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As they entered the laboratory, Matt caught sight of Julie scurrying into the equipment room, which was on the opposite side of the laboratory from the door. The only obvious thing to do was to follow her, which Matt and Malcolm did quickly.

"Hey Julie, what's up?" Matt called to her as they caught up and entered the equipment room together.

"Oh, I don't know. Dr. Stoneking was taking a look at that broken centrifuge you were using yesterday, and --"

Just then, all three of them saw what had caused the noise. Dr. Stoneking sat on the floor with his ears struck back, shaking his head, next to what appeared to be a severely dented centrifuge rotor. When he heard the others enter the room, Dr. Stoneking looked up.

"Ah, Julie. Matt. And you must be Malcolm," Dr. Stoneking said, bashfully. "Sorry to meet you this way, but I was just wrestling with the centrifuge rotor to see if I could get access to the drive shaft and figure out why the centrifuge isn't maintaining speed properly. But, unfortunately, there was some condensation on the rotor, and it slipped out of my paws. Sorry to startle you all."

"Dr. Stoneking! Why on earth did you try to lift that heavy steel rotor all by yourself?" Julie scolded. "You're lucky you didn't drop the damn thing on a paw! As it is, the tile where it fell was totally pulverized. Look! We'll have to get facilities up here to replace it, hopefully sometime this century."

"Well, at least this means we'll be getting a new floor-mounted centrifuge, right, Dr. Stoneking?" Matt inquired. "The rotor is practically half the cost, and this one is certainly beyond repair."

"Oh. Well, yes, of course. I just wanted to see what could be done with this one," Dr. Stoneking said as he stood up and dusted himself off, bits of tile still clinging to his fur. "But clearly I'm not up to such tasks anymore. I should be in my office, writing grants or some such thing. What's an old greymuzzle like me doing in the laboratory anyway, right?"

Dr. Stoneking strode over to where Matt and Malcolm were standing and extended a paw to Malcolm, his professorial aura returning as he recovered from the mishap and being discovered on the floor.

"Malcolm, why don't you come up to my office later so we can discuss your project, after Matt has filled you in a bit more on what we are trying to accomplish," Dr. Stoneking said. "And Julie, please do call Facilities. They are probably going to need to decommission and certify that centrifuge free of contaminants before we can get rid of it, and we need the floor space if we're going to replace it."

"I'm on it," Julie said, resignedly.

"Sorry, Julie," Matt said, wearing a mischievous grin on his muzzle. "I don't envy you having to deal with them. They're probably going to make you give them the address, and they're housed in the same damn building."

"Yeah, yeah. I can't decide what I enjoy more -- dealing with facilities or getting trapped in an elevator with a sales rep," Julie said as the group re-entered the main laboratory room. Being a laboratory manager really was a thankless job.

"Anyway, it's nice to meet you, Malcolm," she added, speaking over her shoulder as she sauntered back to her desk. "Make yourself at home. I just finished showing Matt where everything is, so now I guess he can show you. But feel free to ask if anything is unclear. We don't want any more accidents, do we?"

"No, I suppose not," Malcolm said, clearly a bit taken aback that Julie would speak so candidly about the senior members of the laboratory.

"Eh, we'll be careful," Matt said as he guided Malcolm back to their shared laboratory bay.

"Oh, I am sure you'll both be more careful than I was," Dr. Stoneking said blithely as he headed for the door, likely on the way back to his office.

As soon as Dr. Stoneking had left the room and was out of earshot, Matt wondered aloud, "Why is it that principal investigators always think they know how to fix everything in the laboratory? What the hell was Dr. Stoneking going to do with the centrifuge's drive shaft? Feel it up a bit?"

"Yeah, that's true," Malcolm said, grinning. "My last boss actually welded a capacitor onto a cell culture incubator to get it working again. I was sure he was just going to destroy the thing, but surprisingly it worked."

"Huh. Well, at this point half the equipment in the lab is held together by rubber bands and magical thinking, so maybe your old boss could come out for a visit if he actually knows what he's doing," Matt said. "Anyway, I guess we've had our excitement for the day. That wasn't exactly how I'd planned on making the introductions. But I suppose you *did* meet everyone."

"Yeah, I suppose I did. So... what now?"

"Well, I hate wasting time just showing people where things are located, because you'll never remember anyway, so why don't you just shadow me as I finish preparing the ligation reactions for the recombinant DNA I was making this morning? I'm sure you've done all of this before, but you'll see how we do it here, and learn where we keep the reagents for doing this kind of molecular biology stuff."

"Okay, sure. Just let me grab my lab notebook and we can get started."

As Malcolm went to his desk for his notebook, Matt retrieved the DNA samples from the four-degree refrigerator he'd placed them in earlier that morning, and the two of them worked together on processing the samples.

"So what is it that we're making, exactly?" Malcolm asked.

"Oh, it's simple really. I just thought we needed a good readout for the viability and responsiveness of the cells in our screening assay, so I'm hooking the coding sequence for green fluorescent protein onto the promoter for one of the genes that we know is expressed really highly in the reproductive cells of patients who have contracted the sterility syndrome."

"Ah, okay. So, basically, you think that if we put this DNA into the cells first, they'll glow green from the fluorescent protein only if something has infected them and turned on the immune response gene we know is active in the affected patients? That's actually a really good idea!"

Matt's tail flicked back and forth despite his best efforts. He was happy Malcolm was being so enthusiastic about his experimental idea, and the fox was incredibly charming when he was excited. Matt was also somewhat relieved, as the approach almost seemed too simple to work well.

Matt voiced his lingering doubts to Malcolm, saying, "Well, I am concerned that in some of the cell types we're using, the --"

"-- fluorescence will never turn on," Malcolm interrupted. "Even if the cells are infected, they won't turn green, because they don't express the responsive gene to begin with. So, yeah, we'll get some false negatives. But it's still a good approach."

"Hmm. You *have* done this before, haven't you?" Matt said, beaming and waging his tail in earnest now. "It's always good when a scientist can think on his paws. A nice transcript is one thing, but you clearly actually have some skill."

"I sure hope so," Malcolm said, smiling. "Either that, or my master's degree is just a really expensive piece of paper."

"Very true. I forgot master's students had to pay for their education. That's quite the scam, seeing as doctoral students get free tuition and a stipend besides. What made you only pursue the master's degree?"

Malcolm suddenly looked very uncomfortable, and he shrank away from Matt slightly, his tail drifting downwards as he did so. Matt instantly regretted asking about what was clearly a sore subject, but it was too late to take the question back now.

"Err. Well, I didn't have the -- it wasn't -- I didn't think --," Malcolm said haltingly.

"Hey. It's all right," Matt said as he extended a paw to grab Malcolm's shoulder, squeezing gently in an effort to calm the fox. "I didn't mean anything by the question. You don't owe me any kind of explanation. You're clearly more competent than half the doctoral students I've ever worked with, and it's only your first day!"

Malcolm's mood brightened, and his tail rapidly recovered from its depressed state.

"You really think so?" Malcolm asked. "I thought I was kind of under-qualified to be applying for a staff scientist position, so I was surprised when I received an offer from Dr. Stoneking so quickly."

"That's the great thing about science," Matt said, his paw lingering on Malcolm's shoulder despite no longer having a legitimate reason to do so. "It's less about your background and more about what it is you can contribute right now."

As Matt spoke, the earlier excitement and eagerness returned to Malcolm, and their eyes met briefly, forming a connection more intimate than either of them was comfortable with.

"Speaking of which, let's get back to work!" Matt said, suddenly self-conscious about where he'd placed his paw, and rattled by the eye contact.

Matt retracted his paw and quickly used it to grab a tube containing the DNA they'd been preparing. He padded over to the other side of the lab to measure the concentration of the DNA in the spectrophotometer on Julie's bench, and Malcolm followed, as if the moment they'd shared hadn't happened.

When they arrived at Julie's bay, they found her still on the phone, dealing with the incomprehensible JCSSR phone tree in a futile attempt to reach Facilities about the broken tile and need to decommission the defunct centrifuge. The game of solitaire she had up on her computer screen seemed to be going much better.

Matt and Malcolm wordlessly greeted Julie, made use of the spectrophotometer, and went about diluting and labeling the tube of recombinant DNA for later use in their screening assay. The rest of the day was fairly uneventful; Malcolm and Matt worked efficiently together, even though Malcolm slowed occasionally to note the location of reagents and equipment in his lab notebook. As the evening approached, Malcolm remembered Dr. Stoneking's invitation to visit him in his office, and he did so on his way out of the laboratory for the evening.

Matt, now working by himself, should have been even more efficient as he went about his laboratory tasks. But Matt kept thinking about how much he enjoyed Malcolm's company, and the smell of the fox never left his muzzle as he moved small quantities of biological liquids between tubes, as mechanically as he ever did. Matt realized he was becoming quite infatuated with the fox, but this didn't trouble him as much as it probably should have. After all, while his contract with the JCSSR strictly prohibited relationships between staff members and students, it merely frowned upon relationships among staff members, and Malcolm was technically staff, despite his junior role in the lab.

It occurred to Matt that he didn't even really know if Malcolm was interested in males, although he couldn't shake the impression that he was. Matt hated stereotypes, but really, what were the odds of a scientist-fox being so interested in poetry and also being strictly interested in females? Matt worried that he was merely projecting his own feelings onto Malcolm, that the hint of arousal he thought he smelled on the fox when the two of them touched and locked eyes was merely his imagination. As he finished his work for the day, Matt told himself that the situation with Malcolm would resolve itself with time, and that the time would be all the shorter if they really did meet for drinks and casual conversation later in the week. Matt had to be careful, though -- the work he and Malcolm needed to complete was important, and it would be very irresponsible to let personal entanglements stand in the way of a treatment or cure for the sterility syndrome.