"Kafkaesque". It had become Dr. Al Kozinski’s favorite expression. It took him days to recover after the police interviewed him. "Aren’t certain relationships between colleagues ‘privileged,’ just like client-attorney relationships?" he asked Dr. Fleischman.

     Kafkaesque, distorted, surreal. I was sensitized to little things, like the security guards checking our I.D.s at the front entrance in the morning. In the evening, I felt nauseous when I had to walk around a cluster of guards outside the building. They were getting orders in cop talk from a pudgy, cigarette-smoking Miami Police Department burnout who wore a rumpled navy blazer and gum-soled shoes.

     And each day was Kafkaesque. The profs were metamorphosing. Stampawicz became perceptively more aggressive. Maria Mendez thought he was wresting control of the Graduate Program from Taylor. Dr. Sturtz’ attitude of sophisticated unconcern metamorphosed into assertive superiority. Robert Gunnison, in his Hawaiian shirt, shorts and sandals, held forth like a hallway philosopher, making vague pronouncements about the need for responsibility in science. And Rob McGregor became tenaciously inquisitive.

     And the indictment provided a focal point for our collective angst. The Miami Standard carried a short story in the local news section. It stated that Dr. John Ledbetter, Professor of Pharmacology at the Bryan Medical School, was indicted for the murder of his colleague Dr. Charles Cooper. The indictment claimed that he had poisoned Cooper and offered professional rivalry as a motive. The article said that the indictment was supported by medical evidence from the M.E.’s Office. But it said that defense attorney Jason Diamond described the case as "fabrication, flimsy beyond imagination." He was very critical of Dr. Geoffrey Westley.

     The next day, Dr. Kozinski’s technician called me from across the lab and handed me the phone.

     "Ben, this is Alice. Alice McRae from the Mensa Society."

     "Hi, Alice. How are you doing?"

     "Well, that’s what I called up to ask you, Ben. You know your department has been in the paper. There’s something about one of your profs having poisoned another. What do you make of it?"

     I heard a click of a keyboard and office conversation in the background. I could imagine Alice sitting at her computer, ready to take down my every word. She was probably also recording our conversation "for accuracy."

     "Alice, all this stuff happened before I came to the Department."

     "Sure, but you must know something. You’re sitting right in the middle of it."

     "Alice, I’m sorry, but I can’t tell you anything."

     "Why?"

     "Because: One, I don’t know anything and Two, we are under orders to say nothing to the media."

     "It must be very confusing around there now. Do the professors think — "

     "Alice, I’m sorry. I can’t say anything."

     "Bastard." (Click.)

     The next day there was another story in the Miami Standard. The headline read "Murder or Coroner’s Theory?" It repeated the details of the day before, stating that the indictment hung on an intricate theory of Dr. Geoffrey Westley. The story said that the professors in the Department of Pharmacology were in a state of shock, and that everyone was under orders to give no details.

     The next day, I received my own shock. Rebecca and I were eating lunch on a park bench outside the Med School and sharing our feelings. Then I looked up to see Alice McRae sitting with Rob McGregor, just a few yards away! Their bench faced away, but they sat sideways. Alice nodded as she took notes and listened. Rob was smiling and gesticulating, like when he was in one of his high-baud-rate information-transfer modes. Occasionally, Rob would stop and then Alice’s lips would move, and suddenly he would be talking again. How many intelligently formulated questions would it take to uncover Ben Candidi? What would they do if they turned and saw me? I gasped, told Rebecca I’d forgotten to turn off the electrophoresis and got the hell out of there.

     The next day the Miami Standard ran a background piece under Alice’s byline. "Sources who declined to be named" confirmed that Ledbetter and Cooper had been fighting for some time. Her sources described Ledbetter as a brilliant but personally difficult scientist. She wrote that within days of Cooper’s death, an employee of the Dade County Medical Examiner’s Office had made application for study in the Department and was accepted. At this time, it is not clear if there was any relationship between the sudden appearance of this employee and Dr. Goeffrey Westley’s eventual findings.

     From that day on, McGregor avoided me as much as I avoided him.

     Luckily, I wasn’t named in the article. Luckily, Rebecca didn’t see it. Luckily, that day was Good Friday, and the med students got a one-week Easter vacation. Unluckily, we grad students were still expected to work in the lab. The following Tuesday Dr. Moore sent around a memo saying that we were not to talk to reporters or take any actions which "might confuse the public or compromise the legal proceedings."

     I started feeling sorry for Ledbetter and had trouble getting him off my mind. Someone said he had a daughter in a college in the Northeast, and that he had divorced his wife several years earlier. He probably didn’t have many friends. What was he doing now? Planning his defense? Was I really sure that he was guilty?

     I took refuge in the library, but Ledbetter found ways to haunt me there. While browsing the shelves, I opened a volume of the Journal of Psychiatric Medicine to an article titled "The Narcissistic Personality." Seven of the nine listed traits described him perfectly: Extreme reaction to criticism; grandiose sense of self-importance; preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success; pronounced sense of entitlement; lack of empathy for others; pronounced feelings of envy; and elitist attitude. Or had Ledbetter simply been disappointed about not getting proper credit? I longed to discuss my doubts and feelings. But I had no one. Fondly, I tried to recount Westley’s English-Sheepdog lectures on the Divine Scheme of Things. Oh, how I longed to check my moral compass against his.

     And torpid weather did its part. By Easter it became quite warm. By late April it turned to summer. The cumulus clouds were back, the thermometer passed 80-degree mark before noon, and it was always humid. And in mid-May, two weeks before final exams, came the African dust. It happens in the summer, every once in a while. A big Saharan sandstorm kicks micron-sized grains of sand thousands of feet in the air, and the Trade Winds carry them to the Caribbean. The dust seems to get pulled down when the winds come ashore. The sky became a haze, and the downtown buildings were indistinct.

     In the early evening, two hours before sunset, the sun transformed into a large pale sphere. You could almost mistake it for the moon, except for its slight yellowish cast and lack of features. You could look straight at it without hurting your eyes. And there was no sunset. Well above the horizon, the sun simply faded away and disappeared. No glorious sunsets. No clouds with silver linings. Instead, fallout. When it rained, the cars were covered with dirty splotches.

     Then Ledbetter invaded my dreams. One night on the boat I dreamt that I was in a Central American jungle. The Aztecs were rounding up people to tear their hearts out. I came across a large pyramid, partially covered with jungle growth and swarming with warriors. By an act of willpower, I was able to float away. Rising up the side of the pyramid over their heads, I floated over a bald priest, with a large feather headdress, standing at the top. As he slashed the air with a knife, I recognized Ledbetter’s face. I tried to float higher. The warriors shot arrows at me and yelled that I didn’t have the right DNA sequence.

     Then a well-defined Egyptian pyramid rose like the sun in the East, and I had a vision of Westley in his Pharaoh Chair. And Margaret’s voice echoed from the clouds:

     "We shall have to tame these savages. And we shall give them a real drubbing if they don’t behave themselves! And we’ll singe their tail feathers in the bargain, we will!"

     The feathered priest shouted out, cursing in the voice of Ledbetter, "Yours is the logic of fools, a sacrilege of science."

     Awakening in a nauseous state, I went up to the cockpit. It was covered with dust, and there was no breeze. Coconut Grove gave off its ghostly yellow light. I could make out the Mayan Temple shaped building housing Tassel-Toe Diamond’s office. I went below and grabbed a beer to wash down my throat and quiet my nerves.

     Rebecca’s apartment was air conditioned and dust-free, and her sleeping body was warm and soothing, but Ledbetter still attacked me while I slept there. In a dream, I hovered over a cold, starlit desert floor and glided to a walled city. Holding a short thin rope, I floated over the wall and drifted through a moorish arched window into a palace — floating over the heads of sleeping guards armed with long daggers — drifting into a spacious bed chamber. On the bed slept a regal figure in a long robe. Persian slippers on his feet curled up at a ridiculous angle. He resembled a dead Raja on a funeral pyre, ready for the torch. What was I doing?

     Behind me an imperious, English-accented voice, exclaimed, "Not in the slipper, Watson, in the chest!"

     But I could find no one behind me. I descended to a small treasure chest at the foot of the bed and plugged the rope into the keyhole. The chest sprang open to reveal glimmering plates and strings of diamonds, each of which held the secrets of the centuries of souls who had possessed them. I slowly perceived them to be optical discs and the diamonds to be computer chips. The sleeping sultan began to stir and transform into Ledbetter. I sensed a light step behind me and saw, reflected in the plate, a dark-haired, veiled maiden.

     "The plate is crystal in your hand," she sang in an enchanting but lulling soprano.

     "Rebecca!" I shouted.

     "Ben," she cried, appearing before me. I sat up as if shot from a bolt.

     "Rebecca, he’s going to find us," I shouted, waking myself in the process.

     "Who?" she asked.

     "Led — " I said, swallowing my tongue to stop the last two syllables of Ledbetter’s name from betraying me. "Lead to crystal to dagger in the back."

     Thankfully, inspiration had not abandoned me.

     "Ben, darling. You had a bad dream, but it’s over now. Would it help if you told me about it?"

     "No."

     No, I couldn’t tell her. No, I couldn’t bear to hear a play-by-play account of the trial. No, I couldn’t stand up to scrutiny if they subpoenaed me on my role in the Ledbetter investigation. I could act the smart-ass in front of the Dean, but I wouldn’t be able to lie under oath for hours. Westley had known this and had offered a last word of advice: "Do your utmost to keep from getting sucked into this thing." But the pull was getting stronger by the day, and the situation changed from Kafkaesque to nasty.