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sample to sample,” Thomas replies, “because the expense of procuring hard-ice fluctuates widely. Extraction involves sea voyages lasting months, sonar-scanning hundreds of bergs to find a vein, then mining specimens out of submerged ice, all without compromising the material. That’s the expensive part. Reanimating creatures back here, comparatively, is about as costly as turning on the lights.”
    â€œToday’s krill, for example,” the congressman’s pet persists. “How much did it cost to find the material, bring it here, store it, and now reanimate it?”
    â€œThis institute,” you interject, doing your best at that moment not to look at Thomas, “has the luxury of receiving private funding, which grants us the liberty of keeping our financial information also private. The point is not to avoid accountability, but to cultivate flexibility and responsiveness to findings, in stark contrast with today’s typically rigid governmental funding of the sciences. We are following the model Peter Marshall used in Great Britain seventy years ago. Operating a private lab enabled him to identify the electron transport mechanism in mitochondria when no one else was able.”
    â€œDidn’t he win the Nobel for that?” asks the newspaper heir.
    You hold your hands out, give a little bow.
    â€œWe’re ready,” calls the postdoc. That is your cue. You reach into your pocket for a stopwatch and hold it at arm’s length. They all glance, but return their eyes to the projection screen. They do not want to miss the mystery. They want to shed their skepticism. They want, in some inexplicable way, for you to become the hand of God.
    â€œPlease watch closely,” the postdoc says. He lowers a skim of ice, thin as a piece of paper, into the warm bath. It dissolves immediately. The screen overhead divides, one side showing the bath, the other displaying a technician’s hand on a black dial. He turns it clockwise. “We are now adding a weak electric current and a powerful magnetic field.”
    You start the stopwatch. And barely suppress the joy in your throat.
    The water shows an agitation so small it could be a trick, the eye manufacturing what it wants to see. An expectant silence possesses the room. You love this moment, the anticipation. Then, ever so slowly, one krill unbends from its cold prison.
    â€œRecovery,” you explain, and at that the hand on the dial cranks hard to the right. Instantly the water is full of activity, krill opening and closing like inchworms stretching to reach the next leaf. Several seem to move, in a straight line that indicates a purpose or destination. Two bump each other, then veer away. Another jumps clear out of the microscope’s field of vision.
    â€œPlateau,” you tell them.
    The woman from the Post puts one hand on her chest. “Oh my God.”
    It never fails to thrill you. These tiny beings that appeared to be dead . . . there is no other way to phrase it but that you are bringing them back to life. The krills’ motion rises in tempo. It looks like play. As their activity continues, you cannot resist projecting all sorts of emotions onto them: exuberance at being alive again, comfort at being warm, delight at encountering others of their species. One day might it be possible to mate two reanimated krill?
    Now the energy shifts. Their motions grow frantic, violence on a microscopic scale. You announce: “Frenzy.”
    Perhaps they are living the krill’s version of the most fulfilling life they can, because they know at any moment it will end. Or perhaps they are panicking, for the same reason. If only they had consciousness, if only they could communicate.
    Eventually the energy decays on the screen. The creatures slow in their motion. Finally they stop, save one whose extremities twitch like a just-dead beetle. Then it, too, goes still. You click the stopwatch loudly, and with a