideas or findings. Magpies of the scientific world may decorate their curricula vitorum with the purloined works of others and rise to prominence undetected, except belatedly by their unfortunate victims. Thus a majority of the denizens of Essex University might easily have continued to feather the nests of their own academic reputations quite unaware of the depredations of the thief within their midst. It was a curious set of circumstances that led to his exposure, to the sudden end of his scientific credibility, and culminated in the death of the magpie.

### CHAPTER ONE

Janet Gordon stood atop the rocky cliff's edge, a gentle breeze barely disturbing her hair and faintly rippling the water's surface beneath her feet. Poised on the brink in more ways than one, she reflected. She had been honoured by the invitation to bring her research group to the prestigious Wotinabee Cell Conference, a collection of assorted biologists including Nobel laureates and senior scientists who annually congregated for this week-long exchange of results at the frontiers of their field. Tomorrow her work would come under scrutiny by this august and intimidating group of scholars, and would either receive the cachet of recognition or, possibly, the condemnation of triviality. As she contemplated the depths of the Wotinabee River far below, rapt in thought, a loud shout to her left interrupted her musings.

"Don't do it Janet! Even at Essex U life can hardly be that desperate."

### Janet smiled, recognizing the portly figure in the canoe rounding the river-bend as John Antwhistle, Professor and Head of her Biology Department. The canoe made a landing at the river's edge while Janet scrambled down the rocky bank.

"Getting in a little early bird watching?" asked Janet, noting the binoculars hanging from the Professor's neck.

"Ah-- you'll find many rara Aves hereabouts," he responded, "both in and outside the conference hall. There are plentiful deep data waders, spoon-billed brain-pickers, several varieties of cuckoos, and colourful evening tent-flappers. Now there, for instance," and he pointed skyward at a long-tailed bird in flight, "is your common magpie. Beware particularly the magpie, Janet- the scientific woods are full of them!" He gestured toward the bow of the canoe. "I don't have an extra paddle, but you're welcome to a free ride."

### Janet climbed over the gunwale and allowed herself to be conducted along the river. As she had done on other occasions Janet wondered at the adroit handling of the boat by one who seemed so ponderous and awkward on dry land. John Antwhistle, like the dark river they glided over, had depths and meanderings of the spirit that continually bemused his colleagues and confounded those unfortunate enough to be his adversaries. It was the latter he was concentrating upon at the moment.

### "Has our learned colleague, Beetleman, attempted to preempt your thunder yet-- pick your brains in advance of the meeting?"

### Janet replied that she hadn't encountered Processor Beadle as yet.

"Continue to avoid the fellow if you can. Hasn't done anything significant himself in ten years, but beetles about in other peoples' bailiwicks hoping to turn up a lead he can jump on." The Professor continued to fulminate about his antagonist as he leaned vehemently into the paddle thrusts which rapidly propelled them to the landing below Wotinabee Lodge.

### Janet excused herself with a promise to join the Professor for pre-dinner cocktails, and walked briskly back to her room to finish unpacking. It was not Richard Beadle who concerned her regarding the security of her findings. Her true misgivings centred on a member within her own Department, and the worst of it was that she felt that she couldn't confide in her mentor. She frowned as she sorted through the slides for her presentation next day. If she had voiced her suspicions to the Professor she had no doubt that he would dismiss them as preposterous, and conclude that Janet was suffering from delusions of persecution.

Through the open window Janet could make out the voices of a group of arriving conference members disembarking from their bus. They came into view a moment later as they proceeded to the registration area at the lodge entrance. Janet recognized several of her colleagues from Essex U: the geneticist, Frank Butler, and his wife, Margaret; her own graduate students, Doug Wickner, who was finishing his PhD thesis, and Linda Black, who had just started to follow in his footsteps; Frank's graduate student, Celia Franklin, who had recently terminated a tempestuous romance with Doug. There were also some celebrities in the group including Richard Beadle, one of the conference organizers, Dr. Neuhauser, Nobel laureate and keynote speaker for the conference, and the redoubtable Mary Kay Jacobs, possibly a bit on the wrong side of forty but still a head-turner and an influential scientist. And, following in her wake Janet noted with wry distaste, hovered the figure of Karl Elster, Janet's brilliant young collaborator, whom John Antwhistle had recruited from Europe to add his expertise as protein chemist to the Biology Department of Essex University. As the newcomers milled about in the entrance-way, Janet pulled the window drapes across, and, after dressing for the evening activities, set off in the direction of John Antwhistle's room at the far end of the lodge.

The first of the Professor's ample servings from the martini-shaker was accompanied by general conversation about the conference environs, the Wotinabee River, and the fishing therein. Now, as she plied her way through the second of these potent offerings Janet found the courage she had lacked earlier to raise the subject that had been troubling her.

"What information did you have about Karl before you hired him?"

"About Karl? I can't recall a candidate for a position so highly commended in his references. And of course he had a formidable record of publication. Was that the sort of information you meant?"

### "Actually, I was thinking of more personal matters. Formal schooling, family affairs --."

### " Now about affairs. I try not to dig too deeply in that area," he replied with a chuckle. "But his scientific training was first-rate. PhD with Gunther Lankenauer- seven publications on tyrosine kinase activators- then a post-doctoral with Sir Reginald Cunningham at London. You know all the papers from that work on characterizations of somatamedin analogues. He gave an impressive poster on that work at the workshop I attended in Europe. I really thought myself quite fortunate to have button-holed him right after the session. Accepted my suggested offer with no hesitation. That was one aspect of his character I admired right off-- he didn't shilly-shally- we needed him for our research projects, he knew what he wanted. and he went for it."

### "Oh yes," Janet replied, "with Karl there's never much hesitation in getting what he needs or wants. But did you have any idea about how he got along in either of those labs?"

### "You mean personally?"

### Janet nodded.

### "Well, both letter's from Lankenauer and Cunningham were very laudatory about his work. There was no mention of any personal matters."

### "Then you didn't have any conversation with his former supervisors, just the letters?"

### "That's true. Though I'm sure if there were any serious problems they would have come out in the references." He got up to refill her glass, but Janet declined. Her head was beginning to get a little fuzzy after one and a half of the Professor's cocktails; to embark on a third portion would be suicidal. She settled back in her chair with the remnant of her martini, and contemplated the river scene beyond the balcony of the Professor's room. The late afternoon sun sparkled on the almost mirror-like water. If only she could calm her emotional surface like that of the river. "Has some difficultly developed with Karl's work?"

### "Not with his work exactly." Janet paused momentarily, "Has he told you that he's leaving the University?"

### The Professor was genuinely startled.

### "No, he has not. In fact we talked about his future work, his grant application, lab facilities, and so on. After the alterations we planned to suit him-- well, I just assumed he intended to be around for several years. He has interviewed technicians, agreed to take on a graduate student. Have you some definite information?"

### "No. Just indications, and a pattern of behaviour."

"Well, I can't approach him with 'indications' can I?" he responded impatiently. "What do you mean by a pattern of behaviour? My impression is that he has been very steady, and productive. You have to admit that his work on your project was pivotal in characterizing the growth factors "

Janet winced at the word 'pivotal'. If her own Professor took this view of the role Karl had played in her research, the outside world of science might be justified in assuming that the whole isolation process had been a mess until the brilliant young protein chemist came across the ocean to solve all the difficulties. She was groping for words to describe her suspicions without undue emphasis on her feelings of bitterness when a knock on the door announced the arrival of the Butlers.

### The Professor busied himself with another round of martinis, while Margaret Butler detailed the discomforts of their aeroplane connections, the bus-ride, and the spartan accommodations at the cabin they had been assigned.

### "Yet another instance of the advantages of staying single," volunteered the Professor. "Janet, take note. Married couples are banished to the hinterlands," and he managed to refill her glass without her realization.

### "What, Janet? Contemplating marriage?" Margaret's face beamed in anticipation of a juicy morsel of gossip. "Now who might it be?" she inquired archly. "Not young Douglas on the rebound from our dear Celia?" Her husband grimaced at this reference to his graduate student. "Or is it your other collaborator, the so brilliant Dr. Elster?"

### Janet, struggling with her confusion, had been unconsciously attacking the cocktail glass, and disposed of its contents. In spite of herself she felt a storm of fury rising inside as her cheeks, forehead and neck flushed to the roots of her scalp.

### "I have no intentions about entering the marriage market," she replied, rising carefully and deliberately from her chair, "but if I did it would certainly not be with that SOB!" and she left the room with as much dignity as she could muster and set off toward the dining hall.

In the gathering dusk Janet could just make out the figures of her two graduate students by the water's edge. Their voices had been raised in argument, but as they saw her approach the conversation died away to an embarrassed silence. It did not seem to have been lovers' quarrel. From appearances, Linda had been attempting to placate Doug, whose grim countenance betrayed a pent-up hostility that Janet knew too well could erupt quite abruptly in an explosion. Somehow his anger quietened her own, and she commenced to lead the discussion to lighter matters.

### "Now you two, have you discovered any diversions on the river? There are boats and canoes to rent you know."

### "No, we just took a hike along one of the nature-trails," put in Linda quickly. "There's a lot of interesting wild flora in the back meadows," she continued earnestly, listing her sightings. Always serious and methodical, Linda, thought Janet so unlike the flamboyant Celia, Doug's erstwhile love-interest. As she prattled on with her catalogue, Janet glanced across at Doug, who was still wrestling to recapture his composure. After a few moments he broke away as though he had given up the struggle, and didn't trust himself to enter the conversation. The two women carried on across the lawn to the entrance to the dining hall.

### A number of conferees had already arrived in anticipation of the banquet and were milling about near the doorway, renewing acquaintances, and arranging themselves into small affinity groups with whom they might amusingly or profitably get through the formal dinner. Janet and her student were noted, or rather their name tags were noted, by Professor Beadle who then proceeded to introduce himself.

"Dr. Gordon!" he enthused, "so happy you were able to join us and bring your young people along. I believe that tomorrow will be the highlight of our conference," and he bubbled on about the upcoming programme. "I do hope that the order is satisfactory. With the morning session all devoted to the chemistry of growth factors it did seem best to put Dr. Elster at the end of that group, as the 'clean-up man' you might say. And then of course, your talk on the biology of cytomitins will be a fitting finale for the evening session."

### Had he looked at Janet's expression while he made these explanations the Professor would have had difficulty in deriving reassurance. In fact, it was the order of presentations that had been giving her the most trouble. With Karl leading off the description of what she had come to think of as her own proprietary interest, the audience might be excused from making the erroneous conclusion that it was he rather than Janet herself who had originated the work. She might have conveyed these feelings, but the Professor was captive of his own exuberance.

"I expect there will be some marvellously stimulating discussions about your new growth factors, and their role in the development and malignant spread of cancers. You will be coming to our reception after the banquet won't you? I'd like to introduce you to Dr. Jacobs (you two will have much in common), and of course hear for myself more details about what you and your group are up to now. But excuse me please, I must attend to our guest speaker," and he bustled off in the direction of the elderly Nobelist who had just entered the dining hall. Together they headed toward the front of the hall and the head-table, where a number of dignitaries including John Antwhistle and Mary Kay Jacobs were also proceeding.

### Janet and Linda moved surreptitiously to a more obscure location, and were just getting seated at a small table near the back of the hall, when they were noticed and joined by the Butlers. If she was aware at all of the feelings she had aroused before Margaret Butler gave no sign of it. She chattered on to Linda about the eligible young male scientists she could expect to find in such a setting, and how she had met and caught the handsome young male scientist who was now her husband at just such a gathering. For his part Frank Butler was quietly trying to mollify Janet about his wife's lack of tact and feeling.

### "Don't concern yourself in the least," laughed Janet. "We all expect Margaret to liven things up that way. Silly of me to overreact to the suggestion about Karl. To tell the truth, things have not been going smoothly in the way of our collaboration. I hate to say it but I've come to mistrust him and his motivations."

### "To tell the truth, I never did trust the guy, either with my data or my wife," rejoined Frank sotto voce.

### Janet considered him with new-found respect. A few tables over she could see the subject of the conversation pressing his attentions on a well-known professor from MIT. Doug was at the same table, still looking like a thundercloud about to spurt a few lightning bolts, and between them sat Celia. Janet recalled the gossip about the Department that it was Karl who had broken up the relationship between Celia and Douglas. Whatever he may have thought of her once however, Karl was giving very little attention to Celia at the moment. She sat in silence, head bowed, almost tragically lovely in desolation, toying with her food. As the waitresses cleared the tables Janet reflected that she would have a hard time recalling what she had eaten herself. The combination of Professor Antwhistle's cocktails, her resentment and mistrust regarding Karl, and anticipation for tomorrow's presentations, had submerged her notice of what was going on around her. Preliminary remarks from the head-table and the introductory portion of Dr. Neuhauser's keynote address had passed by before she had roused herself and tuned in to the proceedings.

### The Nobel prize-winner, a spare wiry man, was equally at home scaling the Himalayas, working at the lab-bench, or spell-binding an audience as he was at the moment. He discoursed, effortlessly, it seemed, on the evolution of hormones, those ubiquitous proteins that lock onto the outer surfaces of certain cells and transmit signals inside to command them to grow, to divide, to develop special functions-- all without the use of visual aids, conjuring vivid pictures in the minds of his audience. Janet knew that the performance had been honed to a fine art after numerous repetitions on the same theme, at several thousand dollars per appearance, but the effect was nonetheless awe-inspiring.

### With only passing reference to his own epochal work on growth hormones, Dr. Neuhauser managed to cite all the pertinent researches, from the beginnings of Banting & Best with insulin up to the current brief abstract of the current work of Elster & Gordon in discovering the novel cytomitins. Janet blushed furiously and tried to look unconcerned, while noting that Karl beamed and virtually took a bow from his place of primacy in the citation. The Nobelist concluded with a wry anecdote regarding the numbers of trips to Stockholm already fostered by these hormones, and predicted from the exponential rise of interest that the current hall would shortly be unable to contain all the contenders for future awards. For an instant Janet fantasized herself before the King of Sweden, as she had in her youth imagined herself at the centre-court of Wimbledon. A round of applause brought her sharply to the realty of the present, and she followed the rest of the group back towards the main lodge where the evening reception was scheduled to take place.

There were three main categories of players at the reception: a select group of established investigator's like John Antwhistle and Richard Beadle used such occasions for forays into one another's camps to garner valuable intelligence clues concerning enemy operations, or to conduct raiding parties on promising junior faculty members; an aspiring cohort of the latter eagerly displayed their scientific wares to would-be employers; an amorphous buffer group came with the delusion that the reception was merely a social event, or an opportunity to consume as much free booze as possible courtesy of the sponsor Biotechnonics Supply Co. Although Janet counted herself among the third group, she was barely emerging from the haze of the pre-dinner cocktails and banquet wine. Accordingly she avoided the crush of participants crowding the bar and wandered out onto the terrace for a respite from the hubbub within.

### In the gloom at the far end of the terrace Janet could make out a couple who seemed to be engaged in animated discussion. As she averted her eyes from this apparently romantic scene she heard the unmistakable slap of palm upon face. Shortly after the male participant strode back along the verandah and through the reception-hall doors not far from where she stood. He was readily identifiable as Karl, and he scowled rubbing his reddened cheek, but too preoccupied to notice that he had been observed. Janet walked down to where the female half of the action was standing. She was also readily identifiable, to Janet 's surprise as Linda. The girl, still but shaking with emotion, allowed herself to be led to one of the lawn-chairs where Janet sat down beside her.

### "Are you alI right?" The question seemed fatuous the moment she had uttered it. The scene carried Janet back several months to a similar occasion when she had herself been in unpleasant proximity to Karl and his importunate demands. She hadn't needed to resort to the extreme of physical force to repel his unwanted attention, but she now had more compelling motivation to do so herself, and experienced some vicarious satisfaction that Linda had responded in this way.

"Well, Doug was probably right in the first analysis, but I wanted to see if I could head off any unpleasantness-- without involving you."

"Without involving me in what?"

"It had to do with Karl's lecture tomorrow. You see Doug happened to overhear him rehearsing his slides in an empty lecture room back home the night before we left for the meeting. And he could tell that Karl had copies of some of the same slides you planned to use in your presentation. Doug wanted to tell you as soon as we arrived here, but I wanted a chance to straighten things out with Karl myself." Even in the dim light from the distant reception hall Janet could tell that Linda was blushing with embarrassment.

"You see Karl and I -- well, we became pretty close \--so I thought--" (You and how many others? Janet wondered) -- instead of stirring everyone up I could go to Karl and ask him not to present your data-- or at least get him to ask your permission."

"And how did he react to that?"

"Just laughed. Told me I was naive and foolish-- that if it had been my data or Doug's it made no difference-- we all worked together, and you were at liberty to use his results in your talk. You were going to present the experiments on biological effects of the cytomitins he had purified, so why shouldn't he talk about the work on isolation of the factors in your lab."

All of which is carefully calculated to appropriate senior authorship on the original work for Karl, reflected Janet grimly. There was no longer any shadow of doubt about the game he was playing. If he cared little about the reactions from his present collaborators to this blatant theft of their experimental findings there was a fairly likely explanation-- he was in the process of engineering another position, and didn't intend to work with them further. By now he assumed that he had skimmed the cream off the cytomitins project-- as far as his limited biological assessment could take him at any rate-- and he would try to make his skills as a protein chemist indispensable to some other unwitting biologist.

"Anyway," sighed Cindy, "I discovered one useful fact from all this."

"And that is?"

"Anything there might have been between Karl and me is dead and finished as far as I am concerned. God, he made me feel such a fool."

### Janet felt a surge of tenderness for the girl. She had only been working under her direction for a few months but already there was a closer bond between them than she could ever have had with the aloof and independent Douglas. While reassuring Linda she examined her closely about the information which Doug had passed along from his eaves-dropping. Somehow Janet realized that any further confrontation either with Doug or Karl himself about the matter could only lead to more frustration and humiliation for her.

### As she made her way back with Linda toward the main lodge, avoiding the revellers in the reception hall, she choked down her bitter anger. She would need all the mental control she could muster to get through the next twenty-four hours.

### CHAPTER TWO

The first rays of sunlight touched the tree-branches, and a few skeins of early mist persisted as Janet stood again at the cliff's edge next morning. Below were the rocks of the river bank, and it was necessary for her to spring outwards as she dove into the depths of the Watanabe. She struck out briskly for the point up-river that was about a half kilometre away. At home she would have would have gone for a ten kilometre run to settle her mind, but here the wilderness trails were too uneven and she had to settle for a swim as a purgative for the dark thoughts crowding her consciousness.

### The river banks were virtually deserted at this early hour. Further up-stream, nearer the landing at the lodge she could just make out a lone canoe pushing aside the low mist toward the opposite shore. And as she made the turn, Janet thought she caught sight of a figure on the cliff near where she had set her customary breakfast orange and towel. However, by the time she got close enough to have a decent look the person had vanished. The canoe across the river had also disappeared among the swirling foggy canopy. Janet huddled under her towel against the morning chill and polished off the orange. The exhilaration of the swim, the rough comfort of the towel, and the warm sunshine on her back provided balm for her battered psyche. Whatever the day had to offer she knew now that she would have the power to handle it.

### The atmosphere of the lecture room was subdued and sober by contrast with the holiday mood of the previous evening's events. Participants were reluctantly entering in twos and threes when Janet arrived. With the exception of the morning's speakers, conference organizers and a few senior scientists with myopic vision or hearing aids, most of the audience filled the hall in the manner of students-- starting in the back rows. A safety feature in the event of fire or boredom, thought Janet, as she settled into a seat not far from the projector and close to the rear exit door. The speakers had deposited their slides for the talks with the young projectionist, who was distractedly attempting to arrange them in order of presentation and had already started loading the first set into the projector's carousel for the opening talk. On the opposite side of the projection stand Janet noticed Linda apparently none the worse for her confrontation of the previous night, and Celia with Doug. Their mood seemed notably cheerier than last evening also, and Janet wondered if some reconciliation had taken place between them.

### Now the buzz of conversation, the rustle of note-books, and snapping of binders gradually subsided as the conference chairman, Professor Beadle, mounted the dais. The opening papers, consisting chiefly of sequence analysis of the better known protein growth hormones and the strategies for cloning their genes, were heavy going for Janet, and she departed with alacrity via the back door into the dazzling sunshine at the mid-morning break. Most of the other conferees had pushed through the front of the auditorium, either to convey or extract gems of wisdom not covered in the discussion of the papers, or to perform some stimulant therapy for their sagging mental condition at the coffee urn.

### The rear of the conference hall opened onto a cleared space containing playing fields for volleyball, baseball, and beyond, the screened-in tennis courts. Janet stretched, yawned, and was about to set out for a walk when she was overtaken by Celia.

They exchanged a few remarks about the morning papers as they strolled in the grassy field, and as they approached the tennis court fence Celia inquired about the afternoon's programme, and if it were true that no talk were scheduled.

"Well, so far as I could gather the first afternoon is always left open. I guess that the organizers must realize that the audience needs some chance to recuperate before facing another battery of "speakers tonight."

### "Would you be interested in playing some tennis after lunch then, Dr. Gordon?"

### Janet was delighted to be asked. though she had never played with Celia she had watched her graceful style with approval on occasion from an adjacent court. She would be only too happy to agree to a set or two, if they could find a vacant court.

"Oh, that's great responded Celia. "Dr. Elster was wondering if you and Doug might play some mixed doubles with us. And he said he will reserve a court for two o'clock, if that time is alright for you?"

Janet, feeling trapped, had to agree although with dampened enthusiasm, that two o'clock would be convenient if she could organize Douglas. By now the audience had started to filter back after its brief recess, and she stomped across the field to the resumption of the morning session with more vehement thoughts about Karl. It was not enough that he should dominate their research collaboration; he must also try to exert his supremacy on the combat field of the tennis court. As she stumbled toward her seat, eyes barely accommodated to the darkness of the auditorium, she brushed against someone coming away from the projectionist's table. One of the earlier speakers retrieving his slides, she guessed, and wondered irritably why on earth he would have waited until the next session instead of collecting them in the interlude.

### The first speaker of the second session was well launched into his presentation by the time Janet was settled in her chair. For a while she tried to make notes following the protocols for the isolation of embryonic growth factors. This was all fairly pedestrian stuff, standard column chromatograms--jagged peak after jagged peak flashing across the screen -- almost identical to the separation methods Karl Elster had used for her cytomitins fractions. Her cytomitins-- and he was (according to Doug's account) about to claim them as his own! In the darkness she felt the heat of anger surging up her neck again. Would she have the self-control to remain in her seat if Karl in fact started projecting her cytomitins peaks on the screen without acknowledging her priority on the work? She sat squirming, only half listening to the saga of the embryonic growth factors, wondering whether she should bolt for the rear exit before Karl came up to the dais. But before she could act on this impulse the speaker had concluded his talk, and the chairman, suggesting that discussion be reserved until the last speaker had also finished, proceeded to introduce Karl to the audience.

### It was the first time that she had heard Karl give a formal lecture and Janet was not greatly impressed with his delivery. He seemed to be embarking on a lesson on how not to give a talk, speeding through the acknowledgements and introduction, reading directly from his prepared manuscript, and scarcely giving a glance in the direction of audience or screen. It all comes, she thought, from too little class-room exposure. Her freshman biology class would not have tolerated such a performance; by now there would have been much scuffling of feet, rumbling of conversations punctuated by loud coughs and occasional titters. The present audience was too staid and courteous for such signs of outright disapproval, though there was a detectable air of restless inattention. But still Karl droned on. Part of the problem was that he talked down to the audience, as though he were instructing the uninitiated into the elements of peptide chemistry. He spared them none of the ghastly details, each component of the isolation media, buffers, stabilizers, protease inhibitors.

The latter inhibitors were one of Karl's pet subjects. As he rambled on, rhyming off their acronyms-- DFP, TACK, NEM-- Janet thought back to his early days in their lab, and how he had lectured her on the artefacts produced from autolytic actions of cell extracts, a hazard of which she was already aware. The health hazards from handling these often highly toxic inhibitors of autolysis were more serious concerns to her than they seemed to be to Karl; he exhibited an unhealthy lack of respect for the deadly reagents, a contempt bred no doubt from habitual familiarity.

With only a passing mention of the previous work done by herself or Douglas, Karl now proceeded to relate the events leading to the discovery of the cytomitins. Janet's early trials to isolate unknown substances from the culture fluid that might trigger dormant cells to enter mitosis and multiply were almost held up to ridicule as naive attempts using primitive techniques. Then he proceeded to describe the exciting revelation that more than one factor was involved: that the two factors had to work together synergistically. All of this had been accomplished before Karl had set foot in the lab, but Janet could see that the impression was being conveyed that these refinements of protein fractionation coincided with his entry on the scene.

### Most of the slides he had shown, Janet recognized either as copies of her own, or slightly modified versions. Some were replicas of the data she had planned to use for her own talk later that night. It was in fact worse than she had imagined from Doug's information. She sat in impotent rage wondering if Karl would dare to show her key experiment, the chromatographic separation with her two discrete peaks of the cytomitins A and B, which was to have formed the crux of her evening presentation.

### It was just at this point when her worst suspicions were about to be confirmed, as she thought of it later, that the bomb-shell fell in the auditorium. Karl had been leading up to the perplexing problem which had almost stumped Janet early in the investigation. As she had purified the growth-stimulating protein from the cell culture medium the ability of the fractions to activate cell division seemed to simply vanish, despite the addition of inhibitors to prevent protein breakdown. Then, as Karl expressed it reading from his manuscript "it became apparent (meaning apparent to him) that the active fraction had separated into two large peaks (my two peaks) which were inactive separately, but fully effective when combined again together". Janet was looking down at her clenched fists in her lap, but she knew which slide showing her two peaks was due to appear next on the screen. It was only gradually that she became aware of the audience response: first an assortment of embarrassed giggles, then a few chuckles, and finally a chorus of ribald guffaws. Neither speaker nor projectionist had yet taken in the spectacle before them.

"Well", thought Janet in astonishment, "those certainly aren't my two peaks!"

### Looking up from his notes querulously in response to the unexpected laughter in the hall, Karl was probably the last to realize that the black and white line-drawing had been replaced by a technicolor photograph of the upper torso of a healthily endowed female, quite décolleté. The projectionist too was frozen momentarily in inaction, until unbidden he slipped in the next slide. The audience evidently considered this to be a joke in somewhat dubious taste, perpetrated by the speaker. To Karl, and to Janet who knew him well enough to disregard that possibility, it was apparent that he had been the butt rather than the perpetrator of the joke, and he had a difficult time recovering his composure.

### Karl bumbled along with the presentation, frequently losing his place in the manuscript with the consequence that the slides appeared at inopportune moments or in the wrong sequence. As he had to look up each time to ascertain that a bogus slide had not been inserted he became more flustered, repeating his previous statements or getting the order further muddled. Deciding that blame for the fiasco should not rest with him, Karl proceeded to take out his ire and frustration upon the unfortunate projectionist. The latter in response deliberately removed and inspected each slide before showing it to detect any more coloured anatomical displays, thereby ensuring that every third slide was either backwards or inverted. There was a palpable sense of relief among the audience when Karl feebly discussed the significance of his findings, and finished his presentation somewhat prematurely.

### Professor Beadle did his best to restore a serious tone during the general discussion. He summarized the morning's results of the labours of the expert protein biochemists who had produced a great lesson for the assembled biologists about doing good research only on good, clean protein fractions. There followed a few questions about details of techniques and protocols, mainly among the elite club of the session presenters. Professor Beadle was about to thank them and conclude the session, when Janet noted with a mixture of anticipation and apprehension the figure of her Professor striding with determination to the speakers' podium and removing the microphone from the hand of the rather startled chairman.

"As a founding member of this colloquium," John Antwhistle began, establishing his credentials for the benefit of upstart scientists in the audience, "I wish to echo some of the words of my esteemed colleague and worthy chairman. This evening I shall be chairing the sister session on the biology of these important growth-promoting factors. I would be the first to agree with our chairman that isolation of clean factors is primary in studying their function. However, the primary finding in every case is a biological phenomenon and, obviously, the existence of the factors for isolation could never be known without the labours of the cell biologist. In the last analysis, the designations-- chemist, biologist, biochemist-- are irrelevant in assigning credit for the fruits of our labours. In short this work must be a team approach of diverse scientists with each bringing his or her special talents to bear. In the case of the cytomitins in my own Department I am sure that Dr. Elster would be the first to agree (although he was no doubt distracted from saying so at the end of his talk by the lively prank played on him by persons unknown) that it was in fact Dr. Gordon who originally demonstrated the synergism of the two fractions which he has subsequently so elegantly characterized as cytomitins A and B, but we await eagerly further chemical characterization of the differences between A and B, and we also await with excitement Dr. Gordon's elegant biological characterization of the events of the cell cycle that are affected by these agents later this evening." And he sat down.

During this extraordinary speech Janet felt her anger transformed into a warm glow of affection for her protector, mingled with an embarrassing yet satisfying sense of being the centre of attention. She only hoped that she would live up to all the hype and advanced billing for her evening talk. The other centre of attention, Karl, on the other hand could only nod dumbly in assent to the comments attributing priority for discovery of the factors to his colleague. At the chairman's behest the audience signalled the adjournment of the proceedings with a round of applause for the speakers, and made a rapid departure for the lunch-room. Just before slipping out the back door, Janet noticed Karl walking angrily toward the projectionist, doubtless to continue his castigation in private. It had the makings of a jolly doubles grudge match this afternoon, she thought.

### CHAPTER THREE

### Meals at Wotanabe Lodge were one of the high points of the celebrated conference. As one of the regular attendees had remarked, it was essential to leave some of the afternoons free so the participants in the luncheon could either work or sleep off the effects of their bountiful repast. After the somewhat unorthodox occurrences of the preceding session the dining hall was virtually abuzz with bemused or scandalized conversation. Although it was a recognized feature of the conference that diners might over-indulge both in food and shop-talk at meal-times, the morning's events insured a brisk appetite for the delectable food as well as for the equally delectable scientific gossip .

### Janet found herself in the buffet lineup behind a young man whom she recognized as one of the speakers from the morning session. She spent a profitable hour with him over the lunch-table comparing properties of his blood-cell growth factors. At a near by table she noted Karl engrossed in animated conversation with Mary Kay Jacobs. And not far off, the chairman of the morning session appeared to be trying to extract information from John Antwhistle. Blood from a stone, thought Janet, as she returned her attention to her companion, although Karl, she reflected, in his eagerness to impress his audience, would doubtless be more forthcoming. if he were indeed planning to make a transfer of her cytomitin work to a large, well-endowed group such as that of his present luncheon companion. This would be devastating for Janet. After the events of the morning she felt more assured about the priority of her work, but Karl still presented a threat that she could little afford to underestimate for the future.

### The tennis-court was moderately crowded by the time that. Janet had changed and arrived at the sign-up table a little before two. Karl and his partner were already on the court having a warm-up singles rally but Doug was nowhere to be seen. Janet felt somewhat irritable about the situation. She had played little this summer and never before with Doug. It was typical of him to be late or unprepared. He invariably left messes in the lab, although admittedly he had a prodigious capacity for concentrated work once he got started. On the other hand there was nothing desultory about Karl in or out of the lab, she reflected, as she watched him vigorously trying to remove the cover from the tennis ball. He had a compulsive, almost obsessive attitude to his work, that carried over into his play and social life. Janet had always prided herself on a fine balance between science and extracurricular activities, with little importance attached to games now that she was no longer involved in competitive sports. But today she had to admit that she needed badly to win this match, and hoped grimly that her belated partner would be up to the challenge.

### Doug's appearance a few minutes later did not greatly inspire her confidence. He arrived looking ragged in badly worn sneakers, cut-off jeans, and dragging an ancient wooden tennis racket borrowed from the office at the lodge. Amid the modern equipment and shiny whites of the other players he looked like a slum refugee. Karl made no attempt to conceal his disdain as he commenced the first service game.

### The first three games went to the opposition, as Karl and Celia held serve and Doug was broken after several close deuce points. He redeemed himself in the next game making a couple of good volleys at net and Janet held her service game.

### "Three serving one," announced Karl crisply as he started the fifth game, sighting his beady eyes along the racket frame as though it we're a gun-barrel. For some reason this portentous and arrogant gesture aroused Doug, who raised his level of play and belted back several strong returns for winners, taking them to break-point. Janet converted this to game in their favour with a cross-court return that Celia volleyed into the net, and they stayed on serve until the twelfth game with Janet serving at 5 - 6. In spite of some inconsistent serves owing to her lack of practice Janet fought off two set-points with the help of some brilliant stop-volley from Doug that took the sting out of Karl's heavy hitting and forced the tie-breaker. To her great surprise and Karl's obvious disgust, Janet prevailed taking the tie-breaker easily for the first set. Celia waved in congratulation, but Karl turned deliberately toward the back fence and prepared to open service for the second set.

### It is a common tactic in competitive mixed doubles to force play deliberately to the female member of the team, with the supposition that she will be the weaker. In the present match-up this supposition was rather dubious at best. Janet was clearly a more advanced player than Doug, who made up for deficiencies in style or finesse however, with a dogged capacity to retrieve the ball from virtually any part of the court, and occasional bursts of brilliance. Across the net Celia was the steadier more graceful player with classic strokes and footwork, and although she hit few outright winners made few unforced errors. Karl, on the other hand, hit out at every ball, interspersing service aces and double faults, with hard placement shots either on the line or just out. Although Celia had no apparent tactic except to keep the ball in play, Karl was following the old adage of keeping the play in Janet's side of the court.

After Janet's boost of confidence from the first set Karl's strategy seemed doomed to failure as she started leaning into Karl's drives and pounded them back at his feet, forcing him to hit up into easy volley put-aways or over the base-line. Sensing the situation Doug also concentrated on the reverse tactic of hitting every return to Karl, further increasing his level of frustration and ire which he released by berating his partner, questioning out-calls by his opponents, and eventually by trying to smash the ball directly at Janet. There was no question about the outcome of the second set which went to 5-2 with Janet serving. She chose to hold at the base-line, and as Karl charged to the net caught him twice with deep top-spin lobs that proved unchasable. By now a considerable crowd of spectators from the conference had gathered to Karl's obvious chagrin, as Janet served out the set at love. He turned from the court and stormed off without a word. As it turned out it was the last occasion that she might have had for communication of words with him.

The final conference session of the day was held in the bar immediately following the evening's formal presentations. Presenters of the talks assembled in small groups to compare notes and reply to comments from persistent questioners who had pursued them from the conference hall. Janet found herself seated in a corner of the lounge with one such group which included Mary Kay Jacobs. The latter turned her chair toward, Janet's and complimented her on her work and the delivery of her paper. Flattered by the attention of this star among women scientists, Janet could not help being impressed and attracted by the power of her intense personality. Within a few minutes of conversation about mutual research interests it became apparent that the two women were soul-mates Mary Kay proceeded to dispense some elder sisterly advice on the publication of Janet's findings, and the subject came around naturally to Karl.

"I think it magnanimous of you to agree to his proposal to bring the cytomitin problem to our laboratory."

### For a moment Janet was too stunned to respond. Her small triumphs of the day, the accolades over her presentation, were reduced to insignificance by this revelation of the prospect she had dreaded. And her regard for the new-found friend in the next chair was being transformed quite rapidly into bitter resentment. Mary Kay regarded her soberly for a minute, raised an eye-brow, and started to laugh.

"So your collaborator has not sought your blessing in this enterprise? I hope I haven't shocked you unduly, but I wanted to be certain. No doubt he still harbours the misapprehension that I am dying to take over him and your problem. Dr. Elster is not the first of his type that I've had to deal with, though he's certainly the most transparent. Anyway, our group is maximally extended in studying the embryonic growth factors for the foreseeable future. Perhaps sometime later on we could work out an exchange to compare our factors with yours in the two systems. But I believe for both our sakes it will be best not to involve Dr. Elster. He is such a fast operator; by this time tomorrow he will probably have made arrangements to go to Dick Beadle's lab. Spike his plans if you get the chance, before he robs you blind!"

### As she walked back alone to her room later that night Janet reflected on the advice she had received. She didn't want to fight the issue out with Karl. It was clear from her and Linda's earlier dealings with him that he would be unmoved by moral suasion. Perhaps she could prevail on, John Antwhistle to adjudicate the dispute. She might settle the matter of authorship on their joint papers, but how exactly could she 'spike his plans' to transport her problem to another laboratory? Her present thoughts matched the velvet blackness of the night. The only certain way she could think of to eliminate the threat was to eliminate Karl.

### The second day of the conference dawned rosy and bright. Long fingers of sunlight cast misty shadows through the conifers as Janet set off along the forest path from the back of the lodge. Phantasmic dreams had made her sleep poorly after the tension and excitement of last evening's session. Yet, It had gone exceedingly well considering what had taken place beforehand. On reflection she realized that being first in the second session was infinitely preferable to Karl's position as ultimate speaker of the morning meeting. Instead of being sated, weary, and longing for the end, the audience was relaxed but attentive. It gave her an opportunity to deliver a brief, capsule introduction of the biological significance of the cell growth-promoting hormones. She took pains to name predecessors in the field and each of her co-workers, and paid tribute to their contributions. And she skipped over the methodology with whimsical references to the Old Testament of Beadle and Jacobs on cell culture techniques, together with the Revelations of Antwhistle, and the Apochrypha of Gordon and Elster, not yet sanctified by publication. By the time that she reached her key slide on the synergistic effect of A and B cytomitin fractions, and assured the audience that the peaks displayed were not counterfeit, she had her listeners eating out of her hand. The final slide on projected work and speculations re the mechanisms of cytomitin actions had elicited an enthusiastic barrage of questions, commentary and cross-fire among the senior scientists, Beadle, Jacobs and Antwhistle. She was proud and relieved to have done justice to her subject, and to have recovered some lost credit for her group from Karl's disastrous performance of the morning.

The sun was still behind the trees when she reached the cliff's edge, and the river was quite obscured by the heavy mist. Janet set down her breakfast orange, towel, and running shoes, and dove confidently straight out to clear the rocks below. She could barely make out the shore line as she stroked upstream through the gray vapours. Somewhere in the channel she could hear the whisper of a feathered paddle as an unseen canoe slipped past. She reached the point, made her turn, and started to strike out downstream.

The sun was just clearing the tree-tops. From the water level the cliffs's edge was vaguely visible, and through the swirling veil a glimpse of movement caught Janet's eye. A figure seemed to rise, pause for several seconds, then fall and vanish out of sight behind the mist. She could have been persuaded that it was but another phantasmic vision, until she heard the thump of an all too corporeal object slamming on to the river bank. Her heart beating furiously, Janet raced back to her departure point. She did not have a long or difficult search. At the base of the cliff a few feet from the water lay the crumpled remains of a twisted human shape upon the great rocks. There was no sign of life, no breathing, no pulse. With mouth agape the dark beady eyes stared upward at her with a look of surprise. It was Karl Elster. The magpie was dead.

### CHAPTER FOUR

### By mutual consent the morning session was postponed until after lunch while the conference organizers and lodge administrators scurried about attempting to locate medical assistance and notify next-of-kin. Janet played a more active role in the last activity than she would have liked. As Professors Beadle and Antwhistle conferred about the appropriate action she knocked hesitantly on the door of the conference office. Still shaking from her discovery by the river and efforts to bring down help from the lodge, she entered apologetically.

"There is something I felt I must tell you in your attempts to get in touch with Karl 's family. The fact of the matter is that Karl has had a wife."

John Antwhistle paused momentarily, then asked , "I suppose that is what you were obliquely referring to as 'family affairs' the other evening is it Janet?" She nodded affirmatively. "And I also suppose that the marriage broke up, or that they had separated before Karl joined us. Otherwise he would have made some mention of his wife?"

"Exactly. I first learned about it by chance. A Christmas card from a fellow post-doc I had known, now in England. He had over-lapped with Karl in the lab, and mentioned his wife, Margot, still working over there as a research assistant in the next lab. She may go by her maiden name, but I'm sure a telegram to Mrs. Elster at the Department would reach her.It's possible she has left the lab if your last communication was at Christmas," responded Professor Beadle, "I Know the Director moderately well. In the circumstances a long-distance call seems to be in order. I'll see if I can get through right away since it would be mid-afternoon there by now."

### Janet and John Antwhistle stood in the corridor outside the office while their colleague endeavoured to cope with the complexities of trans-Atlantic connections from the rudimentary local telephone system.

### "I know what they say about speaking ill of the near-departed," muttered John Antwhistle sotto voce, "but our Dr. Elster seems to have had several devious sides to his personality. Did your friend furnish further personal glimpses of his activities over there?"

"Well, yes-- he-- as a matter of fact, Christmas was not the last communication. I didn't want to say more in front of Professor Beadle. The first letter plus several things in our lab got me wondering aboutKarl's past. So I wrote to my friend-- it was Bob Hayes incidentally-- you may remember we published a couple of things together."

### "I do indeed. We met at the International Biology Convention. Energetic sort of fellow as I recall."

### "Yes, and thoroughly reliable. I just got a reply back last week and--"

### At this point their conversation was broken off as the door to the office opened and Professor Beadle called them in.

"I got a hold of Sir Reginald all right." Janet had to suppress an inappropriate giggle as she conjured a picture of this solemn intercontinental wrestling match. "My God he's a cool bird! Didn't show much feeling over the death of his ex-colleague. Just said he would break it to the widow right away, and asked us to stand by the phone in case she wanted to call back about the arrangements. I told him you both were nearby, in case she wanted more information, or wanted to talk to another woman."

### In the end his comment was prophetic. After a few minutes of uncomfortable chit-chat among the three of them the telephone call came through. It was for Janet, and to her surprise the voice on the other end was not that of a woman.

### "Janet? It's Bob-- Bob Hayes. Margot's pretty shaken by the news as you can imagine. Can you fill me in on the circumstances?" She tried to provide a coherent account of the accident, omitting her own role in the discovery because It seemed more sensational than helpful to the widow. Margot wants to fly out there directly. I couldn't talk her out of it, and I didn't think she should come alone. Can you arrange some accommodation for us? I guess it might be sometime tomorrow evening before we could get there."

Janet promised to make the arrangements and signed off the telephone. She left the other two to contact Karl's parents, and went to talk to the lodge manager. The latter was shattered by the demise of one of his guests, as though the fall might be attributed to his administration, or would reflect unfavourably on the conference site. Janet, who was harbouring some uncomfortable guilt feelings of her own, attempted to reassure him.

### " Some foolish person will persist in diving from those cliffs into the river. Only last summer a young chap had a bad injury at almost the same spot."

Janet squirmed a little in her chair." I am certain Dr. Elster had no intention of diving. He was fully clothed you know, with shoes on when I found him. He must simply have lost his footing and slipped over the edge."

### "Ah well, it's a dreadful tragedy none the less. You worked closely with him I understand. Perhaps you wouldn't mind taking charge of his personal effects, later on of course. No need to hurry."

### Janet explained why she had come, and asked if rooms could be found for the widow and her travelling companion.

"Of course," he replied. "And Mrs. Elster can then take possession of her late husband's belongings." He seemed relieved to have this matter settled so neatly. "We had a couple of cancellations, and of course there is Dr. Elster's room, although that might be a little upsetting for the poor lady. No, I think we had better place them in the married couples' quarters-- separately of course," he hastened to add.

### It was morning before Janet got to the cafeteria. In the earlier panic she had forgotten totally about breakfast: even her usual orange had been overlooked in the mad scramble for help. She would have to return to collect her shoes and towel, also abandoned at the top of the cliff. In the mean time she staved off the pangs of hunger with a large eccles cake. John Antwhistle, coffee cup in hand, sat down beside her.

### "I think it's time you told me the full story about Karl," he began.

### Janet started, involuntarily.

### "You don't think that I had something to do with it--"

### "No, no, of course not! Karl's death was an accident, we all know that."

### "But if wishing could have made it so--"

### "You felt that strongly about him?"

### Janet nodded, admitting to herself that she probably felt less remorse than Sir Reginald, and more than little relief that her dealings with Karl were finished.

"But he did fall didn't he? Besides, you were in the river, and all the wishing and psychokinetic powers in the world couldn't propel him from there. Do you suspect that someone 'assisted' with his accident?"

"I really don't know what to make of it. I couldn't see at all clearly, because of the mist. I could actually only make out a shape, and there were no other witnesses, except--"

### "Except whom?"

"I'm not sure of that either. But as I swam up toward the point I could swear a canoe passed nearby, headed downstream. Whoever it was must have been quite close by when Karl fell. And yet, they didn't respond in any way. They must have heard what happened at least, or perhaps they got there well ahead of me-- they could in a canoe, easily outstrip a swimmer-- and then--"

"Scramble up the cliff and 'assist' with the accident ?" said John

Antwhistle. " Well I'm glad that lets me out anyway. Apart from the fact that I was snoring peaceably at the lodge, it would have required a higher level of fitness than I could possibly muster to scale cliffs of that magnitude. With all the fog and condensation on the cliff the rocks would have been pretty slippery to boot. Surely you would have heard some noise of the scuffle if somebody had wrestled Karl over the edge."

### "l suppose so," Janet sighed. "I just wish I knew who the other witness on the river was."

### "Chances are he just paddled on by, or turned and went back up the opposite bank without realizing anything was amiss," reasoned the Professor "Now what is the rest of the story about our dear-departed colleague?"

### "l daresay it would have caught up with him before long," mused Janet. "In short, there was a fairly serious conflict with Sir Reginald and other's in that lab over Karl's publications which came to a head at about the time he left the lab over there. It turns out that those were mainly Bob Hayes and Rose Bennett's results he presented at the meeting you attended."

### "It made an impressive story," the Professor recalled. "Better than the confusing mess he made of yesterday's talk. Of course there were reasons for that fiasco, weren't there?"

### "Yes. Well I didn't have anything to do with that, although it served him bloody well right. You see, apparently he got away with the same thing last summer. I don't suppose he attributed any of the findings to anyone else?"

### "Now that you mention it, he did not. But there was nobody else at that meeting from his lab."

### "So he gave the impression that he had worked the whole thing out himself did he?"

### "He got away with it once so he thought he'd try it again yesterday."

### "But for the fact that you blew the whistle on him. I'm not sure what I might have done if you hadn't spoken up as you did. I didn't trust myself to say anything."

### Janet gazed with fondness at the man who had played the role of scientific father to her for so many years. John Antwhistle shifted uncomfortably. He could bear the slings and arrows of life and the calumny of his rivals, but he could not suffer praise in any degree.

"Just a small grass-fire that needed putting out," he huffed. "But if Sir Reginald had been there earlier to do the same we might not have had the problem here."

### "Well, anyway that's the story on Karl, although Bob hinted at other dark doings, yet to be unravelled. There were no doubt things he didn't want to put in a letter."

### "Such as his own relationship with Mrs. Elster."

### "No doubt. Possibly it will come clearer when we have a chance to talk. I must admit I am curious to meet Mrs. Elster, and to find out why on earth she would think it necessary to travel all this way, if as you surmise their relationship had already broken down."

### "I suppose," reflected the Professor, "however distant a husband and wife may become there is a finality about the 'death do us part' situation that needs some personal verification. To see the tangible body, do you know?" Janet pondered the last remark with a shudder. The tangible evidence of Karl's crumpled remains lingered too vividly in her own memory. Part of her mind turned away in horror, but another rational part prompted her to replay the sequence of events over again. But try as she would she could not reconstruct the scene with any more clarity than at the time, through the river mist. And with lengthening time in the future the mist of memory would doubtless thicken rather than lift. Perhaps an immediate return to the scene, necessary anyway to retrieve her possessions, would provide some cues or clues to this strange accident.

### The sun, high in the sky by now, had burned off the river mist when Janet returned to the top of the cliff. Her running shoes, and towel neatly folded, were as she had left them, but to her surprise the orange had vanished. Perplexed, she looked around to no avail, then carefully picked her way along the cliff until she found a safe route down to the water. She shivered as she approached the place where a few short hours earlier she had made her grisly find.

### The picture flashed back on her mind's eye-- the splayed body, almost convulsive in its attitude, the head snapped back, mouth ajar with spittle down the cheek, eyes agape and teary, but such tiny pin-holes instead of pupils. Karl always had that peculiar beady-eyed appearance; it added to his severe, humourless mien, but in death it seemed exaggerated to the point of caricature.

### Water of the river's flow lapped gently at the rocks beside her. She turned as if to eradicate the vision of memory from the rocky pile. The water swept along this part of the bank carrying debris from up-river, some of which became entrapped by little eddies among the stones. The flotsam included natural objects such as leaves and twigs, plus some man-made detritus swept down stream from the lodge inhabitants. Janet, surveying the bobbing trash, pondered about the canoe that had passed nearby at the fateful instant. Had there in fact been another witness or participant in Karl's demise? As her eye followed the current along the stony bank a flash of colour caught her eye among a pile of the floating debris. She carefully made her way downstream among the rocks and retrieved her orange from the little back-water with a feeling of bewilderment. Someone, even possibly Karl himself, had tossed it out into the river. Was it his idea of a practical joke to settle the score over his real or imagined hurt at her hands on the previous day? If that were the case it must have been an ineffectual toss: had it been thrown out into the stream it would have carried further down river before coming to rest. It seemed more likely that Karl, if it was he who was responsible, was contemplating the toss, or in the middle of the act when he lost his footing near the cliff's edge. That would explain how the trajectory could have been shorter than planned. Janet shook her head in dissatisfaction with this line of explanation. Karl was a strange and devious person without any shadow of doubt, but retribution by elimination of her orange hardly fitted with the sort of act expected from him. The orange, at any rate, appeared none the worse for its adventure, and Janet pocketed it absentmindedly. Collecting the remainder of her belongings with a troubled mind she headed back to her room. She was drastically in need of a rest before the onslaught of the afternoon's papers.

### CHAPTER FIVE

The next two days passed without further incident. The conference carried on with its own inexorable momentum. The demise of one researcher, however lamented, could not halt, or even deter more than briefly, the juggernaut of science. Speaker followed speaker, some worse, a few better than Karl at presenting their private burrowings in the warren of scientific inquiry. Janet learned emore than she had wanted to know about the differentiation of slime moulds and other disagreeable organisms .She disciplined her self to attend all the sessions and took extensive notes to focus her attention on the content of the meeting. But despite her best intentions she frequently found her concentration fading. In the darkened room, the rows of silent heads in front of her must contain stored impressions of the first day, memories of Karl or of Janet herself. Now they had turned like spectators at a carnival to a different side-show. How much was still retained of Karl's personality, of his achievements, or of her own? Doubtless all they would recall would be the comedy of the mixed-up slides and the tragedy of his death that had so inconveniently moved the morning session to disrupt their free afternoon of boating or swimming. Janet was usually too much occupied at home for philosophical musings. Karl's death had brought into focus the realization of her own mortality, and the ephemeral quality of her work and accomplishments.

Karl's death had also brought about a tightening of the little group from Essex University. They tended now to congregate more, at meals, at coffee-breaks, in the lounge after the sessions ended. Without any formal assent they gathered in silent funeral parties, each groping to find a common view-point to eulogize their former compatriot in science. In the absence of a ritual service to finalize Karl's departure it seemed only decent to attempt some expression of loss as rehearsal for the impending arrival of his widow. The latter event raised their spirits; there was an air of expectancy for the forthcoming appearance of Mrs. Elster, and considerable speculation, if not outright betting about the attributes of the mysterious widow. Though few could muster sincere feelings of regret about Karl, all were prepared to offer support for Margot Elster. They could scarcely be blamed if their eagerness to extend condolences to the bereaved lady was strongly prompted by a natural curiosity to size her up. Janet found herself to be among the first to be in that position. It was late on the Wednesday afternoon as she returned to her room from a lengthy hike with Doug when a taxi pulled up at the front of the lodge. Although his back was turned to her Janet immediately recognized the stocky figure of Bob Hayes as he wrestled with the collection of baggage. Shortly afterwards a woman emerged from the taxi. Despite the wide and wild guesses about her appearance Janet was not prepared. Margot Elster was not only stunningly attractive; she was quite obviously in the penultimate stages of pregnancy.

### In order to save them trouble Janet took the new arrivals directly to the office of the manager, who seemed relieved to have a relative of his deceased guest to decide details of the arrangements. Janet left while the three of them made contacts with the district hospital authorities. There was one curious aspect of the meeting that struck her forcibly later as she reflected on the conversation in the manager's office: the desire of the manager to rid himself of Karl's personal belongings was matched by Margot Elster's eagerness to possess them; in fact she showed more immediate concern about the disposition of Karl's effects than for the fate of the corpse itself.

### It was considerably later in the evening before that matter was tidied up. Bob Hayes and the widow returned from the local hospital as the group was struggling into the lounge from the evening session in search of liquid and other forms of refreshment. Professor Antwhistle took the newcomers in tow, and steered them toward a table already occupied by Janet and Celia. There was an embarrassed interval of silence while he arranged a round of drinks, broken by his welcoming speech to Margot.

### "I know I speak for all of us in the Department in offering our sympathy and help, my dear. We are after all, if somewhat extended and diverse, still a family group. I hope you may feel one of us for a time at least," and he raised his glass to her while Janet and Celia nodded their assent. Margot thanked him for these sentiments, and after a brief round of conversation, turned to Bob and made a sign.

"I'm sorry but I believe Margot has had enough for today," he said rising from his chair." If you'll excuse us I really think she must get some rest."

### "Quite understandable. But please let us know if we can do anything at all to help." The Professor's voice trailed away as they departed from the lounge.

### Later as she made her way back to her room, Janet noticed a familiar figure seated on a bench over looking the river. She got almost up to him before breaking into his reverie. Bob Hayes sprang to his feet with a characteristic burst of energy, and impulsively gave her a hug. They sat down filling in the respective gaps in their lives since their last encounter. It was Bob who eventually steered the conversation around to the subject of Karl.

"What exactly did happen to him? The doctor at the hospital was pretty vague. The closest we could gather was that he took a dizzy spell and somehow lost his footing."

### "I've wondered about it considerably myself." Janet frowned and recounted her part in the discovery of Karl's body. "He was definitely dead when I got to him."

"If he hadn't been then, there wouldn't have been much to revive. According to the pathologist's report he suffered a broken neck, as well as much brain haemorrhaging. My goodness, it must have been a terrible thing for you-- finding him that way."

"Yes. But there was something odd about it also. It didn't strike me right away, and even now I have trouble remembering all the details. It was misty you know, and being at water level looking up you get a queer perspective anyway. It didn't look like someone just fainting and toppling off the edge of the cliff. It really seemed that he was sort of-propelled."

### "Did he jump, or was he pushed?" murmured Bob.

### "Exactly. I didn't see anyone else about" Then she related the impression she had about a canoe overtaking her. "I can't believe that somebody climbed that cliff and pushed Karl off. But who ever it was must have been close by. You know, it seemed as though he had been startled, surprised in the act of taking my orange."

Bob turned and raised both eyebrows at her disbelievingly. "I know it sounds ridiculous, but how else can you account for my finding it in the river not far from Karl's body?"

### He shrugged his shoulders, but retained his sceptical look. "How did this orange enter the story anyway?"

"I'm not much of a breakfast eater. And as a rule I drop by the cafeteria on the way out for my morning dip, pick up an orange and eat it after my swim. When I got to the cliff I sat down to take off my shoes. There's a rocky outcropping there, and I knew from earlier it is a pretty safe place to dive in. So I dangled my feet over the edge, left my shoes, towel, orange right there."

### "At the edge of the overhang?"

### "Yes. Just next to where I had been sitting."

### "And you think that's the spot where Karl took his unsuccessful dive?"

### "Undoubtedly. From the position of the body, and also the final resting place of my orange. I'd give anything to know what was in Karl's mind as he picked it up."

### "Or in the mind of whoever it was that 'propelled him' off the cliff as you put it."

### "Well, it's probably a foolish fancy of mine, but there were enough people about who would have been happy to oblige."

### "Tell me about it " laughed Bob sardonically. "If they all lined up from our lab they would have had to take a number and wait their turn. I don't think anyone was too sorry to see him leave there; nor were there many tears when word came about his accident here."

### "Including Margot?"

### Bob paused for a minute before responding. The door from the lounge opened disgorging a few conferees and sending a shaft of light across the lawn onto Bob's face. His expression of evident hatred combined with the hoarse chuckle that accompanied it left no doubt in Janet's mind about his own feelings in the matter.

"Probably especially Margot." "Most especially" he repeated emphatically. I never could understand what hold he had over her-- why she stayed with him as long as she did. He treated her abominably. I'm sure I didn't know the whole story, but what I did find out was bad enough. I presume he continued his philandering ways over here?"

### "Well," replied Janet carefully, "I suppose that no one had any cause to realize that he had a wife, and other responsibilities."

### He turned toward her sharply. "It was-- is Karl's baby," he said.

"I didn't doubt it. But if so it must have been conceived just before he left Margot."

### "His parting gift, as it were. And Margot, much as she may have detested Karl has accepted the role of mother to his child. I guess I've taken the job of surrogate father-husband if it comes to that," said Bob with a sigh.

### "Well I'm glad for both of you." Janet recalled her days of working in the lab with him. Full of energy, bursting with ideas, plus a great capacity for sheer hard work. If Margot had set about to find a dependable 'surrogate' who was the opposite of Karl in virtually every way, she couldn't have made a better choice.

### "Tell me one thing," she went on. "Why was Margot in such a rush to visit the scene of the crime, as it were?"

### "I'm not exactly sure," he answered. "She may have felt responsible to take charge. After all Karl's parents weren't well enough to travel. So she wanted to-- you know -- arrange about the remains."

### "And Karl's belongings? That surprised me. I don't know if it did you. Why was she so hot off the mark to get his things from the room?", and Janet, half-jokingly related her conversation with the lodge manager, and his eagerness to tidy up the effects left behind by Karl.

### "Probably just an obsession for neatness on his part. As far as Margot was concerned," he confided, "she had written to him recently. There were things in that letter that she said she wished she had never put in writing, and having done so she was in horror of anyone else coming on it."

### "And did she find it in his room?"

### "Apparently she did. I didn't question her more about it since it was obvious she wanted to avoid the subject. But she seemed relieved after she had been through his things."

### "And what will she do next?"

"I'm not sure. We've made the arrangements for cremation and shipping. I guess Margot will want to visit in Essex for a while, to sort things out there. After that, I don't know. It's possible we'll stay over here till after the baby comes. Stay with my parents most likely. I've been writing around you know and there are one or two openings. I'm planning to contact a few people here-- maybe arrange some visits for job interviews after the meeting. I know Margot doesn't plan to go back. There was apparently a decent life insurance policy on Karl, although it was Margot who had to keep up the premium payments. Anyway, she had planned to get out of the lab for a bit. Her work was a bit tricky."

### "In what way?" asked Janet.

"Didn't you know? She had been working on some new potent serine protease inhibitors."

### "Like DFP?"

### "Similar action, but many times more effective. As you can imagine these were frightfully toxic compounds. She was getting pretty anxious about continuing to handle them, particularly in her

present state of pregnancy. She had to keep an atropine antidote on hand at all times."

### I suppose that's what brought her together with Karl; serine proteases," mused Janet.

"It was about the only thing they had in common as far as I could tell," he snorted sardonically. "You know, those two papers he published from Cunningham's lab-- that was about 75% Margot's work. Somehow Karl conned her into doing those studies while she was supposed to be working as Cunningham's research assistant. Then he explained to her, so she told me, that Karl couldn't include her as a co-author. It would offend Sir Reginald to have his assistant as author on someone else's work! You'll note a brief acknowledgment to Margot at the end of the first paper 'for technical advice'. That translates as 'she set up the method and did half of the experiments after hours.' Even after he came over here Karl kept badgering her for details of the work in Cunningham's laboratory. Wanted her to send him data, even some samples of the new compounds they were just developing. "

### "And did she?"

### "No doubt she did. Some of the results at least. I think Karl must have had some leverage with her. She desperately wanted to keep her independence-- hang onto her job. She seemed terrified that Karl would write to the director-- let it out that Margot had been moonlighting while supposedly working for him."

### Janet sighed and shook her head.

"I see now why you said 'especially Margot' among the list of those who would not be too unhappy to hear of Karl's demise!" The list, she thought, of aggrieved females including herself, Linda, perhaps Celia, plus how many others not known to her. Had Karl's death been murder rather than a simple accident the list of suspects with a sufficient motive would be stretching out to the horizon. Except for Margot of course, who had a watertight alibi in the strict sense of the term. And unless one could conjure up a process of psychokinesis to engineer a push by remote control, none of the 'suspects' was in a position to shove Karl off the precipice except Janet! She tried again to relive that instant of realization when he seemed suspended against the curtain of mist. Was there someone else nearby? Her only recollection that persisted was of the canoe passing by, the still, silent witness.

Janet had difficulty sleeping that night. The evening had been stiflingly warm, the air heavy. After saying goodnight to Bob she returned to her room and sat by the window for a while. A fitful moon sparkled intermittently on the river as a freshening wind threw a procession of clouds across the sky. She thought back to her earlier conversation with Bob. Karl had conned Margot into producing his experimental work (and his offspring as well no doubt). As he had attempted to do with Linda, with Celia, with herself perhaps. Janet at least had evened the score as far as her own research work was concerned. And somebody else, had planned in premeditated fashion to sabotage Karl's talk, somebody who had foreknowledge of the order of his slides, and knew enough to calculate just how seriously the bogus slide would upset his delivery. Could such a person also have enough foreknowledge of Karl's movements to anticipate his arrival on the cliff-top, to arrange to follow him there, and 'assist' him over the edge?

As she sat in the dark, feet up on the ledge under the open window, Janet closed her eyes and let her mind swim back along the course she had followed in the river. She must have still been a couple of hundred metres from her departure point when she had first sighted the figure she assumed to be Karl's at the top of the cliff. It must have taken her at least five minutes even at top speed to get back to the site of his fall. During the interval the passing canoe could have reached the base of the cliff, with ample time for the paddler to climb to the top and depart before she got within sight. She tried to relive the last few minutes of her swim, but no further impressions returned at her bidding. There was just the feeling of breathlessness from the final burst of speed she had exerted, the recollection of panic as she scrambled out over the slippery rocks, her hands grappling to pull herself ashore. Then she recalled suddenly the palms of her hands with small red flecks adhering. At the time, her attention rivetted by the scene, she had paid little heed, but now the recollection came of what she had first mistakenly thought was blood --of flakes of red paint on her palms. The paint was of course identical with that used on all the rental boats and canoes at Wotinabee Lodge. It could have been scraped there when Professor Antwhistle pulled in the first day of the conference. Or it might have come from the bottom of the canoe that Janet had sensed rather than seen the morning of Karl's death.

### Perhaps it was not so fanciful after all to suppose that Karl had been 'assisted' over the brink. The 'assistant' could easily have scrambled back down the cliff and, after ascertaining that Karl was indeed dead, pushed off again silently into the mist by canoe before Janet's arrival at the scene. As she pondered and drowsed over these puzzles it seemed that her legs, still wet from swimming, were now shivering with the cold. A sudden gust of wind clattered the blind and brought her back to wakefulness and the realization that rain was blowing into the room and over her feet.

### "I suppose that's another crazy fancy of mine that's all wet!" she muttered grimly while fastening the window shut. But none the less she knew that next morning, if it still seemed in any way sane in the light of day, she would have to follow up with her suspicions, fanciful or otherwise.

### CHAPTER SIX

### Morning dawned grey and damp from the showers of the night before. Janet forewent her customary swim and huddled in a small lounge at the elbow of the lodge wing that extended toward the area where Professor Antwhistle's bedroom was situated. From this spot he would be seen whether he left the room by the hall or the path outside the building. After a short wait he emerged from the lodge resplendent in a bright blue jogging suit, with binoculars slung around his neck. By exiting from the other end of the wing Janet was able to intercept him apparently by coincidence as he followed the path around the building. His boisterous greeting seemed calculated to arouse the remainder of the conferees still gently slumbering.

"Ah, Janet! Just in time to join me in an ornithological expedition!" The Professor ambled and rambled along on the subject of their first conversation. "A simply marvellous spot for aves rara and otherwise, don't you find?" He continued without waiting for an answer, cataloguing the natural feathered inhabitants on his list of sightings. It was evident that the Professor did not confine his attentions to the conferees, nor to the waterfowl observable from his canoe. He pointed out several varieties of finches, barely distinguishable to Janet's untrained eye. She had to admit to herself that her mind was flitting not with the birds, but among the tangles in the case of Karl Elster, and she hoped an occasion would arrive when she could break in upon John Antwhistle's lecture. Unfortunately, she recalled from long experience, when he began enlarging on a theme it generally ran its full natural course of fifty minutes assigned for a standard exposure of the brain in his classroom.

### Janet kept step, and tried to keep pace with the discourse, hoping against hope for a diversion from the landscape or the weather. But the woods rolled by relentlessly, similar in features, and the clouds, although discharged of all expressible juice the night preceding, billowed along like so many identical fruits in a supermarket display.

"Now here," said the Professor grasping her wrist and lowering his voice, is one of my more interesting finds (or almost finds at all events)."

### With the cautionary wariness invoked by his tone, Janet slowed her steps and became more alert.

### "Do you remember our earlier discourse about the magpie?"

### "Of course," she whispered back.

### "A curious bird in the true sense of that adjective. Much maligned in our efforts to draw moral lessons from nature. As scientists who are similarly motivated we should be paying homage to the magpie for his curiosity. You see, he is in fact one of the great observers of nature: he is attracted indeed by those things outside the commonplace of his experience. You might say that, like the great comet discoverers or remarkers of new species who are so praised in the scientific community, the magpie is an observer par excellence, attracted by and noting the anomalies of life. Those events in short that make a difference somehow because they are out of context, are the significant ones to us in science. And the magpie sees such differences ; the shiny trinkets of our civilization that intrude on the natural world for example, and duly notes their existence in the best tradition of our astronomers or lepidopterists by collecting them. Man with his misplaced proprietary interest in his trinkets, and his misplaced morality of possession, brands the poor creature unjustly as a thief. He is in simple fact a scientist in the natural world, a collector of significant data."

### After this lengthy peroration Janet began to wonder if any of the Professor's feathered quarry would be remaining within an observable distance. But at this point he lowered his voice and drew her quietly further along the trail until they faced a line of high trees along the river bank, not very far from the spot where they had first met at the outset of the conference.

### "I have been tracking the magpie," continued the Professor sotto voce, "and now I think I have him!" and his voice rose a little in exultation.

### "This is very near the spot where you first pointed him out to me in flight," responded Janet, thinking that it was by a stroke of irony the vicinity of the place where the magpie from their laboratory had met his violent end.

"And I have spotted him here at several times of the day," said Antwhistle scanning the boughs with his binoculars. "For very good and sufficient reasons I do not wonder," he went on: "It is my firm belief that it is in that brake of trees the fellow has concealed his nest. And along with it possibly a trove of collectibles. It has long been my ambition to examine this fabled collecting activity at first hand, to find what elements of our leavings may be enticing to the bird."

### Together they lingered for twenty minutes or so combing the limbs for signs of life, but to no avail. The Professor slung his binoculars over his shoulder with a sigh.

### "Well, we must not be despondent. I had really hoped to share the moment of discovery with somebody. Perhaps we can return at dusk and make our find."

### As they started back toward the breakfast hall Janet seized the opportunity of the hiatus in the Professor's monologue to raise the matter she had been longing to discuss with him.

### "It seems a trivial point but had you any further thoughts about the comic interlude in Karl's talk?"

### "You are referring no doubt to the 'soft core pornography' as I believe it is termed in the popular press."

"I could be off track, but it might be important to talk to whoever was responsible."

### "I already have!" exclaimed the Professor, with such a mischievous gleam that Janet began to wonder whether he would claim credit for the prank himself.

"The culprit shortly confessed when convinced that I had the goods on him, and was not totally out of sympathy with his motivation. I really thought none the less of Douglas for what he did. Might have done something similar myself if l had been younger and had the opportunity." he chortled.

As they strolled back toward the lodge, the Professor recounted Doug's confession: how he had obtained the slide from a friend in another department who had pulled the same trick on a fellow-student; how he had calculated from Karl's rehearsal the point in his script where the 'double-peaks' would appear; how he had palmed the slides from the projection table in the interlude, inserted the extra one, and then replaced them in the carousel just as the lights went out.

"Which probably accounts for the person who jostled me as I returned to my seat. I thought it was an earlier speaker retrieving his slides."

"Desperate times require desperate measures," quoted the Professor. Janet didn't dispute the point. But she resolved to have a chat with Doug herself. Perhaps the person who felt the situation to be desperate might have envisaged even more desperate measures to do more than merely ridicule his adversary. An admission of guilt on the lesser count did not ensure implication in the serious case of Karl's 'accident', but it did leave an aura of suspicion about a possible connection between the two events.

### This time Janet decided that she would not wait for a chance encounter, but would rather create the opportunity at once. Accordingly, as she parted from the Professor at the entrance to the lodge she immediately walked to Doug's room. Along the corridor there were signs of people stirring as the breakfast hour approached. But no sounds emanated from the room which Doug had been assigned, and several rappings on the door brought no response. After a few minutes' wait Janet frowned and headed down the hall. She had just reached the end of the passage when she chanced to look back in time to catch sight of Doug entering the room. She returned the way she had come, a rap on the door bringing an instant response this time.

### "I thought we should have a final look at the layout for the poster presentation," she explained. Doug showed little enthusiasm for the suggestion; evidently he felt quite capable of setting up the poster on his own. Reluctantly he pulled out the selection of graphs and tables describing his work on membrane receptors for the cytomitin cell stimulators, and assembled them into a mock-up of the final layout for his supervisor. After reviewing the familiar data and making a few minor suggestions about Doug's method of presenting and discussing his experiments, Janet turned to the true reason for her visit, with as much of a casual manner as she could muster.

### Doug was clad in bathing-suit and his kneecaps were noticeably reddened.

### "Doing a little canoeing?" asked Janet not waiting for an answer. "Must be a regular early morning routine for you."

"As a swim in the river is for you."

### "I suppose," said Janet leaning against the window-ledge, "that was you on the river the morning that Karl fell from the cliff." She made it a statement rather than a query.

### Doug paused and nodded.

### "Were you in a position to see clearly what happened?" Again that long hesitation, and finally, a wary reply.

### "I'm not really sure what I saw, or what I thought I saw," he answered slowly.

### "You saw him fall?"

### "I saw him, but only vaguely you know, through the fog. I could tell who it was, though his movements were unnatural. At first I thought he was reading or examining some thing in his hand, then it seemed to fly out of his hand, and at the same time he flew off himself."

### "You mean he jumped?"

"I didn't see anyone behind him but if I had I might have guessed that he had been pushed off. He just shot forward all hunched over, did a sort of a flip. Then I heard somebody splashing up the river behind me."

### "That was me."

### "Well, I thought it might have been you that--"

### "Pushed him off?"

### Doug nodded silently.

"I suppose I sort of panicked. At the time I just thought (I know it's awful to say) good riddance, and I hoped the bastard broke his neck. If someone had given him a bit of a push I wasn't going to complicate her life."

### "You thought it might be me at the time. But if I had been in the river behind you--."

"I don't know. I thought about it a good deal afterward. Maybe he took an epileptic fit or something?"

"I think we would have had some inkling if he had been subject to such attacks. But now that you mention it his movement was rather convulsive. More like an involuntary jump than an assisted one."

### "Perhaps you could ask his wife if he had a history of fits or attacks before he joined us. Not that it particularly concerns me how he was finished off," concluded Doug vehemently.

Nor should it concern me, thought Janet as she walked across the lawn to the dining hall. But despite her lack of sympathy for the victim there remained something unexplained and peculiar about the manner of his death that she could not ignore. It was, as the Professor had said, the incongruities of nature that were the most intriguing. Doug's explanations of his own actions seemed plausible enough. However, she wondered if she had been in his place whether she could have simply backed away after witnessing the fall. He may have been simply motivated by loyalty to the person he presumed to need shielding from suspicion. How had he put it?- 'didn't want to complicate her life.' Interesting that he should implicate a 'her' in the scenario; and if not Janet who was the 'her' involved? CeIia? Linda? It was only considerably later that the true significance of what Doug had said fitted into the picture; only after another sizable portion of the peculiar unexplained aspects of that picture came clearer could she seize upon the important incongruous word in Doug's recital.

### The breakfast hour was well underway by the time that Janet reached the dining-hall. She picked up a muffin to go with her usual orange and looked about for a table. Most were fully occupied, but she noticed Bob Hayes and Margot seated together and she sat down in a vacant space at their table with suitable apologies for the intrusion.

### "Looks as if you could polish off that lot standing up," snorted -Bob tucking into a lumberjack's stack of pancakes and bacon. "They certainly make money on you here. You know they charge the same whether you eat or not."

"Well, whatever they save on me will be more than taken care of by certain of my colleagues!"

### Margot was tentatively nibbling at a plate of scrambled eggs. She seemed quite edgy and uncomfortable with the banter passing across the table. This in no way distracted from her allure. Margot was so quintessentially feminine, her gentle vulnerability and state of widowhood with impending motherhood only added to her appeal; she was virtually crying out for protection. Janet felt like a rather awkward bull next to the dainty fragility of Margot's china-doll appearance. Despite her best efforts, Janet's words when they came seemed to her to be harsher than she had intended; nonetheless, she found it hard to explain the effect they had on Margot and on Bob.

### "Was there an autopsy report on Karl's death?"

### They both blinked, looked furtively at each other, but neither showed much inclination to answer. Finally it was Bob who laid down his fork and responded.

### "It was so obvious, there wasn't any need to inquire. Cause of death was the fall."

### "And cause of the fall?"

"You were in a better position to answer that one," replied Bob pointedly. "Anyway, aren't you confusing an autopsy with an inquest? You're not really inquiring about the cause of death are you?"

"I'm not sure," said Janet thoughtfully. "But as it turns out there was another witness; semi-witness actually, because like me he only perceived the event through the fog. Nonetheless, he confirms what I thought all along. Karl didn't just slip off the edge. It was more as if he were propelled," and she described Doug' s version of the scene, and how it matched her own perception.

### "Now what I want to know is, was Karl susceptible to some sort of spell or fit?"

### During the discussion Margot had been growing more and more fidgety. Finally she could contain herself no longer and broke in.

### "I suppose you could say that. I guess you didn't realize that he was diabetic."

### "I certainly did not!" Janet tried to recall some clue from her previous knowledge of Karl. How little she really did know him! Perhaps some of his helter-skelter approach to life was attributable to his health problem.

### "He carried an insulin supply," Bob went on, "but he was not very regular about it, or about his diet. There were several occasions that he overdid it."

### "0.D.ed on insulin?"

"Or on food, without taking his insulin on time. You know you can become comatose from either too much or too little relative to sugar intake."

### "So he might have been either hypoglycemic or hyperqlycemic?"

### "You couldn't have known about that, but it might have had something to do with his fall," said Margot. It could have explained why he seemed unsteady. I guess it also explains the preoccupation of your fussy hotel manager."

### "Yes," interjected Bob with a laugh, the poor man must have been convinced that Karl was an addict, with all the vials and syringes they had seen in his room."

### "He was concerned about a scandal of some kind no doubt," Janet said reflectively. "He wanted you to come and claim his personal effects before someone attributed his death to a drug overdose."

### "So it may have been a drug overdose, if you consider insulin or glucose as a drug," said Bob devouring a good measure of the latter in a mouthful of pancakes drenched in maple syrup.

### Janet finished her orange and walked back pensively to her room. As she passed her desk she noticed the orange from that earlier morning three days ago. She picked it up from the ash-tray where it had been sitting and pitched it in the waste-basket. After she had brushed her teeth and washed she set out for the conference hall. Except for a short summary session before lunch, the morning would be taken up with the poster presentations. Although she didn't like to curb Douglas's creative initiative, she dreaded more than somewhat the surprises that were bound to spring from his inventive mind. Despite her earlier questioning of the content of his poster display, and his seemingly orthodox answers about the data he proposed to present, she was certain that Doug would not be able to resist the impulse to construct some crazy mobile or pop-up gimmick in his poster; if not he would doubtless find some outlandish way of wording his conclusions. Janet hurried into the conference hall ready to wield her censorious scissors.

"And now for the side-show to our week of theatre!" exclaimed the Professor catching her up. Each of the poster displayers, mostly the younger conference participants, graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, junior faculty, was nailing up the charts and texts upon his allocated piece of fibre-board. Some of the displays were finished with professional flair (precisely spaced lettering, clear-captioned diagrams, multicoloured legends); other's were at the opposite extreme (hastily constructed, hand-lettered, with more results than the space could hold).

"Why is it I wonder," the Professor continued, "that I find it hard to take these poster sessions seriously?" and then not waiting for Janet he provided his own answers to the question, which was in no doubt of being mistaken as rhetorical. "It smacks too much to me of hawkers selling their wares. The advertising mania has invaded science with a vengeance, Janet. The sellers of cells, entrepreneurs of enzymology, merchants of membranes-"

"Whores of hormones," muttered Janet sotto voce.

"I suppose I must seem archaically wedded to the old ways," he rambled on oblivious to her comment. One used to have but two ways to communicate discoveries, either extempore to a roomful of peers, with the awesome prospect of being shot down in flames during question time, or cast in print and subject to the baleful eyes of the journal referees. Nowadays any young upstart can tart up the most egregious nonsense with a fancy display and get away with it. Did you see that poster on parthenogenesis by that brazen post-doc from Beadle's lab? Nothing new in it at all! And all those fanciful quotes on virgin birth. Is this biochemistry or theochemistry? Most inappropriate, if not sacrilegious in the truest sense! I trust that your student's stuff has more substance."

### At this point they had reached Doug's station. His poster had been fully assembled but Doug himself was nowhere to be seen. The Professor scanned the figures and tables, read the discussion and nodded approvingly.

"Fine fellow, Douglas, he commented. " You know you're lucky to have one like that, for the first student. First student can make or break you. Mind you mine have been exemplary, first and last," he added graciously with a chuckle.

"I had wondered whether your last hadn't perhaps finished you! You have only had post-docs in your lab since I did my Ph.D."

"Well, once you have attained perfection you may also appreciate the urge to quit while you are ahead. I've actually spent more time in the lab myself since my sabbatical leave. Let the younger fellows raise more families of M.Sc.s and Ph.D.s. All my 'children' are grown and producing their own scientific offspring. As a grandparent I'm into second generation stuff now, and the post-docs keep things lively enough. Ah, there's old Beadle headed this way. Think I'll beatle off myself and let him pick your brains instead. Careful what you divulge, Janet," he cautioned in an audible whisper, "the fellow will phone his lab and put somebody working on your problem if you're not careful" and he scuttled down the aisle.

Janet was relieved when Doug returned to man his poster before Professor Beadle had finished reading the text. She was particularly glad not to have to answer a lot of technical questions about Doug's approaches, some of which had been unorthodox bordering on the eccentric. Besides the ventilation in the building must have been awry. She felt decidedly flushed, perspiring, and a bit 'closed in'\-- short of breath. She made for the open doors at the far end, and slumped down in a chair on the terrace. The strange events of the preceding days must be exacting their toll on her: had she not been sitting she might have fainted.

### "My glory, you look as limp as I feel!" Mary Kay Jacobs sat down in the chair opposite and regarded Janet quizzically. "Can I get you a drink of something?" she offered while examining Janet's flushed countenance. "Are you coming down with something infectious?"

" I don't know. I don't think so," Janet replied confusedly, "I just felt a bit woozy in there-- must be the air. Think I'll be OK in a minute or so." Was it her imagination or was her vision getting a bit blurry also? Her eyes felt weary as though she had been exposed to some irritant, but without the irritation.

"Are you hoping to go back tonight? You don't look as if you should be trying to travel in that state."

"No. As a matter of fact I drove up with John Antwhistle. He plans to stay an extra day to do some birding."

"Just as well. You could do with a rest after everything that's gone on here. You know, I wanted to ask you something, quite in confidence-- your reply need go no further. If it is an awkward thing for you just say so. It seems that dear old Dick Beadle has been organizing publication of the proceedings from the conference."

### "Yes, I know" said Janet, "I've got my manuscript almost ready."

### "And Karl's?"

### "That I don't know about. You'd probably have to ask his widow. So far as I know she picked up everything from his room, so she must have the manuscript, or a draft."

### "That's why I asked you. It's gone."

### "Gone?"

### "Well, if there was a manuscript --which Mrs. Elster could neither confirm or deny-- it was not among his papers in the room. I went through them with her."

### "But that's ridiculous " said Janet. "For one thing, we know that there was a paper-- he read his presentation from it."

### "Gone. Not a trace."

### "Then what--?"

" It is possible that he lost it. Maybe he destroyed it, thought it was too rough to submit, or was upset about the way his talk turned out, decided he wasn't going to submit it for publication, or -- "

### "Or what?"

### The older woman paused for a moment. "There is a suggestion that Dr. Elster would have used the text of his talk only for the meeting. That he would have had a finished manuscript ready to bring to the conference organizer, to assure it would be published."

### "But he didn't turn it in apparently."

### "No. And obviously he hadn't given it to you, or hadn't discussed it with you."

### Janet shook her head.

"I hadn't thought so. I didn't want to raise any concerns, more than she's already got, for his widow. But I felt I should find out. It would be nice to publish something posthumously. Perhaps you could scout around the Department when you return, see if he left a copy somewhere. I asked Dick Beadle about it. If something turns up and it needs some editing we'd like you to do it if you agree."

### "Of course," Janet promised. "In fact if it doesn't turn up I can easily adapt the work, the collaborative parts, into a joint paper."

" Splendid! It would be a fine memorial for Karl. Incidentally, as you know they're doing the conference group photo at noon, and that, as tradition has it, goes in the frontispiece to the proceedings. Since Karl will be missing from that we've asked Margot Elster to provide a separate snap of him. Could we prevail on you also to write up a short dedication, evaluation of his work etc.?"

### Janet flinched. She could bring some objectivity to editing a manuscript or collating some data for a joint paper, but a tribute to Karl? She shook her head and forcefully declined.

"I think you need some body with more perspective to do that. John Antwhistle, or you yourself. I'd feel a bit strange about it. You knew that our relationship was --"

### "Splitting up?"

### "It was only a matter of time. And in time I'll be able to be objective about Karl. But it would be hypocritical for me to praise his talents. He was a bit devil-may-care in the lab you know. Not sloppy, but reckless, even dangerous. He would take risky short-cuts."

### "Such as?"

"Running the ultracentrifuge beyond top speed with derated rotors or using mismatched rotors without the proper overspeed devices. He also bore a number of scars from earlier lab explosions-- bragged a bit about duels with flying glass."

"He was handling some pretty deadly reagents from time to time. It's a wonder he survived with an attitude like that."

### "I often thought so. He gave the impression that he put a low value on human life, his own or others," mused Janet. There was an unreal quality about her memories of Karl. She could picture his abrupt, impatient actions in the lab, his irritating, caustic laugh when warned about what Janet first had assumed must be unappreciated hazards. But she could not picture his face as it had been then. The last sight of him, dominated by the staring eyes with piercing pin-prick pupils overwhelmed all her previous recollections of Karl alive. She shuddered again involuntarily.

### "l think you need a good lie-down," said Mary Kay. "Look, I'll walk you back to your room, then pick you up later in time to have our portraits immortalized. Your grad student is minding the stall well-- seems to be quite a take-charge fellow."

### Quite an inventive fellow, thought Janet as she allowed herself to be conducted rather unsteadily back to the lodge. In fact with Douglas his powers of invention at times exceeded his critical sense: his ingenious entrapment of Karl with the appropriately placed slide; how intriguing that he had chanced along the river just at the instant that Karl toppled off the bank. Doubtless, she thought later as she lay shivering in bed gazing at the ceiling, Doug knew about Karl's manuscript as well as he knew about the slides. As she finally dozed off her mind tried futilely to hang on to all these signs and arrows, pointing back guiltily to one person.

### CHAPTER SEVEN

### In the event Janet didn't wait to be aroused by Mary Kay Jacobs. With some considerable effort she dragged herself from her torpor and attempted to put herself back together to a semi-decent state of appearance for the photograph. Though light streamed in through the windows her room seemed dismal. She could barely see her own image in the mirror, and had to turn on a dresser-lamp to see to brush her hair. It was small wonder that Mary Kay had been concerned about her washed-out look. Her complexion was pallid, her eyes dull, expressionless and weepy. Perhaps she was coming down with some virus infection. Still feeling clammy and shaky Janet opened the door just as Mary Kay was walking down the corridor.

### "That's quite a grad student you have working with you!" she exclaimed.

"Who? Oh, Doug. Yes he's turned out rather well."

### "I thought his poster really superb. He has answered most of the uncertainties left by Karl's work hasn't he?"

### "Well, with Doug there were probably two motivations for that. He wanted to redo some of the earlier slap- dash experiments properly, and--"

"He wanted to prove Karl wrong."

### "Yes. There was a bit of bad blood there."

### "Over Celia?"

### Janet turned and regarded the older woman carefully. "Have you been in my lab when I didn't realize it or do you read minds?"

### "Oh, I just notice things. And then Karl was not too subtle in his approach, the way he dropped Celia, or was trying to."

### "I think he may have succeeded. Word was getting around about Dr. Elster. He didn't leave too many stones unturned."

### "What do you think of Doug as a potential post-doc then?" enquired Mary Kay, changing the subject.

### "Oh my! So he was also trying to get into your laboratory."

### "Yes," laughed Mary Kay, "though in Doug's case he didn't offer to bring the cytomitin problem along with him."

"Well, thanks be for that."

### " He's too totally loyal. He has some thing of a complex about you, didn't you know?"

### Janet blushed, became angry that she showed her feelings, and blushed more furiously in consequence.

### "Doug seems to need mothering \-- or sistering. But he's an excellent worker," and Janet elaborated about his bizarre but innovative approaches. "At least," she went on, "those are some of the things he tried that worked! Goodness knows how many others he attempted that didn't. I still get strange requisitions from esoteric suppliers. But I'm sure he'd fit in well with your group."

"We can use some offbeat approaches from time to time," Mary Kay responded as they neared the grassy bank of lawn where the other participants were gathering for the picture-taking. "I imagine I may have to accommodate Celia as well," she continued, nodding toward the couple standing a few feet up the slope ahead of them. It seemed to be true that they had reunited since Karl's demise, and Margot's appearance on the scene. But there lingered a troubled expression on Celia's face. Janet determined to have a talk with the girl.

"I gather that you have a medical degree," said Janet as they returned from the portrait session.

"Many a year ago," Mary Kay responded. In my day it seemed a good idea to provide a competitive edge. Also, I wasn't at all sure that I'd find a place in academia. Medicine gave me a way out if I didn't survive the tenure hurdle. As it turned out I've made use of it only once or twice-- mostly the sort of thing one could do with a good course in first aid or C.P.R.?"

"C.P.R.? "

"Cardiopulmonary resuscitation. We are surrounded by ancient male crocks who need revivifying occasionally you know. If you want my medical advice incidentally, you could do with more of the same as before the photo."

"I know I should rest up, and will after a bit of lunch. No, I actually wanted some advice about diabetes."

### "Diabetes mellitus?"

### "Yes. If I were a diabetic, and you wanted to rid the world of me with a minimum of mess, how could you go about it?"

### "I suppose someone could slip something into your insulin supply. Either that or see that you took too much which could produce an insulin shock reaction which might be interpreted as accidental or self-inflicted. Or the opposite alternative--substitute something like plain saline solution for the real insulin."

### "Then you might induce a diabetic coma."

### "Right. ketonuria, acidosis, hyperventilation. It would probably take a while, and the symptoms would be pretty obvious to you. I think you'd catch on before too much harm was done, unless you were a bit stupid. Who is this diabetic person you are singling out for special attention?"

### Janet hesitated before replying.

### "I'm sure you wouldn't buy it if I said I was simply curious."

### Mary Kay smiled and shook her head.

"I didn't think so. Actually it was Karl and the circumstances around his fall," and she related her version and Doug's eye-witness account of what happened.

### "Tampering with his insulin supply might have induced some strange behaviour," Mary Kay responded thoughtfully. "Did you notice any other signs of abnormality before it happened'?"

"To tell the truth I hadn't seen much of Karl at the meeting. Except for his seminar, and a tennis match the previous afternoon. He seemed too busy hustling the V.I.P.'s."

### "Touché" Mary Kay replied. "But you noticed nothing anomalous while you were playing tennis?"

### "Aside from the fact that he became frustrated, overhit the ball and made a lot of errors".

### "Which could have been due to his state of aggravation?"

### "I think so. There was nothing wrong with his stamina or his co-ordination that I can recall."

### "Then I would think it unlikely that he had an insulin-related problem, or it should have shown up when he was exercising. It sounds more like some acute toxic reaction, infection, food-poisoning which could have upset his equilibrium. You know the organs of balance are the most sensitive to toxic agents in the body."

### "You don't need to try too hard to convince me!" said Janet miserably. "The room was rotating slowly around me a short time ago, while I was lying on my back."

### "Which is where you should be right now," said Mary Kay sternly. "Doctor's orders!" She paused for a moment, then changed the subject. "You knew incidentally that Karl had written to me?"

"No, but in light of what you told me earlier he had no reason to keep me in the picture about his future plans."

### "He conveyed that he was looking for a position in the next few months. That he wanted to discuss problems of mutual concern."

### "He wasted no time about doing that," Janet muttered.

### "No. But in the letter he noted our work with proteases and mentioned a new inhibitor you had both been using-- proteastatin."

### "That's the super-potent protease inhibitor from Cunningham's lab."

### "He had a private source of supply, so he said."

### "From Margot no doubt."

### "No doubt. And he had tried it in your lab, shown it to be several orders of magnitude more potent than DFP on serine proteases."

### "If he did he said nothing about it to me, which doesn't surprise me really."

### "He was pointing out the problems with sending it in the mails and indicated he could bring me a sample at the conference. I suppose this was some sort of inducement to impress me."

### "And did it?"

"Not yet anyway. Like his manuscript he seems to have left it behind. It's no great loss. For what we're doing the standard agents are good enough, and we can get some in due course from Sir Reggie. But you might have a good look round when you get back to the lab. If Karl was as careless in storing as you describe for his handling of these toxic compounds, somebody could be at risk from accidental exposure. It sounds like a particularly nasty substance to me !"

### By this time they had reached the shade of the lodge building. The contrast of dazzling sunshine with dim light inside the building struck Janet as she parted from Mary Kay and made her way rather unsteadily toward her room. Her eyes were adjusting poorly to the semi-darkened room, and she still felt woozy bending over to turn down the bed-covers. Just as tipsy as Karl was, she thought stupidly as she stumbled over her suit case, and sank into the bed. She knew some how that it was no ordinary infection that she was suffering from, but her mind was fuzzy and incapable of concentrating on the problem. There was something that Douglas had said earlier that stirred her interest, but she could not focus on it and soon fell asleep.

### Several hours later when she finally came to Janet found the shades of evening gathering around. Although still a bit unsteady, she was able to get up and perambulate the room. She wasn't feverish, she concluded. The dinner hour had obviously come and gone but she had little interest in food anyway. The odour from her discarded orange drew her attention to the waste-basket which had not been emptied since early this morning. A couple of dead flies lay alongside at the bottom of the basket. She wondered how many more days they would sit there before somebody removed the trash from her room.

### As Janet left the lodge for a stroll and a breath of fresh air, she noted several groups of conferees leaving the dining hall. There was still nearly an hour until the final evening wrap-up session. Douglas and Professor Antwhistle, deeply absorbed in conversation, were among the first to emerge. Good, she thought, the gentle Celia may be on her own and I may get a chance to find out what is ailing her. She lingered for a while in the shadows watching the stream of people making for the conference hall. After several minutes Celia came out accompanied by Linda. Janet set off across the grass and intercepted them half-way on the path. The two girls seemed oblivious of the fact that Janet had been hors de combat for the afternoon, but carried on their discussion of the workshops they had just attended. Before they had reached the building Celia excused herself to get something from her room. Seizing the opportunity Janet accompanied her in the same direction. She was pondering how to lead the discussion when Celia unexpectedly invited her into her room.

### " I'm not sure how much of this you already know, Dr. Gordon."

"Janet, please."

"Janet. I'm sorry but it's hard to begin," she said hesitantly. Janet waited nodding encouragingly. She had hardly exchanged more than a dozen words with the girl on any occasion in the past. Celia had always been indecisive in her manner; this evening she was virtually paralysed.

### "I've been living through a nightmare this week!" she blurted out at last "I really thought I knew Karl, but I didn't. Not at all."

### "Meaning his wife for example?"

### "That came later," Celia replied bitterly. "No, I meant about the situation in your lab. Doug had tried before to clue me in-- how Karl was using people. I guess I just thought it was jealousy on his part and didn't take it seriously. Then it came clearer, that afternoon when we finished the tennis match, it was obvious even to me."

### "That he was using you also?"

### Celia nodded and pursed her lips.

### "I was pretty cut up by some of the things he said to me. I guess I was a bit of a disappointment to him, or maybe there just wasn't anything more in it for him, anyway, Karl made no bones of the fact that things were over between us. He was through with Essex U, with me, you, all of us. He was moving on to bigger things, publishing his part of the story on his own. I knew he would too if he had the chance. So when I found that I had his manuscript I just thought I'd- get rid of it."

### "You had his manuscript! How in the world-- "

### "It started as an accident. Then when I thought better of it, it was too late," said Celia distractedly, and proceeded to fill in the gaps: how they had their final talk in Karl's room; how in her state of confusion Celia had picked up the wrong note-case; how she had discovered her mistake later that evening when she found the manuscript inside; how she had determined to destroy the paper in hopes that Karl would have only the one copy.

"I knew he could rewrite the paper later. I wasn't thinking too straight when I disposed of it. Then when he died the next morning I forgot about it in the shock. But it came back to haunt me when I realized they were planning to publish the conference proceedings, maybe without Karl's paper."

### "Perhaps this was only the draft and there's a publishable version," offered Janet, grasping at straws.

### "There were two versions together, one that he must have read from with slides all marked in, the other had bibliography, everything. I was just so angry to see how phony it was, with no recognition of you or Doug, and I ripped it to shreds, both copies."

### "Have you told anyone about this?"

"Only Doug. He thought I should let you know what had happened. I know the way he presented the work wasn't fair to you but I still feel terrible about what I did."

Janet was beginning to feel like a mother-confessor. Perhaps she was maturing early, or aging prematurely; there was no generation gap between her and Douglas or Celia and yet she was becoming increasingly in loco parentis. She tried to be reassuring to the girl and explained how she and Mary Kay had come to realize and adjust for the disappearance of the manuscript.

"It's as well that you did clear the air about it. At least it removes suspicion from some innocent party. In any case there's no real harm done. After all that transpired at the conference I doubt the organizers could have published his paper as it was. In the end you may have helped find a solution to a very awkward situation!" She went on to describe the plan to print a collaborative paper on the joint aspects of Karl's work in her laboratory. "And we do have records of the slides he had made, and can go back to the photography shop for copies from the negatives."

### "Including the infamous twin peaks."

"To tell the truth I did think it was Doug who had interfered with the manuscript as well. By the way there is something else. You didn't by chance come across a small chemical sample in the same way?"

"l haven't noticed. What was it in? I have the note-case still here," and she opened the desk drawer. There were no names or other distinguishing marks on the outside of the brown plastic folder, one of which had been distributed to each conferee at the registration desk. Janet could readily accept Celia's explanation of her mistaken removal of Karl's note-case.

"Let's see," said Celia as she dumped the contents of the case on the desk-top. The inventory was fairly short: a map of the conference site; a list of the participants; small note- pad; pencil and pen.

"No sample that I can see. What was in it?"

### "Some inhibitor that Karl was supposed to be bringing for one of the other participants."

"I suppose that would have been the proteastatin inhibitor."

### "So you knew about that?"

### "I knew about it all right," responded Celia emphatically. "In fact I had set up the protease assays in our lab. Karl wanted somebody to collaborate on that work. I guess that meant I was to do the experiments and he was to write it up for publication. He implied it was pretty hot stuff because other people were working on it, and we would have to really hustle to get it out first. He didn't want me to discuss it with anyone else. And now I find he's bringing samples for some other group. No doubt he has a paper in the press somewhere on 'our' work."

"When the proofs come back I'll get Professor Antwhistle to write a covering letter explaining your role to the editor, and asking that your name be added as co- author if it isn't already. Have you seen a draft of this paper?"

### CeIia. shook her head.

"Well it may be necessary to discuss this with Margot to see if some others from their lab should share in the credit. That's where Karl obtained his supply you know."

"No, I didn't know. But now it doesn't surprise me really. Nothing about Karl would surprise me now. At any rate I feel better after talking to you."

"It has helped me also. Though I would like to know where the sample got to. Perhaps he forgot to bring it."

"I hope so. It's pretty nasty! I did some toxicity tests with cells. It must penetrate the membranes very easily. The killing dose is orders of magnitude lower than any of the other agents like it."

"Well , that's one of the unsolved mysteries," sighed," Janet.

### "If we hurry," she noted, glancing at her watch "we can just catch the final session," and they set off together for the conference hall.

### CHAPTER EIGHT

The concluding session of the conference was only sparsely attended. It was apparent that almost one-third of the original membership had skipped the Friday afternoon workshops to make travel connections for distant locations. The remainder, amply fortified by the wine from the final banquet, were in a warm and festive mood in spite of the tragedy earlier in the week. As she settled into her chair Janet found herself adapting to acceptance of what had transpired, to a different perspective of Karl. She thought of the waste of his talents (for he had some creditable traits): drive, hard work, ambition, a certain imagination, ability to arouse enthusiasm in others toward his projects. His projects! There was the tragedy-- that all his efforts had been so aggressively and totally self-serving. He actually seemed to have convinced himself that these were all his projects, that through his efforts to solve problems, although the work may have been undertaken by others, he had acquired sole proprietary rights to the solutions.

### Taking the long view, she wondered what posterity would remember of Karl. His name would be cited henceforth occasionally in connection with some of his publications on tyrosine phosphatases, cytomitins or possibly proteastatin, but within a year or two most of the one hundred souls in this room would recall Dr. Elster only as an aberration, a brief diversion in the smooth flow of this year's conference. Janet gave a little shudder in the realization of just how ephemeral the reputation of a scientist was, much in the same way that the sight of Karl's broken body and piercing stare had brought home the realization of her own mortality. As her eyes were gradually adjusting to the dim light of the hall, Bob Hayes bounced into the next seat shattering her reverie.

"I swear you're trying to avoid me," he declared accusingly. "I couldn't find you at any of the workshop sessions or the dinner table. Where have you been hiding?"

### Janet explained the curious state of her health and her enforced absence from the afternoon's activities.

### "Well, Margot has been feeling pretty low as well. Although in her case I'm sure it's chiefly a psychological problem."

### "Hardly unexpected in the situation she's in. Frankly I don't know how she managed to hold up as well as she has so far!" replied Janet with admiration.

"There's something else as well," Bob whispered as the conference session started to get underway. "Look, if you are feeling OK after this maybe we could go somewhere for a bite to eat and a talk."

### Janet nodded in affirmation, then turned her attention to the podium. The chairman for the evening was Professor Antwhistle, and he was making the most of his privileged position and the general bonhomie of his audience to roast the conference organizers, particularly his bête-noire, Professor Beadle.

### "Ladies and gentlemen, he commenced. "Some of you of tender years or limited experience in administrative matters may be labouring under the misapprehension that science begins and ends in the laboratory and/or library. Moreover, you may mistakenly believe that conferences such as ours rise up spontaneously in the manner of mushrooms in the early morning; in fact they require hard digging for funds, sowing of the proper fertile minds in the programme, and considerable energy to bring in the harvest."

### "He missed little light and much manure!" put in Bob Hayes in a loud, irreverent stage-whisper.

"For all this we must thank our old friend, Dick Beadle," the Professor continued with the emphasis on 'old', and proceeded to show some candid photos of a youthful D.B. "complete with hair", and in a laboratory gown -- "the last day that D.B. actually did an experiment on his own". Janet noted that Professor Beadle joined in the jocularity, although his smile had a somewhat forced quality.

"The conference depends on its organizers no doubt," continued the Professor, "but without the presenters it would have no point, and without the youthful experimenters, the actual labourers of science, there would be no data to present. And so in thanking the speakers for their contributions to our meeting I especially want to direct my final remarks to the true students of science. If it seems to you that the fruits of your labours tumble as windfalls into the laps of your undeserving supervisors, bear in mind that they also may bear a disproportionate share of bad fruit or broken limbs if your efforts turn out to be rotten through errors or artefacts. Also be heartened by that famous tombstone elegy 'where thou now standest there once did I, where I now liest thou too shall lie'. So in your turn you shall reap all the harvest from the work of your associates and students, and the penal ties for their wrongs. It is only necessary to do as myself and my old colleague, D.B., persist, survive, encourage others, you shall find your just deserts."

### With these portentous remarks he sat down and handed the meeting over to Mary Kay Jacobs, who provided a summary critique of each of the work-shop sessions. Janet found this particularly useful to fill in the gaps from her afternoon's absence. She thought ahead to their return to Essex U, and determined to hold a discussion seminar about the key new findings of the conference with the students, a sort of post-mortem. The thought brought her back again to the nagging questions concerning Karl's demise. Perhaps it was one of those situations with a host of coincidental contributing factors, no one of which could be the isolated or sufficient cause.

### When the formal proceedings concluded Janet went to the front of the room to say her farewells to Professor Beadle and to arrange to meet Mary Kay for a last chat next morning at breakfast. Then she and Bob walked across to the snack-bar, and took a light supper out to the terrace. Most of the action was taking place in the bar-room, and they managed to find a secluded table away from the main crowd. Janet satisfied her indifferent appetite fairly quickly and eyed Bob impatiently.

### "What exactly is on your mind Dr. Hayes?"

### "It's something that has been troubling both Margot and me. Actually, you're much to blame."

### "Now hang on a bit. I have enough feelings of guilt about Karl's case. If I had been there sooner he mightn't have fallen, and so on. Don't try to make me feel any worse."

### "I'm sorry , but that isn't it at all. You see, you were the one who raised the question whether Karl's fall had been accidental."

"Which both you and Margot pooh-poohed as I recall."

### "Yes. Well, we're beginning to wonder a bit."

### "And what brought about this change of heart?"

### A couple emerged from the bar and noisily occupied the adjacent table. Bob leaned across the table and suggested a walk. They passed the tennis courts and strolled slowly along the path by the river. A waning moon cast a few shadows through the trees.

"It had to do with Karl's remaining insulin supply," Bob went on. "There was one unused vial, seal still intact, then two others that were partly used."

### "So I suppose he found there wasn't enough in one for a new dose and opened another."

"I don' t think so because they were both over half-full."

### "Or then he suspected one batch and started a new one?"

### "There was something else."

"You're not going to tell me that Karl left a suicide note or a letter."

### "He did leave a letter as a matter of fact but it couldn't be interpreted that way. The letter was addressed to Margot, and there wasn't much personal content. The main item concerned obtaining a supply of proteastatin."

### "Which he presumably already had," mused Janet. "Could you tell when it was written ?"

"It was started up here because it was on Wotinabee Lodge stationery."

### "So what is the mystery about the two opened insulin vials?" asked Janet after a pause.

### "One is normal looking, the other, rather turbid with an oily film on top."

### "As though it had gone off?"

### "Or had something added to it."

### Janet thought back to her conversation with Mary Kay Jacobs. For anyone who seriously wanted to be rid of Karl the simplest solution was to slip some toxic substance into his insulin supply. Provided of course that one could do so without provoking suspicion. The bottle would have had to be opened already, and the adulterant would have to be uncoloured and readily miscible with the contents of the vial. That condition surely hadn't been met if it was so obvious to Margot that the vial had been tampered with.

### "It makes no sense though," argued Janet. "Unless we assume that Karl detected something amiss with that bottle and opened another."

### "Then why keep the contaminated one?"

"Oh I don't know. Perhaps to confront the manufacturer. Perhaps he realized the cleanup in this place is slow to nonexistent," and she related the situation with the accumulated trash in her room.

### "Or perhaps," said Bob evenly, "because it was Karl himself who put some toxic substance into the bottle."

### Janet stared at him incredulously.

### "To what end? You surely don' t believe that he--"

### "Killed himself," Bob nodded emphatically. "It all seems to point to that end. Karl was a moody fellow. I had seen that side of him as you must have. Black moods."

### "More of anger than remorse I should have thought," snorted Janet scathingly.

"Yes, but a lot of that anger could be self-directed too. He seemed an arrogant person, perhaps totally insensitive."

### '"That's an understatement!"

### "But not so. He was really terribly unsure of himself underneath."

### "Ye gods!" interjected, Janet impatiently, "next you'll be telling me he wasn't responsible for his actions."

"I wouldn't put it just that way," Bob replied cautiously. "But he was an impulsive sort, could be carried away by uncontrollable urges."

### Janet was struggling to keep her temper under rein.

"I have an uncontrollable urge right now to tell you that is so much B.S. Karl had no more of a suicidal temperament than some carnivorous animal with his prey. He was a predator and you know it."

### "Well, as I said at first I'm still not really convinced. But Margot has come to the conclusion that Karl tried to poison himself."

### "What with?"

### "Possibly the proteastatin. It wouldn't take much of that stuff, it's so fantastically toxic. Karl was supposed to be bringing a sample for Dr. Jacobs's lab, and that has never turned up."

### "Maybe he just forgot, or never intended to follow through, at least until he saw whether she would really offer him a job."

### "Perhaps. But he could have taken it up in a syringe, shot it into the insulin bottle to make an emulsion."

### "It all sounds pretty far fetched to me. If he wanted to do away with himself why not just take the stuff? Why go to such trouble?"

### "I don't know."

### "And why go all the way down to the cliff? Why not do it right in his room?"

### "Hard to say. Maybe he wanted people to think it was an accident."

### "Well anyway, there's no way of proving it now that Karl's been cremated is there?"

### "That's certainly true. Although there were those funny indications; you said yourself he was reeling before his fall."

### "The only sort of proof would be an analysis of the contents of the bottle. I presume you have taken precautions to keep it out of harm's way?"

"Safe enough. I was very careful to see that Margot didn't handle it once we suspected something. I sealed it up in plastic, then put it into an empty tin and sealed that thoroughly."

### "Good. We can verify that when we get back to the lab."

### "In which case it would surely point to suicide. No-one else knew that he was carrying the inhibitor with him."

### "Except for Dr. Jacobs, who might have told somebody else."

### "True. But not very likely," said Bob as they returned to their starting point.

"Not very likely." The phrase echoed in Janet's brain. And who else beside Mary Kay Jacobs, whom she couldn't suspect for an instant, was not very likely to be involved. Celia, for example, who knew as much about proteastatin and its toxicity first-hand as anyone, including Karl and Margot. Or Doug, who may have discussed the compound with her. Even Linda for that matter could have heard about the inhibitor and its killing properties. There were enough people with knowledge, motive, opportunity. Except for one puzzling factor-- how the stuff had been administered. There was nobody nearby to deliver the fatal dose. And if Karl had injected it into himself in the contaminated insulin preparation, why on the cliff-top, and where was the incriminating syringe which he used? Janet went to bed with a number of new posers troubling her. By the time that sleep came finally she was no nearer to solving them, although the train of her thinking had ordered itself into an agenda for inquiry the following day.

### CHAPTER NINE

The proprietors of Wotinabee Lodge and organizers of the Wotinabee Conference had reached agreement on one salient feature-- that although scientific saturation of the conferees had been attained on the Friday, after five intensive days of meetings there would be a substantial group who could be counted on to remain and enjoy the ambience of the place without the professional strain associated with the conference proceedings. Since the next booking, by a society of clinical psychologists, was not until late Sunday a special rate had been offered for those who could afford the time to recuperate before returning fired up with new ideas to their home laboratories. Most of Janet's associates who were within easy driving distance from Essex U on the Sunday, took advantage of the extra day in the out-of doors. Janet herself was glad of the decision to stay on. As a beautiful sunlit day dawned she aroused herself, happy to feel that she was well on the way to normal health. She still was not quite up to an early morning swim, but after a freshening shower she had a revival of appetite and made for the breakfast hall with some enthusiasm.

"You certainly seem to have made a full recovery!" exclaimed Mary Kay, eyeing Janet's well-laden tray of bacon and egg.

"I begin to think that I may survive this meeting after all."

### "It has been traumatic for you, with the various unpleasantnesses surrounding Karl's activities."

"And disturbing in the sense of still being largely unexplained," and she relayed the relevant parts of her discussion with Bob the night before.

"From what I hear of its toxicity, if Karl had taken proteastatin in any quantity the effects would certainly have been drastic and instantaneous," Mary Kay mused.

### "What exactly did you hear about its toxicity?" asked Janet.

"Via the grape-vine from Cunningham's group, it came across pretty clearly to me the stuff was acting much the same as DFP."

### "Meaning that it reacted irreversibly at the serine of serine -proteases?"

### "Yes. Apparently it forms a tight transition state complex, thus very slow to reverse, but its potent toxicity is related to two other factors I gather. As you remarked it's not very water-miscible."

### "But it is fairly stable in the presence of water?"

"That's true. It could retain potency as a water emulsion. But it's because of its oily nature that it penetrate cells so fast-- goes right through the lipid membranes."

### "So it would act as a contact poison?"

### "Taken up through the skin, and it would quickly get to where it does the most damage-- in the brain and other nerves."

### "But it acts like DFP on the nervous system by inhibiting cholinesterase?"

### "Yes. It's a parasympathomimetic agent."

### "My aching head!" Janet exclaimed in mock despair. "I seem to recall some of this from an undergrad course I took aeons ago in pharmacology. Anticholinesterases, eserine, muscarine, nicotine," she rhymed off.

### "Some of them are still pretty important as drugs in clinical practice," Mary Kay replied. "Others of course, found more lethal applications."

### "As for insecticides like malathion."

### "And some of the so-called nerve gases designed for chemical warfare."

"It sounds as though proteastatin could be a pretty good candidate for one of those military applications. I gather that Margot Elster carried an atropine supply handy while she was working with it."

### "The beautiful lady," mused Mary Kay.

### "Meaning Margot?"

### "Meaning both Margot and the antidote, atropine-- belladonna as it was referred to originally-- taken by ladies, so it was said, because of its ability to dilate the pupils and produce soft limpid eyes."

### "Well, Margot dilated the pupil of many of the men about her."

### "Including those of your friend, Bob Hayes. He seems to have been quite smitten by her."

"He's protective toward her I would guess," replied Janet thoughtfully. "You know she has that defenceless quality. Fragile seeming."

"But tough underneath."

"Oh yes, she's a survivor, that girl. I'm sure that living with Karl must have challenged her survival instincts. But she radiates that quality of frailty. And with the added vulnerability of the madonna-to-be."

### "Almost irresistible to a tender-hearted fellow like Bob Hayes."

"Probably it's one of the main reasons that I've escaped entanglements with the opposite sex for so long," laughed Janet.

"Well, if so our independence has protected us from the crèche, and all that that entails."

"What would be the symptoms from proteastatin poisoning then?" asked Janet, changing back to the original subject. "It would produce incordination of nerve -muscle wouldn't it? "

"My pharmacology courses were rather long ago and far away, but as I remember that was one of the debilitating effects of the anti-cholinesterase nerve gases-- nausea, confusion, problems with speech, vision. I gather that's one of the earliest signs."

"Yes, I seem to recall that now," said Janet with a frown of concentration. "The antidote, belladonna expands the pupil in the eye; the nerve gas itself acts in the opposite way, to cause a constriction of the pupil."

### Mary Kay nodded. "Miosis, or pupillary constriction is often detected with even minimal doses of anti-cholinesterase agents, before any of the other effects on the nervous system become evident."

Janet fell silent. There was no longer any doubt in her mind. The night-mare vision of Karl's dead face flashed vividly again, with those tiny, almost non-existent pupils staring at her in blank surprise, like two pin-holes into the blackness of his soul.

As the sun mounted in the sky and the morning mists dispelled, Janet felt her dampened spirits rising also. But the mist of mystery in her thoughts remained to obscure the rationality of events. She left the brilliant sunshine of open lawn as the morning bus departed taking Mary Kay Jacobs and other distant voyagers to make their afternoon connections. Janet waved to her friend, then entered the dappled light of the woodland pathway. There were several bifurcating trails and Janet followed the turnings and forks at random, her mind still absorbed in the puzzling features of Karl Elster's last hours. It was with a shock of some dismay that she came upon the clearing where she had earlier discoursed with Professor Antwhistle. For there he was before her standing near the clump of trees at the farther edge, placing a ladder against one of them. She hurried up to him, hoping to avert a second fatal fall.

### "I do believe that I have closed in on my quarry at last!" he enthused. "The chap at the lodge was most co-operative about the ladder. And the nest, you see, is just within reach above there." He pointed upward into a crotch of the fir-tree that supported a tangle of twigs.

### "If you take the glasses," he whispered extending the binoculars to Janet, "you may note the tail of the magpie extending beyond the edge. So far at least he has made no move to leave."

### The trees were short and scrubby here. With the aid of the field-glasses Janet could see clearly the large, dome-shaped basket some fifteen feet above with large glossy tail-feathers protruding from one of the entrances.

"It is a rare find in this region, outside his normal nesting area you know," burbled the Professor sotto voce, trying to restrain his excitement. In spite of ladder, or the two observers below however, the bird remained quite motionless, as though frozen within his twiggy bower. Janet had little real fascination for either birds or tree-climbing but felt that she owed it to science to make a gesture at least. Perhaps it was the awesome prospect of calamity to her departmental Head, perhaps a show of gratitude for his efforts to protect her from the ravages of the human magpie. She offered accordingly to scale the heights and report her findings.

### "My dear," responded the Professor, kindly yet firmly, "this is one experiment which I must perform personally. You will however, be of inestimable value if you will maintain some solidity at the base of the ladder. I shall describe events to you, and later you may wish to ascend for a look of your own."

### Janet reckoned that she would be well-satisfied with a second-hand account of the nest. Possibly its occupant would stage an attack on the intruder in defence of his violated home. How in the world, she wondered desperately, might she help to cushion the descent if the Professor were to be dislodged from the ladder? There would be but little time to react, for with startling agility John Antwhistle scaled the ladder, and, standing on the penultimate rung, brought his head up virtually level with the rear entrance to the nest. And still the long feathers remained in place, apparently undisturbed. The Professor too seemed immobilized in his place atop the ladder, then slowly and sadly he descended again. Janet could see clearly that there were tears, whether of grief or disappointment, shining in his eyes

"Poor fellow is quite dead" he said in a hollow voice. "Such a sorry find, sorry find," he repeated shaking his head.

Without further thought or discussion Janet climbed the ladder herself and confirmed the Professor's observation. The bird's head was thrown back in a convulsive attitude. How long he had lain thus was impossible to tell. Later Janet could not recall what impelled her to refrain from reaching out to pick up the bird. She simply stared, frozen as John Antwhistle had been a few moments earlier. But even before she started back down the ladder her gaze looked earthward, and was captured by a bright glint of sun light reflected from near the base of the tree a few feet from where the Professor was standing.

### "I think," she said slowly, as she warily inspected the shiny object on the ground, "that we may have discovered the key to the death of the magpie."

### CHAPTER TEN

"Come in my dear, do come in." The voice of John Antwhistle resonated through the open doorway and out to the street. Janet walked via the small entrance-way into the hall. The house, or more properly the cottage, was an ancient one-storey brick structure, elaborately gabled and decorated with wooden fret-work in the style locally referred to as carpenter's gothic. The hall ran the full length of the building, and at its farthest end the figure of the Professor could be made out dimly approaching with two large tankards of ale.

"Let's sit in here." He motioned toward the front room, originally designated the parlour, but presently occupied by the owner's not inconsiderable library, an eclectic mix of works on the arts and sciences. Janet sank into one of the over-stuffed arm-chairs and gratefully accepted the proffered ice-cold tankard. The day had been hot and hectic, the Professor's cottage, cool and tranquil. It was a welcome interlude, a chance as the Professor had remarked to "bring two great minds to bear upon the dilemma of life".

### The particular dilemma upon which they were focussing this late afternoon was the mysterious history of the late Dr. Elster. They had held previous discussions of course, chiefly during their long car ride together back to Essex after the Wotinabee Conference, a ride that had been protracted considerably by Professor Antwhistle's predilection for short-cuts, diversionary trips, and innumerable stops for snacks or interesting vistas, not to mention the untrustworthy state of his automobile which punctuated the voyage further with several unscheduled visits to service stations. On the drive they had debated extensively about the next course of action to be taken. In the end the best approach seemed to be to alarm as few people as possible, to conceal their suspicions from Margot or others of the Elster clan, and to avoid alerting the authorities. And in the event it appeared that this may have been the best way to proceed; certainly they were not without resources of their own.

"There are several avenues of the investigation where our old ally, serendipity, seems to have played a prominent part," pronounced the Professor. "In the 'real world' as in the laboratory one often makes the most significant discoveries by explorations in the direction opposite to that where the clues would be expected."

### "So if you had not had a passion for bird-watching we would have had no prospect of finding the weapon that inflicted the fatal blow."

### "And if you had not come along as you did to warn me, I might have required an obituary notice like our friend, the magpie."

### "Not to mention possibly dangerous, if not lethal, consequences for one of the maids at Wotinabee Lodge," added Janet. "Incidentally, the contents of the syringe and the bogus insulin vial had roughly equivalent concentrations of proteastatin."

"Amazing what the gas chromatography-mass spectrometry system can detect these days," sighed the Professor. "It proves incontrovertibly that the unfortunate Elster, acting while his reasoning was temporarily unhinged, removed the proteastatin solution he had been carrying in an insulin bottle, and later injected himself with it. I presume the pathologist would not have distinguished one injection site from another in a known diabetic, hence his suspicions of unnatural causes wouldn't have been aroused in the first place. In the second, the lethal syringe was not found at the scene because our ill-fated friend, the magpie, was attracted by the glitter, removed it from the site of the poisoning, and tried to carry it off to its nest. There was enough of the toxic potion seeping about the needle to kill the bird, and cause the syringe to fall where we found it. QED."

### The professor adopted an expression of self-satisfaction with his analysis and took a healthy swig from his tankard. Janet however, frowned and shook her head.

### "You must pardon the efforts of a very amateurish mathematician in criticizing your solution, but you will recall that there may be more than one root to an equation."

### "I trust," the Professor responded, "that your alternative solution -- for I assume you are about to propound an alternative -- does not contain the square root of minus one. I should remind you in turn that such a solution will produce an imaginary root!"

### "I think not," said Janet. "But I do believe that there is another variable of which you may not be aware until now, a variable that introduces one additional partial victim of the toxic agent plus a near victim."

### "A near victim?" echoed the Professor.

### "The room-maid at Wotinabee Lodge. Through under-staffing at the lodge she was saved from the effects suffered by the partial victim."

"And who was this 'partial victim' you refer to?" asked the Professor.

### "Myself."

### John Antwhistle drew in his breath and stared at Janet as though she had overstretched his credulity. There ensued a period of silence when only the ticking of a pendulum clock could be heard to emanate from the hall.

### "What in the world brought you to such a conclusion?" he asked.

### "A quick refresher course in pharmacology/toxicology. Study of the symptoms from anti-cholinesterase poisoning. In particular, the sub-clinical manifestations of persons repeatedly subjected to minimal doses of agents such as DFP."

### "You mean that you experienced such manifestations?"

### Janet nodded and pointed toward her eyes.

"Miosis, or constriction of the pupils. Even now I have some residual difficulty in adjusting rapidly to a darkened room. Apparently this is the earliest, most sensitive indication of low exposure to such parasympathometic agents. Had I realized immediately I supposes I could have countered the effect with the antidote, atropine. But now it's simply a minor irritation and will reverse with time."

### "However," the Professor enjoined, "if I recall correctly the effects of these agents are somewhat cumulative. You are in a delicate condition of sensitivity to future exposure."

### "Precisely the reason why I reacted as seriously as I did to minor exposure, and possibly the reason why it killed Karl Elster!"

"Sherlock Holmes used to refer to complex cases as requiring more than one pipeful of tobacco to ruminate over. I think this may well be a two-tankard problem, that is if your 'delicate condition' permits it."

### The Professor scuttled off down the hall for refills. In the meantime Janet perused the book titles on the shelf, and examined John Antwhistle's bird carvings which nestled among spaces between the books. Most were fashioned from bits of driftwood, shells, stones and wire appendages; all were quirky caricatures of the creatures, and some, she suspected, bore similarities to members of the University community. She was examining the eyes of one of the latter when the Professor returned with more ale and an immense bowl of peanuts.

"Eyes are the windows of the soul" he intoned. "Or as we have been told repeatedly, if one is to be a teacher, by our pupils we shall be taught!"

"Touché," Janet responded. "The pupils in this case were very instructive, and it was pretty dense of me not to catch on sooner. It should have been obvious that in death Karl's eyes were abnormal, virtually no pupils at all! And even when he was alive his 'normal, everyday' appearance, with those small, beady pupils no doubt reflected a chronic hypersensitivity brought on by his rather cavalier way of handling such agents in the lab."

"And consequently you feel that he may have been at risk, as a result of long-standing sensitization from what you call 'subclinical' toxicity?"

"I believe so, though it's fairly speculative."

"And yourself?."

"This is the verifiable part, Because you see I had analyses done on the offending article and it was loaded with the stuff!"

### "The offending article was your source of contact with the poison I presume."

### Janet nodded grimly.

### "It was in fact the orange recovered from my wastebasket."

### "And where did the maid come into it?"

### "Fortunately, both for the analysis and for the cleanup crew, I came to a reconstruction of the events and managed to retrieve the lethal orange and seal it up well before somebody else could contact it."

### "Now," said the Professor making a serious attack on the contents of his tankard, "perhaps you will oblige me by sharing your reconstruction."

"Well," began, Janet, "once we found the syringe, as you point out, the agent of destruction for the bird that carried it off, I realized that it was the agent of death for Karl also. "

"But not in the manner I had surmised?"

### "It didn't really add up: first, for him to use a syringe to self-administer the poison had he been suicidal; second, for him to inject himself at such a distance from his room; third, I just didn't accept the supposition that Karl was suicidal in his intent."

### She paused in her narrative to lubricate her throat. The Professor pursed his lips in meditation.

### "So the true delivery weapon was the orange, and the target was you."

"I hate to flatter myself so, but all the indications seem to point that way. Karl may have been unhinged, perhaps by the fact that he had been embarrassed, exposed before the very group he desired most to impress."

"Embarrassment is, so they say, the most painful of personal injuries, because it punctures that most sensitive part of the anatomy, one's amour propre," said the Professor nodding in agreement. "I suppose we all played a part in that embarrassment," he noted somewhat ruefully. "He obviously didn't appreciate the humour in Douglas's rather tasteless joke at his expense. And my diatribe after his self-serving abrogation of the cytomitin story."

### "True enough," admitted Janet, although I guess my sin was the greatest in his eyes: that is that he must have felt that I prevailed over him, not only in the conference room, but out on the tennis court!"

"You so-called sportsmen certainly do take your games seriously."

### "Well, there is a saying among aficionados of the sport to the effect that tennis is not a matter of life or death, it's more important than that!"

### "And to one who was accustomed to being a winner, losing in these situations added to his feeling of humiliation."

### "That's the best guess I had for a motive," replied Janet. "Though I suppose none of us realizes the animosity or envy one may stir up in another, particularly when that other thinks of himself as a competitor."

### "I could probably accept your arguments now better than before the meeting," mused the Professor. "Karl had a history, so I have since discovered, of pinching other people's data when the occasion arose. He was doubtless a bit deranged by the events that went against him, and showed a viciously vindictive side to his personality."

### "He cheerfully eliminated a long list of people from his life, if they were burdensome or no longer useful to him. I was just the last on the list. Except that in my case he decided upon a final solution."

### "So he followed you out to the cliff on that last morning."

### "I had a sensation of being watched on the way, though I thought little of it at the time. I believe that Karl must have found out about my early morning swims, my habit of taking an orange for breakfast afterward. I suppose that in his plan it would have been I who toppled from the cliff, rendering a verdict of accidental death. Except for two unforeseen factors that not only foiled his scheme, but reversed it upon the perpetrator."

### "A case of lethal back-fire."

### "Just so. In the first place, Karl must have either over-estimated the dose required, or under-estimated the fluid content and internal pressure of an orange."

### "Or both perhaps?"

### "Perhaps. It sounds simple to inject a fluid into an orange. But an orange such as mine was, jostled, palpated in transit, is not only full of juice, it may be full to overflowing. I tried the experiment in the lab using a syringe loaded with ink. If you're careful and slow about it you can certainly inject a fair volume; but there is a definite back-pressure, depending on needle size, rate of injection, possible blockage of the needle tip with peel or pulp. If you hurry it you could get lots of leakage around the injection site and even in the seal between needle and syringe. I wound up with ink, not just at the site of injection, but on occasion, sprayed on my lab-coat and face-mask."

### "And of course Karl was wearing neither such protective device. So is that the first factor you referred to?"

### "Yes. The second had to do with timing. While I was still some distance away, Doug must have passed me and emerged unexpectedly from the mist on the river. Probably Karl was just part way along and could have been startled by the sudden appearance of the canoe. So he panicked a little, shoved the barrel down hard on the syringe possibly causing the needle to separate a bit. The injected solution would have sprayed back on his face, eyes, open mouth; in his hypersensitive state from previous exposures in the lab the effect would have been accentuated and could have been pretty fast. He must have extracted the syringe, possibly getting more contamination on his skin, dropped the orange with needle still embedded over the edge, and followed soon afterward himself."

### "The syringe then must have fallen out of sight," mused the Professor.

### "Out of my sight, but not of the magpie who spotted it later."

### "If this orange was so lethal to the touch, I don't understand why you weren't affected the same day you picked it up, brought it back to your room. And what happened to the needle?"

### "I guess it must have jarred loose in the fall, dropped off among the rocks on the way down, or fell to the bottom of the Wotinabee River," argued Janet. "As for the delayed effect I'm not sure I understand," she said with a puzzled frown.

### "You found it in the water?"

### "Yes. So I suppose that the surface material may have been washed away."

### "Then you wouldn't have had great exposure at first, unless you squeezed the beast."

### "I presume that could be it."

### "Later the stuff on the inside might be expected to diffuse out to the peel. It is apparently quite lipophilic so would tend to concentrate in the oil of the rind," reasoned the Professor.

### "Then later the oily concentrate outside would come off in handling it. If I had thought at the time, it was acting like an insect trap-- there were several dead flies near it."

### "Well, let's drink to the fact that you did not share their fate!"

"I'll drink to that," responded Janet hoisting her tankard, "and here's to the slovenly help at Wotinabee Lodge."

### "A telling argument for a reasonable degree of untidiness and disorder," concluded the Professor.

### "The one victim that does concern me more than any other is Margot. I suppose that she and Bob will return, though I am not sure what they have to return to," said Janet with a worried sigh.

"Ah, the beauteous widow, mother-to-be, and her gallant protector!" the Professor exclaimed. "I took it upon myself to speak to them both about the analyses of the insulin bottle and syringe. Naturally, I knew nothing then of your later investigations and realizations. As far as they are concerned Karl destroyed himself-- not so very far from the truth anyway, if we ignore the question of intent. I don' t suppose we need to raise that question with them?"

### "No, of course not. There would be nothing to be gained, except perhaps some unfortunate feelings of guilt by Margot for having provided Karl with the stuff."

"I quite agree," nodded the Professor. "Now as to the future of these two- uh three- young people. We also discussed that matter at some length As it happens we now have an opening for someone to carry on with the cytomitin problem."

### "You mean Bob Hayes?"

### "If you so wish."

"I can't think of a better collaboration," Janet enthused. "Would he agree?"

"I believe he might," chuckled the Professor. And perhaps a bit later if she desires Margot could also be very valuable to our group. Just now she seems more intent on providing a home for her offspring in the offing. Dr. Hayes may also fit somewhere into that equation."

"Ah well," sighed Janet in relief, "it seems to have resolved itself fairly well in the end. Perhaps it is the best of all possible worlds as Dr. Pangloss observed."

### "Perhaps," replied the Professor finishing his ale. "But remember what happened to him after making that observation!"

### It was twilight, almost dusk, by the time that Janet returned home to her room in the ancient house that she shared with her land-lady of long standing, Kay McKay. In the summers Kay tended to spend a good deal of her time at her lake-side cottage. So it was a surprise when Janet returned from the conference to find the place not gloomy and deserted, but stocked with a plentiful supply of food, and a note inviting Janet to make free with what was at hand. Now in the gathering darkness she was delighted to note a light in the back kitchen, the familiar old car parked in the driveway.

### Janet rushed through the front door calling down the hall. She had always in the past confided the happenings in her life to Kay who was something between intimate aunt and surrogate mother to Jan. She knew that no detail of the Wotinabee experience would escape Kay's shrewd interrogation. Besides, she was literally bursting to relate the story to someone less matter-of-fact than the Professor. Kay was in all things an enthusiast, a lover of mysteries, an ardent gossip and raconteur her-self, but the soul of discretion with matters of confidence.

### "Well," Janet called, bursting in to the back kitchen where Kay was standing near the window surrounded by a mountainous collection of boxes and canvas bags laden with groceries and paraphernalia from the cottage, "you'll never guess what has been happening to me at this supposedly boring scientific meeting!"

### But Kay, who had been standing with her back to Janet, signalled stiffly with her hand while peering out of the window into the back garden.

### "Wait, wait," she warned. "Oh my look ! Did you see him?"

### Janet moved as quickly as possible among the jumble of gear, and got to the window just in time to glimpse a flutter of feathers and a long tail.

### "Oh my, oh my!" gasped Kay, quite overcome with excitement.

### "What is it?" asked Janet.

"Oh my'" repeated Kay breathlessly, "On my way in I was carrying a box and it knocked my brooch off. It wasn't a terribly valuable one, just as well!" she laughed.

### "What happened to it?"

"The clasp wasn't working well and it fell off on the path. I was unloading all this stuff," she gestured at the pile of impediments, "and I forgot about it momentarily. Then he swooped in. I couldn't believe my eyes! I didn't believe there were any of them around this area. He's the first I've ever see here anyway. 0h my, what a thrill! He's welcome to the brooch."

### " Who is?" Janet asked, half anticipating the answer.

### "The magpie! You saw him too didn't you? Great long tail! "

### Janet nodded dumbly.

### "What a welcome home! Wait till I tell them at the Ornithology Club. I don't imagine there's been a sighting for years. Had you ever seen one before?"

### "Yes, as a matter of fact l-- "

"It's a good thing I have a witness," Kay bubbled on, "otherwise none of them would credit it. They would imagine I had been in to the sauce, " she laughed. "You know," she continued relentlessly, "It probably means she has a nest nearby. Now, if we could find his nest! The brooch, all his other collectables inside, what a thrill to come across it. Maybe you would like to take an expedition with me tomorrow, down in to the valley to hunt for it."

"Well--. "Janet started hesitantly.

### "I'm sorry," Kay paused in her dialogue. "I've been pratling on here like a madman. And speaking of the sauce, lets fix a couple of tall cool ones and sit out on the porch. Then you can tell me all about your dull old conference. I presume it was a dull old affair," she said, bustling about, handing Janet articles to load into the refrigerator.

### "Ah, here we are!" Kay exclaimed, grasping the gin bottle by the neck from one of the boxes. "Now we can get down to some serious chitchat. I'm just dying to hear all the gossip about your strange Professors and whatnot. Though it couldn't match that sighting for excitement I bet. Have you ever seen anything quite like that?"

"Well," Janet responded as she followed somewhat unsteadily in the footsteps of her landlady with a heavily diluted version of one of Kay's notorious martinis, "it's funny you should ask!"

### William McMurray was born in Northern Ireland and evacuated to Canada during the Second World War. Growing up in Saskatchewan and Ontario, Dr. McMurray followed an academic scientific career which ultimately led to his appointment as Chairman of the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada.

Cover design by Dr. McMurray's son Geoffrey.

