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same flowers that grow in Falk’s Glen now are the exact same blossoms Falk and his team discovered. The life cycle of elysia has never been discerned; for all we know, it
doesn’t
reproduce.”
    Dr. Klutz snorts and remembers her cigarette. Before she inhales again, however, she says, “Sounds like some bully magic. So that’s what happened to Falk, then? Shows up bold as brass, names the flower, names the place after himself, and then promptly eats the bloody thing and drops dead?”
    “No, that’s not how it happened at all. They set up camp and began experimenting on rats, that’s what they did. The camp moved here and there and finally
here
, where we are now, and then it became permanent. I think it was Dr. Falk’s successor, Wickham, who finally named it Little Cambridge.” And who developed the Wickham test, designed to evaluate new scientists before bringing them into the project. I wonder what Dr. Klutz’s Wickham test was.
    “So what’s the chart about?”
    “I’m getting to that. Will you be patient?” I brush my hair behind my ears and draw a deep breath. “So, they experimented on rats. They figured out how to add the nectar of another flower to elysia to counteract its lethality and make it safe to inject into rats and humans alike. I’ve never seen the other flower, but Uncle Paolo tells me it’s just called the catalyst. It must be rare because I can’t find it in any encyclopedia or database anywhere. Anyway, they started injecting the rats, but nothing happened. They lived their normal little rat lives and died when they got old. End of story.”
    “Is it?”
    “Is it what?”
    “Is that the end of the story?”
    “Of course not!” The woman may be a biomedical engineer, but I begin to think she might also be a certifiable idiot. “Because something happened that no one expected. The scientists had been injecting the rats’ offspring and the offspring’s offspring with Immortis—the nonlethal form of elysia made with the catalyst—never quite believing that anything would come of it. The rats lived, the rats died, and they never showed a sign of anything abnormal. Until…” I cross the room, lift the lid of a cage, and pick up the rat inside it. “Until Roosevelt.”
    I hold him up to Dr. Klutz, hoping that—doctor of biomedicine or not—she might scream and cringe. Instead, she plucks Roosevelt from my hands and coos over him as if he were a kitten. A little surprised, but oddly pleased that she seems so taken with him, I continue, “Roosevelt was born in 1904.”
    She nearly drops him, and he squeals indignantly. “You’re lying!”
    “I certainly am not. Roosevelt is over a hundred years old. Most rats don’t live more than two or three.”
    Dr. Klutz stares at Roosevelt, then stares at me. “What happened then?”
    Ah. I have her attention again, and this time I know she’s hooked for good. “Well, Roosevelt here revealed a few more surprises. He was the only rat to be born in his litter, which is unusual in itself. When Dr. Falk went to inject him with Immortis, the needle of the syringe snapped. So did the other dozen or so he tried to use. Yes, Roosevelt’s skin is as thick as mine. That is to say, it is completely impenetrable. And what is more, Roosevelt is faster and more agile than any other rat. Uh-huh,” I nod when she looks at me questioningly. “Me too. And most important of all, three, four, twenty years pass, and Roosevelt goes on living as happily and healthily as you could wish for. So of course Dr. Falk runs dozens of experiments on hundreds of rats and discovers the secret.”
    I pause, relishing the way Dr. Klutz is hanging on my every word. Finally, I say it. “It comes down to the gradual alteration of the human—or rat—genome. It takes five generations, no more and no less, of periodic injections of Immortis for the immortality gene in the flower to assimilate into the genetic code of the rat or the human. Dr. Falk returned to the