Over a period of weeks they had become so thoroughly steeped in an environment of hypermanic sexual obsession that behaviour induced surgically in the amygdalectomized cats had been induced in the controls without any intervention whatsoever. Starling had discovered that a strong social or “cultural” atmosphere, even as abnormal as this one, could in time overwhelm the genetically determined responses of perfectly normal, healthy animals. Fourteen years later, Starling became the twentieth member of the Dupont faculty awarded the Nobel Prize.

—Simon McGough and Sebastian J. R.

Sloane, eds., The Dictionary of Nobel

Laureates, 3rd ed. (Oxford and New York:

Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 512.

Prologue: The Dupont Man

Every time the men’s-room door opened, the amped-up onslaught of Swarm, the band banging out the concert in the theater overhead, came crashing in, ricocheting off all the mirrors and ceramic surfaces until it seemed twice as loud. But then an air hinge would close the door, and Swarm would vanish, and you could once again hear students drunk on youth and beer being funny or at least loud as they stood before the urinals.

Two of them were finding it amusing to move their hands back and forth in front of the electric eyes to make the urinals keep flushing. One exclaimed to the other, “Whattaya mean, a slut? She told me she’s been re-virginated!” They both broke up over that.

“She actually said that? Re-virginated?”

“Yeah! Re-virginated or born-again virgin, something like that!”

“Maybe she thinks that’s what morning-after pills do!” They both broke up again. They had reached that stage in a college boy’s evening at which all comments seem more devastatingly funny if shouted.

Urinals kept flushing, boys kept disintegrating over one another’s wit, and somewhere in the long row of toilet cubicles somebody was vomiting. Then the door would open and Swarm would come crashing in again.



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