“Now it used to be that you couldn’t mix chickenshit in water because it would lose its juice, but with Pendleton’s process, not only can you mix it with water, but you get something like triple the effect.

“Naturally, this would make a nice little item on AgriTech’s shelf. I might even buy you some for Christmas. You could rub it on your dick, although I doubt the stuff could be that good.”

“Thank you.”

“But don’t get your hopes up, because just when Doc Guano gets this close,” said Graham, holding his thumb and forefinger a sliver apart, “to inventing Supershit, he goes off to this conference and meets Miss Wong.”

“Is that really her name?”

“Do I know? Wong, Wang, Ching, Chang, what’s the difference?”

“Yeah, so? Doctor This, Doctor That, what’s the difference? I’ll bet you AgriTech has more than one biochemist.”

“Not like Pendleton, they don’t. Besides, he took his notes with him.”

Neal could see it coming and he didn’t want this job. Maybe Robert Pendleton didn’t want to finish his research, he thought, but I want to finish mine. Get my master’s and go on for the old Ph. D. Find a job in some little state college somewhere and spend the rest of my life reading books instead of running dirty errands for the Man.

“Have the cops pick him up for theft, then. The notes are AgriTech’s property,” Neal said.

Graham shook his head. “Then maybe he’d be too unhappy to play with his test tubes anymore. The AgriTech people don’t want their professor in the slammer; they want their chickenshit in the pot.”