around the grey-painted centrifuge. 'Which faucet it came from? Any other details?'
    'Poured straight from the kitchen faucet. Jimmy says it's the same out of every 
faucet in the house.'
    Dan took the lid off the jar and sniffed. He paused, considered what he had smelled, 
and then sniffed again.
    'Maybe Shelley was right,' he told me.
    'You think you smell fish?'
    'That's one way of describing it.'
    'What's another way? Turtle soup?'
    Dan dipped his finger in the water and licked it. He frowned, and then licked again. 
'There's definitely some kind of unusual taste and smell associated with this water. But 
it's pretty hard to define. It doesn't taste like any of the usual salts or minerals we 
get around here. It's not like manganese or potassium.'
    He tore off a piece of litmus paper and dipped it into the water. As the water soaked 
into it, the paper gradually turned from pale purple to a reddish colour.
    'Well,' said Dan, 'that indicates the presence of acids.'
    'What kind of acids?'
    'I don't know. We're going to have to make all the proper tests. We're going to start 
by putting a sample into the centrifuge, and seeing if we can separate any solids out of 
it. Did you see if it left any deposits on the Bodine's kitchen sink, or maybe their tub?'
    'Not a trace. Mind you, it's only been troubling them for a couple of days, and 
that's hardly long enough to leave a stain.'
    Dan switched on the centrifuge and we waited while it whirled the Bodines' water 
around and around. Dan said: 'Did you see the Hartford game Thursday?'
    'I missed it. Mrs. Huntley had a burst pipe.'
    Dan wearily rubbed the back of his neck. 'I missed it, too. I was up half the damn 
night analysing fertiliser.'
    Rheta came across the laboratory with an armful of files and reports. Close to, she 
was very pretty, in an odd kind of way. Her nose was a little too short, and her lips 
were a little too wide, but what she lacked in symmetry she made up for with an 
infectious smile. 'I like men who put their work first,' she said, in a mock-serious 
voice, as if she was presenting us each with a medal. 'It shows a responsible, moral 
character.'
    'That's me,' I told her. 'Pipes before pleasure.'
    Dan finished his centrifuge test, and then he took the water over to the 
spectroscope. He was a slow, meticulous worker, and I knew that it was going to be three 
or four hours before he'd completed his analysis. As the electric clock on the laboratory 
wall crept past seven, my initial enthusiasm began to pall, and I began to feel bored and 
hungry, and very much in need of a beer. It was so dark outside now that I could see my 
weary reflection, sitting on a laboratory stool with my chin in my hand. Rheta had almost 
finished tidying up the rows of test tubes and pipettes and assorted laboratory junk, and 
I guessed she was getting ready to quit for the day.
    'Is this really a job for a girl like you?' I asked her, as she put away her Bunsen 
burner hose. 'Why didn't you take up something interesting, like go-go dancing? Or you 
could have been a Playboy bunny with your looks.'
    'Believe me,' said Rheta, closing the cupboard door, 'analysing swine fever samples 
is a hell of a lot more interesting than serving cocktails to lecherous people like you.'
    'Who's lecherous? Just because I have this mental picture of you in one of those 
tight satin outfits, with a cotton puff on your backside, that doesn't mean anything. 
Anyway, how about dinner tonight?'
    'How about dinner tonight?' she asked, unbuttoning her lab coat.
    'I shrugged. 'We could do anything you like. We could go up to Gaylordsville and have 
bluefish and white wine at the Fritz & Fox. Or we could go to Conn's Dairy Bar and have 
milk shakes and hamburgers.'
    'You really know how to live, don't you?' she asked me, with good-humoured sarcasm. 
'Well, thanks, but no thanks. I have a date with Kenny Packer at nine.'
    'Kenny Packer the football player? Pigskin Packer?'
    'That's him.'
    'He's like the Incredible Hulk, only pink.'-Dan said: 'Hold on a minute, you two,' 
and without taking his eyes away from his microscope, he beckoned us over. 'Come and take 
a look at this.'
    We came over, and Dan shifted his stool back so that we could take a look into the 
binocular lenses. I took a squint first, and all I could see was blurry shapes swimming 
around in a sea of dazzling light. But then Rheta took her turn, and she spent two or 
three minutes frowning at the slide in silence, occasionally adjusting the focus or 
moving the slide from side to side.
    Eventually, she stood straight, and looked at Dan with a questioning, concerned 
expression. Dan looked back at her, and shook his head like he didn't know what to say, 
or what to do.
    I said, impatiently: 'Do you mind letting me in on this? All I saw were curly little 
squiggles.'
    Dan nodded. 'There are always curly little squiggles, even in the clearest water. 
Micro-organisms which filtration and purification never remove. They're quite harmless, 
on the whole. You drink millions of them every day.'
    'What are you trying to do?' I asked him. 'Put me off dinner?'
    'Not at all. But those things you can see in this particular sample of water ought to 
put the Bodines off their dinner.'
    'What are they? Anything serious?'
    Dan smoothed the palm of his hand over his bald head. 'It's hard to say. From a 
cursory look at them, they appear to be nothing more than unusually-developed microscopic 
organisms. But when you look at them more closely you can see that they're much more 
sophisticated than the usual run-of-the-mill organisms and microbes you find in water 
Supplies. They seem to have a rudimentary respiratory system, and they also seem to be 
exuding some kind of substance which is mingling with the water.'
    I sat astride one of the stools. 'Is that what's making the water discoloured?'
    'I would guess so. Yes, it almost certainly is.'
    'So what are these things? You ever seen them before?' I asked him.
    Dan glanced at Rheta. 'Have you?' he asked her. She shook her head, and said nothing.
    Dan said: 'They're not in any way familiar to me, either.
    They're not the kind of bug you'd normally expect to find in water, and from what 
little I've seen of them so far, without having had the chance to study their full life 
cycle, I'd say that they lead a most unusual existence. This yellow or green stuff they 
keep producing is coming out of them in enormous quantities, comparatively speaking. You 
take a look at them again. If you or I excreted any kind of substance at that rate, we'd 
be pushing out twenty gallons an hour.'
    I pulled a disgusted face, but Dan said: 'Go ahead. Take another look,' and so I bent 
over the microscope and peered intently at the sample of water.
    Now I knew what I was looking for, I could identify the organisms that Dan was 
talking about. They were transparent and shadowy, but they had a distinctive shape, like 
sea-horses, and I could even see where their respiratory systems were. They seemed to