“You want me to turn off the light?” She crossed the room to the switch on the wall and shut down the overhead lighting, though the lab was still flooded with sunlight so that you could hardly tell the difference.

“That’s not it,” he insisted. “That’s not it, that’s not . . . it at all.” He was standing in the middle of the room, swaying on his feet. “Home,” he said abruptly, his fingers fumbling at the buttons of his lab coat. “Take me home. I need to . . . Help me, Susi, help me.”

If she was frightened—and she was—she didn’t have time to dwell on it. She’d never been to his house, but she knew he lived in Bottmingen, out in the suburbs, some ten kilometers away, and the immediate problem, a problem that could have life and death consequences for all she knew, was to get him home where he could be properly cared for. She helped him out of his lab coat, her own fingers trembling, and then she was handing him his jacket, which he merely stared at as if he’d never seen it before, and she helped him with that too. And his cap—he couldn’t very well bicycle all the way home without his cap. It took him a moment, turning the cap over in his hands as if trying to reference it, and then he reached up and pulled it down firmly over the crown of his head.

She made a quick survey of the lab to be sure everything was in order and led him out the door. Never once did she think of going to his colleagues for help—just the opposite: she went out of her way to avoid them. She looked in both directions up and down the hall and then hurried him to the back stairway, where there was no one to see him but Axel Yoder, eternally plying his mop. She did this reflexively, to protect him. He was more than merely respectable—he was a cornerstone of the research department at Sandoz—and it would be devastating if anyone were to see him in this condition because they would assume the worst, that he was drunk, drunk on the job. That would never do.