emories of his years teaching in Wisconsin are like the state’s winter terrain: The bright sincerity of Midwestern living splotched by the ugly black slush of the reports he handed over to Leo Mihalkov, who would materialize behind snow whirlwinds in a sable overcoat and ushanka hat like Ded Moroz—Old Man Frost—of Mama’s Christmas fables. Hoffstetler tried to sate Mihalkov with material thefts: electroscopes, ionization chambers, Geiger-Müller counters. It was never enough. Mihalkov squeezed and Hoffstetler, like a sponge, seeped litanies of top-secret atrocity. An American program involving abrading the scalps of retarded children with ringworm to study the effects. Mosquitoes bred with dengue, cholera, and yellow fever and loosed upon pacifist prisoners as part of an entomological weapons program. Most recently, a proposal to expose US servicemen to a new herbicidal dioxin called Agent Orange. Each test result Hoffstetler ferreted to the Soviet agent was itself a virus that putrefied the guts of his otherwise pleasant life.

He realized, with a heavying grief, that anyone too close to him might become future fodder for Soviet blackmail. He had no choice that he could see. He broke it off with the lovely woman he’d been seeing and quit hosting the university cocktail parties that had intoxicated him with amiable intellectualism. He christened the house the university gave him by removing most of the furniture and all of the light fixtures, emptying the drawers and closets, and sitting, that first night, alone in the center of the cleared floor, repeating “Ya Russkiy,” I am a Russian, until wet snow covered the windows and he began, in darkness, to believe it.

Suicide was the only exit. He knew too much about sedatives to rely upon them to do the job. Madison lacked a tall building from which to leap. Purchasing a gun with a Russian accent might draw undue attention. So he’d purchased a box of Gillette Blue Blades and placed them on the tub’s rim, but no matter how hot he drew the bathwater, he couldn’t dissolve Mama’s warnings about Nečistaja sila—the Unclean Force—the demon legion into which all suicides were inducted. Hoffstetler cried in the tub, naked, middle-aged, balding, pasty-skinned, flabby, shuddering like a baby. How far he’d sunk. How very, very far.

The invite to be a part of an Occam Aerospace Research Center team analyzing a “newly discovered life-form” saved his life. This is no hyperbole. One day, the razor blades waited on the side of the tub; the next day, they were out with the trash. The news got better. Mihalkov got word to him that this would be the final mission required of him. Do his job at Occam and he’d be taken home, back to Minsk, back into the arms of parents he hadn’t seen in eighteen years.

Hoffstetler could not begin quickly enough. He signed every release form he saw and started reading the partially redacted but plenty astonishing dispatches from DC. He quit his position at the college using the old chestnut of “personal issues” and arranged lodging in Baltimore. Newly discovered life: The term pumped his cold, withering body with warm jets of youthful hope. Inside himself, too, was newly discovered life, and for once he would use it not to ruin another being but to understand it.

Then he saw it. That’s the wrong word. He met it. The creature looked at Hoffstetler through a tank window and acknowledged him in that distinctive way of humans and primates. In seconds, Hoffstetler was stripped of the scientific armor he’d constructed over twenty years; this was not some mutant fish upon which acts should be performed, but rather a being with whom thoughts, feelings, and impressions should be shared. The realization was freeing in the exact way that Hoffstetler, recently resigned to death, needed. Everything had prepared him for this. Nothing had prepared him for this.

The creature, too, was a contradiction, its own biology aligning with historical evidence from the Devonian Period. Hoffstetler began calling it “the Devonian,” and of foremost interest was its profound relationship to water. Hoffstetler first theorized that the Devonian coerced the water around it, but that was too despotic. To the contrary, water seemed to work with the Devonian, reflecting the creature’s disposition by kicking and frothing, or going as still as sand. Typically, insects were attracted to standing water, but those that made it inside F-1 were in thrall to the Devonian itself, zipping about in spectacular overhead patterns and pelting Hoffstetler whenever he made an aggressive-looking move.

His mind stormed with incredible hypotheses, but he hoarded them selfishly, limiting his first Occam report to digestible facts. The Devonian, he wrote, was a bilaterally symmetrical, amphibious biped showing clear vertebral evidence of a notochord, a hollow neural tube, and a closed blood system powered by a heart—four-chambered like humans or three-chambered like amphibians Hoffstetler did not yet know. Gill slits were evident, but so were the dilations of a rib cage atop vascularized lungs. This suggested that the Devonian could exist, to some extent, in two geospheres. What the scientific community might learn about subaquatic respiration, he typed frantically, was limitless.

The drawback to Hoffstetler’s newly discovered life was a new naïveté. Occam had no interest in solving primordial mysteries. They wanted what Leo Mihalkov wanted: military and aerospace applications. Overnight, Hoffstetler found himself in the business of hindrance, fiddling knobs and adjusting valves, declaring equipment unsafe and data compromised, anything to buy more time to study the Devonian. This took creativity and audacity, as well as a third personal attribute he’d let atrophy under Mihalkov: empathy. Hence the special bulbs he’d installed to approximate natural light, hence the Amazonian field recordings.

Such efforts took time, and Richard Strickland had turned time into a species as endangered as the Devonian. Academia was rife with rivalry; Hoffstetler knew how to see the blade hidden behind a grinning glad-hander. Strickland was a different kind

of rival. He didn’t hide his antipathy toward scientists, cussing right to their faces in a way that made them flush and stammer. Strickland called out Hoffstetler’s delays for the bullshit they were. You want to learn about the asset, Strickland said in so many ways, you don’t tickle its chin. You cut it and watch how it bleeds.

Hoffstetler’s instinct, too, was to shrink in fear. He couldn’t, though, not this time. The stakes were too high, not only for the Devonian, but also for his own soul. F-1, he told himself, was the singularity of an untamed new universe, and to survive inside it, he’d need to create a third person. Not Dmitri. Not Bob. A hero. A hero who might redeem himself for saying nothing while innocents fell prey to the experiments of two heartless countries. To succeed, he’d need to live out the same basic lesson he’d taught his students: Universes form through collisions of escalating violence, and when a new habitat erupts, members of the local taxon will fight over the resources, often to the death.