Micro. Michael Crichton

certain polypeptides in cobra venom; his work was part of a vast research interest that included snakes, frogs, and spiders, all of which made neuroactive toxins. His experience with snakes had made him an “envenomation specialist,” occasionally called by hospitals to advise on exotic bites. This caused a certain amount of envy among other graduate students in the lab; as a group, they were highly competitive and quick to notice if anyone got attention from the outside world. Their solution was to complain that it was too dangerous to keep a cobra in the lab, and that it really shouldn’t be there. They referred to Peter’s research as “working with nasty herps.”

      None of this bothered Peter; his disposition was cheerful and even-handed. He came from an academic family, so he didn’t take this backbiting too seriously. His parents were no longer alive, killed in the crash of a light plane in the mountains of Northern California. His father had been a professor of geology at UC Davis, and his mother had taught on the medical faculty in San Francisco; his older brother was a physicist.

      Peter had returned the cobra to the cage just as Rick Hutter came over. Hutter was twenty-four, an ethnobotanist. Lately he had been researching analgesics found in the bark of rain-forest trees. As usual, Rick was wearing faded jeans, a denim shirt, and heavy boots. He had a trimmed beard and a perpetual frown. “I notice you’re not wearing your gloves,” he said.

      “No,” Peter said, “I’ve gotten pretty confident—”

      “When I did my field work, you had to wear gloves,” he said. Rick Hutter never lost an opportunity to remind others in the lab that he had done actual field work. He made it sound as if he had spent years in the remote Amazon backwaters. In fact, he had spent four months doing research in a national park in Costa Rica. “One porter in our team didn’t wear gloves, and reached down to move a rock. Bam! Terciopelo sunk its fangs into him. Fer-de-lance, two meters long. They had to amputate his arm. He was lucky to survive at all.”

      “Uh-huh,” Peter said, hoping Rick would get going. He liked Rick, but the guy had a tendency to lecture everybody.

      The person in the lab who really disliked Rick Hutter was Karen King. Karen, a tall young woman with dark hair and angular shoulders, was studying spider venom and spiderwebs. She overheard Rick lecturing Peter on snakebite in the jungle, and couldn’t stand it. She had been working at a lab bench, and she snapped over her shoulder, “Rick—you stayed in a tourist lodge in Costa Rica. Remember?”

      “Bullshit. We camped in the rain forest—”

      “Two whole nights,” Karen interrupted him, “until the mosquitoes drove you back to the lodge.”

      Rick glared at Karen. His face turned red, and he opened his mouth to say something, but didn’t. Because he couldn’t reply. It was true: the mosquitoes had been hellish. He’d been afraid the mosquitoes might give him malaria or dengue hemorrhagic fever, so he had gone back to the lodge.

      Instead of arguing with Karen King, Rick turned to Peter: “Hey, by the way. I heard a rumor that your brother is coming today. Isn’t he the one who struck it rich with a startup company?”

      “That’s what he tells me.”

      “Well, money isn’t everything. Myself, I’d never work in the private sector. It’s an intellectual desert. The best minds stay in universities so they don’t have to prostitute themselves.”

      Peter wasn’t about to argue with Rick, whose opinions on any subject were strongly held. But Erika Moll, the entomologist who’d recently arrived from Munich, said, “I think you are being rigid. I wouldn’t mind working for a private company at all.”

      Hutter threw up his hands. “See? Prostituting.”

      Erika had slept with several people in the biology department, and didn’t seem to care who knew. She gave him the finger and said, “Spin on it, Rick.”

      “I see you’ve mastered American slang,” Rick said, “among other things.”

      “The other things, you wouldn’t know,” she said. “And you won’t.” She turned to Peter. “Anyway, I see nothing wrong with a private job.”

      “But what is this company, exactly?” said a soft voice. Peter turned and saw Amar Singh, the lab’s expert in plant hormones. Amar was known for his distinctly practical turn of mind. “I mean, what does the company do that makes it so valuable? And this is a biological company? But your brother is a physicist, isn’t he? How does that work?”

      At that moment, Peter heard Jenny Linn across the lab say, “Wow, look at that!” She was staring out the window at the street below. They could hear the rumble of high-performance engines. Jenny said, “Peter, look—is that your brother?”

      Everyone in the lab had gone to the windows.

      Peter saw his brother on the street below, beaming like a kid, waving up at them. Eric was standing alongside a bright yellow Ferrari convertible, his arm around a beautiful blond woman. Behind them was a second Ferrari, gleaming black. Someone said, “Two Ferraris! That’s half a million dollars down there.” The rumble of the engines echoed off the scientific laboratories that lined Divinity Avenue.

      A man stepped out of the black Ferrari. He had a trim build and expensive taste in clothes, though his look was decidedly casual.

      “That’s Vin Drake,” Karen King said, staring out the window.

      “How do you know?” Rick Hutter said to her, standing beside her.

      “How do you not know?” Karen replied. “Vincent Drake is probably the most successful venture capitalist in Boston.”

      “You ask me, it’s a disgrace,” Rick said. “Those cars should have been outlawed years ago.”

      But nobody was listening to him. They were all heading for the stairs, hurrying down to the street. Rick said, “What is the big deal?”

      “You didn’t hear?” Amar said, hurrying past Rick. “They’ve come here to recruit.”

      “Recruit? Recruit who?”

      “Anybody doing good work in the fields that we’re interested in,” Vin Drake said to the students clustered around him. “Microbiology, entomology, chemical ecology, ethnobotany, phytopathology—in other words, all research into the natural world at the micro- or nano-level. That’s what we’re after, and we’re hiring now. You don’t need a PhD. We don’t care about that; if you’re talented you can do your thesis for us. But you will have to move to Hawaii, because that’s where the labs are.”

      Standing to one side, Peter embraced his brother, Eric, then said, “Is that true? You’re already hiring?”

      The blond woman answered. “Yes, it’s true.” She stuck out her hand and introduced herself as Alyson Bender, the CFO of the company. Alyson Bender had a cool handshake with a crisp manner, Peter thought. She wore a fawn-colored business suit with a string of natural pearls at her neck. “We need at least a hundred first-rate researchers by the end of the year,” she said. “They’re not easy to find, even though we offer what is probably the best research environment in the history of science.”

      “Oh? How is that?” Peter said. It was a pretty big claim.

      “It’s true,” his brother said. “Vin will explain.”

      Peter turned to his brother’s car. “Do you mind…” He couldn’t help himself. “Could I get in? Just for a minute?”

      “Sure, go ahead.”

      He slipped behind the wheel, shut the door. The bucket seat was tight, enveloping; the leather smelled rich; the instruments were big and business-like, the steering wheel small, with unusual red buttons on it. Sunlight gleamed off the yellow finish. Everything felt so luxurious, he was a little uneasy; he couldn’t tell if he liked this feeling or not. He shifted in the seat, and felt something under his thigh. He pulled out a white object that looked like a piece of popcorn. And it was light like popcorn, too. But it was stone. He thought the