Herr Hofmann, always mindful of the company’s time, put off the experiment till late in the day. She kept herself busy cleaning the lab equipment, washing and drying beakers, funnels, stirring rods, wiping down the counters she’d already wiped down twice, but all the while she was keeping an eye on him where he sat at his desk making notations in his laboratory journal. The afternoon wore on. She was in the midst of rechecking the inventory for lack of anything better to do, when all at once he pushed back his chair, stood up and swung round on her. “Well,” he said, “are you ready, Fräulein?”

It was four-twenty in the afternoon—he made a note of it for the record and so did she—when he diluted 0.5 cc of ½ promil aqueous solution of diethylamide tartrate with 10 cc of water, gave her a “here-goes” grin, raised the glass as if he were toasting her and drank it down in a single swallow. “Utterly tasteless,” he pronounced, looking past her to the window and the glaze of sunlight on the panes. “If I didn’t know better I’d think I was just taking a sip of water.” Again he flashed the grin. “For the purpose of moistening the throat. Always advisable to keep the throat moist, right?”

Her response was so muted she could barely hear herself. “Yes, I think so,” she murmured, but she was watching him closely, feasting on the sight of him actually, this shining man, this genius, and why couldn’t he have chosen somebody else for the trial, somebody who didn’t have so much to lose? He could have called for volunteers, paid someone—Axel Yoder, the halfwit who pushed a mop up and down the hallways all day long as if it were attached to him. Or the squint-eyed woman in the butcher’s shop down the street. He could have paid her, couldn’t he? What would she know? Or a monkey—what was wrong with trying it on a monkey?

Twenty minutes later, nothing had happened. They’d both gone back to their work, the sun held steady, a telephone rang somewhere down the hallway. She could barely breathe. She was aching to ask him if he was feeling anything yet—any effects, anything whatever—but she felt shy suddenly, as if it would be an imposition, as if somehow the experiment would be in jeopardy if she were the first to speak. The toxin was in him, this was his body, his trial, and what could be more private than that? She thought of Werner Forssmann then and how he’d had to physically restrain his nurse so she wouldn’t interfere with him when he worked that catheter all the way up his antecubital vein to his heart, and then she was wishing she’d taken the compound with him. Or instead of him.