None of this bothered Peter; his disposition was cheerful and even-handed. He came from an academic family, so he didn’t take this backbiting too seriously. His parents were no longer alive, killed in the crash of a light plane in the mountains of Northern California. His father had been a professor of geology at UC Davis, and his mother had taught on the medical faculty in San Francisco; his older brother was a physicist.

Peter had returned the cobra to the cage just as Rick Hutter came over. Hutter was twenty-four, an ethnobotanist. Lately he had been researching analgesics found in the bark of rain-forest trees. As usual, Rick was wearing faded jeans, a denim shirt, and heavy boots. He had a trimmed beard and a perpetual frown. “I notice you’re not wearing your gloves,” he said.

“No,” Peter said, “I’ve gotten pretty confident-”

“When I did my field work, you had to wear gloves,” he said. Rick Hutter never lost an opportunity to remind others in the lab that he had done actual field work. He made it sound as if he had spent years in the remote Amazon backwaters. In fact, he had spent four months doing research in a national park in Costa Rica. “One porter in our team didn’t wear gloves, and reached down to move a rock. Bam! Terciopelo sunk its fangs into him. Fer-de-lance, two meters long. They had to amputate his arm. He was lucky to survive at all.”

“Uh-huh,” Peter said, hoping Rick would get going. He liked Rick, but the guy had a tendency to lecture everybody.

The person in the lab who really disliked Rick Hutter was Karen King. Karen, a tall young woman with dark hair and angular shoulders, was studying spider venom and spiderwebs. She overheard Rick lecturing Peter on snakebite in the jungle, and couldn’t stand it. She had been working at a lab bench, and she snapped over her shoulder, “Rick-you stayed in a tourist lodge in Costa Rica. Remember?”

“Bullshit. We camped in the rain forest-”