“What are they?”

“Tylenol #3. For pain. Take the others one at a time four to six hours apart. And here.” She grabbed a wadded up bit of cloth. “Harvey loaned you his sweatshirt. He wants it back by tomorrow.”

“I’ll get it to him. I’ll also try not to bleed on it.”

“Go ahead and bleed on it. Harvey does. He plays rugby in it.”

Kev headed back to the physics building. He might be able to clean things up before too many others got there. And he had a lot of thinking to do.

Being trusted and privileged physics undergrad (and getting some meager funds for services rendered) meant Kevin had a key to the side door. Legally. He also had an illegal magnetic key that opened about seventy percent of the doors in the building, courtesy of Tommy Parsons and himself, working late one night to see if they could figure out how the keys were actually set. Tommy considered selling them but then round-filed the idea when Kevin pointed out that nobody wanted to get into the physics building during the day, much less after hours.

Tommy was working on keys for several of the undergraduate girl’s dormitories and the chemistry building, at the present time. He always liked a challenge, did Tommy. Kevin went down the stairs slowly, painfully, and let himself in. He found himself frozen in place as he surveyed the total lack of damage that greeted him. His mouth dropped open for all of fifteen seconds before he shook himself, snapped it shut and sighed. “Why not? Mystical gunk evaporates, I expect.” He went so far as to shrug. Well, hell, I didn’t want to clean it up, anyway, he thought.

Still, he remembered the scent of ozone and decided he still needed to check the NMR and see if any damage would have to be repaired. He rather hoped it didn’t, since Tommy knew what to do and Kevin didn’t. He wasn’t really checked out on the guts of the machine, yet.

The access panel was still open and when he looked inside, one of the boards looked to be singed. Damn, he was going to have to explain that to Parsons. A moment of thought and he nodded. Could have happened if there was a short in the board, when the machine was first turned on. He’d use that as his guess when Parsons started cursing, Monday morning. Until then, he’d leave well enough alone.

Kev stood up and then recalled the trace he’d seen just after Marcus had bit the big one. He extracted it, scanned it and nodded. There it was. Too many spikes for benzene. Way, way too many for any compound he had ever seen run through the machine. On a whim, he opened up the sample access port, waited for the samples to clear and then extracted them to take a look.

All of them barring nine in a row, looked exactly as he would have expected. A clear liquid. The other nine had a slightly cloudy, brownish color that made no sense to him whatsoever. The tiny capillary tubes used for the sample were the same as the ones used for melting point determinations and so thin and tiny, it was hard to see exactly what was in there.

He found a piece of clean white paper and extracted one of them and held the paper behind it. Still too dark to see clearly.

Kev headed for the electronics repair lab and a florescent magnifier they kept there. After he switched the light on, he positioned the lens to take a closer look and was rewarded by a nice, clear view of the tiny tube. He’d been right. The liquid in the tube appeared to be the same color as a very weak tea. He thought he also could make out some particles that hadn’t as yet dissolved.