All this was very gratifying. She began to feel an attachment to the work she’d never experienced before because she’d been there from the very beginning, at his side, his helpmeet, and in a sense the compound was as much her child as his. Work, which had seemed so dull and repetitive, was suddenly absorbing, radiant even, so much so that she began to think she’d like to go back to school and become a chemist herself. Of course, she kept all this hidden from her mother, because her mother wouldn’t have approved and because LSD-25, as they were calling it in shorthand, was the secret sweet chemical bond between her and Herr H., and she valued that more than anything in the world.

Spring gave way to summer, the days collecting beyond the windows like so many invitations to another realm, each one softer and lovelier than the one before, and she and Herr H. worked at synthesizing, purifying and crystallizing the product until it was as close to perfection as they could make it, and sometimes, when the mood was right, they took their lunch hour together on the patch of lawn out back of the building. It was during the second week of June—June the twelfth, actually, and she would never forget the date—that she approached him about something she’d been revolving in her mind for the longest time.

They were sitting side by side in the grass on the blanket he’d spread, casually chewing their sandwiches, books open before them, as relaxed with each other as—well, she didn’t want to push the simile because he was married and always would be married and she’d never be married to him, but it wasn’t like brother- and sisterhood either, and no one, least of all her mother, could ever know what she was feeling. At any rate, she took the last bite of her sandwich, chewed, swallowed, and screwed up her courage, sure he would deny her, say no, claim that she was a girl still and not a woman—not a woman at all, but a girl under her mother’s aegis—and the words were out before she could stop herself. “I want to be a guinea pig,” she said.

He turned his head and gave her a long look, as if he’d never seen her before—or no, as if he were seeing her suddenly in a whole new light. It took him a moment, his eyes fixed on hers, working things out in his mind, and then, his voice soft, he said, “What will your mother say?”