"Touch nothing. This place is contaminated." When he had silence and was sure the cameras had stopped panning the milling crowd, he waved his arms and spoke.

"Nothing could happen, they told us. Nothing could harm anyone, they told us. The genes and chromosomes and whatever life codes these monsters are tinkering with have trouble enough surviving, they said. Well, at least this time it has struck only the guilty. Let's stop it before it strikes the innocent."

The protestors, reveling in their good fortune, continued their meeting long after the news cameramen had left. Babies become cranky and someone was sent out for infant's formula. Someone else was dispatched for hamburgers and soft drinks for the elders. They passed fourteen resolutions, all numbered, all labeled Boston Graduate Biological. In this way, the resolution itself would always bring up the accident that happened in the lab where no accident could happen.

Baby Ethel went to sleep in her moist pants, soiled backside up, unsmiling face down on her mother's rolled-up jacket in the rear of the laboratory.

Someone thought they saw a figure paw toward her. Someone else looked around to hear a very low, grumbling growl that seemed to come from just outside the window leading to the alley. And then a young child wandered through saying Dr. Feinberg had returned.

"The lady who drank the nasty things," said the child in explanation.

"Oh, God. No," came a voice from the back of the room. "No, no, no."

Mrs. Walters knew baby Ethel was sleeping back there. She bulled her way through the group, knocking over chairs and people, following a mother's instinct as old as the caves. She knew something bad had come to her child. She slipped, slamming into the person who had cried out in horror. She tried to get up but slipped again. She was wallowing in some oily, red goo. It wasn't oily. It was slippery. It was blood.