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get a job, and read and play. He could abandon his prodigious expectations and begin to live.
    His parents were baffled by this turn of events, and some of his Cincinnati professors were heartbroken, but Jacob did not waste much time pining for what might have been. He was busy now with growing up, and he had just fallen in love with Marion.
    They'd met in Applebaum's lab when she arrived from Barnard to do her initial crystallography research. He was a postdoc, and she a freshman in college, but they were just the same age. Jacob saw in Marion everything he was not. He saw the way she pursued her work, taking her own direction in the lab. She was small, with curly brown hair and snapping black eyes, and she worked with a baggy lab coat thrown over her dress. The sleeves were too long on her, so her fingers just peeped out. Jacob had hardly noticed women before, but in his eighteenth year, when he gave up being a genius, he gave his heart to Marion, and more than that, he laid his formidable mind at her feet. When they were twenty he asked her to marry him. She was only a girl, but he believed she would make radical discoveries.
    This was why Jacob dedicated himself to Marion. He was not trying to be a feminist, or to sacrifice himself. He did not particularly resent his teaching career at Tufts. He believed in Marion. He proofread every paper she wrote, and discussed every nuance of her work in the lab. Friends and colleagues thought him saintly and quite strange. Some felt secretly that he emasculated himself in his devotion to his wife's career. He had been a preternaturally gifted boy, and was now a highly unusual man. His mind was still agile, his reasoning frighteningly quick. He was a microbiology lecturer known for his clarity and his passion for the subject. He was famous, as well, for his dedication to those undergraduates who came to him for help. Patiently, during office hours, he tried to explain his course material, even while privately he wondered if some of his students had been mistakenly admitted to college, because they seemed to him mildly retarded. He was a happy man, for he had grown up. Indeed, he had grown out of himself, as many child prodigies fail to do. He was happy because he had discovered early, rather than late, that he would not be winning a Nobel Prize. And he had been granted an insight many of his scientific peers lacked—that when it came to Nobels, he himself did not need one. No, someday that distinction would belong to his wife.
    “Is something wrong?” he asked Marion without looking up from the chessboard. Instead of joining them, she had been standing silently in the doorway of the kitchen. “What is it?”
    “Something strange with the mice,” she said.
    “Cliff's?”
    “Yes.” She described to him what she and Feng had seen.
    “Suddenly the virus is working?”
    “Well, it's probably not.”
    “You'll have to test it out,” Jacob said. “Then you'll see.”
    “Of course.”
    He nodded matter-of-factly, eyes on his queen.
    “I don't know if we should tell Sandy yet,” Marion said.
    “Because he'll put out a press release that you've cured cancer.”
    “I didn't mean that . . .”
    “Check,” said Jacob. “Well, I think you're right not to tell him.”
    “That's the thing.” Marion fretted. “I don't think it's right at all to keep information from him, but I'm worried . . .”
    “He'll go off half-cocked,” said Jacob.
    “Your turn,” said Aaron, extricating himself.
    Unhappily, Marion came over to the table and set down her worn brown briefcase with the small gold initials MJM. The
J
was for Joyce—a fact that amused Sandy greatly. He'd teased, “Suspicious would be a better middle name for you. Or Doubtful.”
    “You know I'm right,” Jacob said, frowning at the board.
    She did know. Sandy went off half-cocked: that was the danger, but it was also entirely the good of him. You could set him off like a firecracker. She knew no one else so flammable.