nly the heat of the man’s tears makes him aware of the pervading coldness: F-1’s closed door against his back; the hall’s catacomb draft; the corpse chill of his fingers clamped over his mouth. He’d laugh if he wasn’t crying—of course the conduit of this epiphany is an egg. So much of his life has been dedicated to investigating what some call evolution, but he prefers to call emergence: the asexual replications of worm and jellyfish; the embryonic morphogeneses of fertilized ovum; the infinite other theoretical paths of life’s progression that didn’t end with mankind obliterating everything pure and good.

It’s the same thing he used to tell his students. The universe folds itself along dull axial lines generation after generation, but what truly reshapes life are the foibled folds, the outright tears. Changes kick-started by emergences can last for millennia and affect us all.

He’d flatter their young minds by telling them that, though he might be the only first-generation immigrant in the classroom, each one of them is quite exotic, a child of fantastic mutants.

Oh, he’s awfully bold when on terra firma, snug behind a lectern, high on chalk dust. Now he’s in the field, the real world. Why, then, does it feel more like fantasy every day? His mother used to call his daydream spells leniviy mozg. Translated: “lazy brain.” They are, of course, the opposite; his hyperactive mind is what has driven him to be a scientist of repute. What those diplomas, ribbons, and honors are worth here in the real world, he’s no longer certain. He could have pulled the janitor away from the tank, away from danger, and yet he, the ivory-tower coward, had simply raced from the room.

Frequently he returns to Occam late at night, unable to sleep until he’s checked, a fourth or fifth time, the gauges of pool and tank. The asset, he has become certain, won’t last much longer under such artificial conditions. One morning, they’ll find it belly-up, dead as a goldfish, and Mr. Strickland will go around cheering and slapping backs, while he, on the other hand, will try to hold back a tide of tears. Only here, tonight, at last, does he understand the answer to the riddle of the asset’s continued survival. This woman—this janitor—is keeping it alive, not through serums or solutions but through force of spirit. To drag her from the lab right now might be the same as dragging a dagger through the creature’s travailing heart.

Other daggers are slicing into his soft, pink, pitiful human palm. It is a stiff manila folder, an object of outrageous import moments ago, now wadded to sharp-edged crumples. He relaxes his fist and smooths it out. He hadn’t come to F-1 tonight to check gauges. He certainly hadn’t come to have his bedrock beliefs fractured by a dancing janitor. Tonight’s visit was to verify previously collected data. Inside the manila folder is an intel report he has compiled at great personal risk, a report that must be finished before tomorrow’s rendezvous.

Faint strains of “Star Dust” rumble into his skull, still pressed against the lab door. He pushes off and staggers down the hall. He grips the folder tighter, no matter how it cuts into his flesh, to remind himself who he is, why he’s here. He is Dr. Bob Hoffstetler, born Dmitri Hoffstetler in Minsk, Russia, and though one would be excused for inferring from his curriculum vitae that he is a scientist to his bones, his true occupation, the only real one he’s ever had, goes by terms far more sincere than “the asset.” He is a mole, an operative, an agent, an informer, a saboteur, a spy.