It was his third therapist in as many weeks. The others had quit within several sessions, claiming he was irascible, uncooperative; but, after all, it had only been at the Head of Department's insistence that he had agreed to see them. He sniffed angrily. Ridiculous that he, Dr. Leonid Szilard, should have to submit to hours of infuriating psychobabble. Even undergraduates often complained of the stress of academic life - shouldn't a senior faculty member be allowed a few nervous breakdowns? Szilard shifted himself on the uncomfortable leatherette of the couch. From his chair across the room Martens made a steeple with his fingers.

"Your problem is a simple one: excessive stress," said the shrink. "With a little commitment on your part, I feel sure we can make significant progress within the week."

Szilard glanced up at him skeptically. "You know, it's not often you find a biological psychologist in private practice," he said.

This was true. Most professionals in the field confined themselves to the molecular study of the mind. Martens had been drummed out of academia for trying to suggest that the tertiary structure of zinc finger proteins had a deep Freudian significance.

The therapist gave a thin-lipped smile. "My unique perspective may be just the solution to your particular problem. In fact, I've developed a revolutionary form of treatment I'd like you to try. Another mint?" He gestured to the glass dish on one arm of the couch.

"Thank you, they're delicious." Szilard popped another into his mouth. He had been munching them steadily during the entire session; they helped take his mind off of Martens' inane chatter.

"The treatment involves an engineered retrovirus I've tailored for psychotherapeutic use. Upon infection, it integrates harmlessly into the genome; but when triggered by the biochemical stress response it releases a mild toxin at gradually increasing dosage. The perfect operant conditioning for type A personalities. B.F. Skinner would be proud."

Szilard choked on his mint. "You've got to be kidding."

Martens shook his head solemnly.

"This is absurd." Szilard got up to leave. "There is no way I would agree to participate in such a harebrained scheme."

The shrink gave a quiet laugh. "Oh, but you already have. Sit down, Dr. Szilard. You are to be my first test subject." He gestured again toward the near-empty glass dish.

"The mints? But . . . but . . ."

"I'm marketing it as a minty-fresh nutraceutical. The presence of wintergreen will help avoid regulatory pressure from the FDA."

Szilard sank back onto the couch in shock.

"You should feel fortunate to be a part of such a groundbreaking study," Martens went on. "The virus has a very sophisticated mechanism of transcriptional control. It's responsive only to emotionally based stress; in fact, it has a slight specificity to endocrine tissues, so you should feel the effects as soon as your body starts to generate harmful hormones."

"Wonderful," moaned Szilard.

"Initial levels of the toxin cause a feeling of tingling or slight discomfort, prodding the subject toward a more relaxed alternative. After continued stress, toxin levels begin to rise, leading to nausea, migraines, and severe disorientation."

"I said, that's freaking wonderful! Don't you think you should have consulted me before pumping me full of this quackish plague?" Szilard had turned a pale shade of green.

"Unfortunately, the toxin appears to promote cellular lysis at extreme concentrations," Martens breezily continued. "If a negative emotion persists for more than several hours, your tissues may begin to dissolve."

"Dissolve? Dissolve?" Szilard wailed. "Am I to spend the rest of my short life in a state of suspended terror?"

Martens shook his head. "Toxin expression is confined to the early and intermediate-early stages of infection," he said benignly. "Over a period of seven days the provirus will gradually become transcriptionally inactive. After that, you're free to fume and cuss to your heart's content."

"If I survive."

"Precisely. The next week will provide you with a valuable learning experience in conscious serenity and self-control. Whenever someone does something to irritate you, take a relaxed view of the matter. Try counting to 10 in a calm, centered voice. Don't sweat the small stuff - look on the sunny side of life! Just let your troubles slide away like water off the back of a duck. Think of yourself as - "

"One, two, three, four," began Szilard.

"Not now," Martens snapped. "Just try to relax, and you should be fine."

Szilard walked into the departmental lobby. Things were going remarkably well, considering; he had dug into his burnt toast and blackened eggs with a cheery gusto, he had been cut off twice on the drive to work but had made the requisite rude gestures with a careful nonchalance.

On his way in, Szilard stopped by the department secretary's desk, behind which sat a disembodied pink bubble. He waited patiently for it to deflate. Eventually it did, revealing the niece of the Head of Department, a temporary replacement for the desk's usual and far more efficient inhabitant.

"Yeah?" said the niece, between chews.

Szilard dropped two sheets of paper onto her desk, each with a photograph paper-clipped to its back. "And a good morning to you," he said. "I need to modify this two-page handout for my seminar this afternoon. Would you be so kind as to copy these pictures over the outlined areas?"

Another bubble gradually inflated and burst. "But, the pictures aren't over the outlined areas," she said.

"Feel free to remove the paper clips and adjust them. No, I'll do it for you." Szilard did so, ignoring the faint tingling that had begun to pulse in his fingertips.

From behind the desk, the chewing developed a faintly puzzled overtone.

"Look," he said. "It's very simple. Put Figure 3 on page one, and Figure 4 on page two." He indicated the figures, which were clearly labeled.

The niece stopped chewing.

"So," she said gradually, "where do pages 3 and 4 go?"

He blinked. "There are only two pages."

Silence.

"Okay, this is for you." He wrote on a huge Post-it Note and stuck it to her computer screen:

She stared at the paper for a long moment. "What was it you want me to do again?"

Szilard felt a sudden pang of nausea. "You'll figure it out." He staggered off toward the elevator.

Still slightly queasy, Szilard opened the door to his empty lab. Perfect, he thought - he could get that call to the lab supply company over with in peace. Sharky, his graduate student, had ordered $500 worth of plastic colony spreaders in order to receive a free T-shirt. Szilard flipped on the lights and dialed the number on the phone by the door.

A cordial voice blared from the handset. "Thank you for calling LysEnCo, the merger of Lysosome Technologies and the Enzon Corporation." Voice mail again! Szilard swore quietly. The damn thing was speech-activated as well as touch-tone. A physician friend of his had complained of trouble on the golf course being constantly redirected to extension four.

"To place an order over the phone, please press or say 'two.' If you'd like to participate in our T-shirt giveaway, please press or say 'three.' If you'd like to register a complaint - "

The door opened and Denise Mankiewicz, his chief postdoc, came into the room. "Hi, Lee. How many colonies came up on the screen?"

"Two. No, four! Damn."

"Well, which was it?"

"I'll tell you later." Szilard frantically paged back on the voice mail, but before long was lost in a tangled mess. He slammed the phone down on the hook and dropped into a chair. Suddenly he was not feeling very well.

There was a quiet hum, and the sound of distant chewing echoed into the laboratory. The replacement secretary's voice came over the intercom.

"Paging Dr. Fig; please dial extension 1234. Dr. Fig; extension one-two-three-four."

Szilard froze. He ran to the bathroom, making record time.

After nearly half an hour Szilard meekly returned to the lab. He tried to complete some experiments, but nothing seemed to be working properly; his gels ran backward into the buffer, he spilled cold coffee in an RNAse-free zone. Szilard cursed freely, excoriating Martens, the secretary, himself. Before long his head swam with nausea; he was reduced to pawing randomly about his bench.

His hands closed upon a micropipette, but it slipped from his grasp, slick with moisture. He upset a stack of brown paper towels; as they spilled past his face they seemed to become soaked with some transparent fluid. Gasping, Szilard reached for a box of economy-sized Kimwipes, ripped it open. Great splotches of liquid blotted off onto the tissue. "No," he murmured hoarsely, "no, it can't be. . . ."

Through watery eyes he saw Dr. Mankiewicz come in from the darkroom. He staggered out into the center of the lab.

"Denise," he cried. "I'm melting!"

"What?" She set down her canister of film and walked over to stare at him.

He gestured feebly at the trail of damp Kimwipes.

"Who do you think you are, the Wicked Witch of the West?" She sniffed incredulously at the moist paper towels. "It's just sweat. Jeez, what's wrong with you? You need to mellow out a little, Lee; kick back, take a chill pill."

Szilard glanced about him at the sad heaps of crumpled Kimwipes. "I already did," he said miserably.

Lunch was depressing. Szilard barricaded himself inside his office, not daring to touch anything beyond a few swigs of Pepto-Bismol. "Got to relax . . . got to relax . . ." He sat in the dark with a damp washcloth over his face, trying to picture himself on deserted beaches, windblown savannas, desolate, secretary-less hunks of interplanetary rock. It was mid-afternoon by the time he felt ready to emerge.

The lab was a madhouse. Undergraduates swarmed about with buckets of shattered Pyrex. "'Sup?" Sharky coasted by, ears plugged into a brand-new Affymetrix Walkman.

"My budget," whimpered Szilard. "Dear God, no."

He found Denise by the autoclave.

She looked up, surprised. "Aren't you supposed to be at class?"

"Damn!" Szilard winced. "The TAs will deal with it. I'm sure those handout photocopies are done by now."

"The dean phoned. He seemed very upset; apparently you missed the faculty-donor brunch as well."

"Damn, damn!" He drew in a deep breath and slowly exhaled. "Like water off the back of a duck. I suppose I couldn't have kept anything down for long anyway."

She looked at him strangely. "Oh, and someone called for you on December 34th."

"December 34th?"

"Yeah, I thought that was weird. The temporary secretary left the message. Something about polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis."

He froze. An awful possibility dawned in his mind. "Who was the message from?"

"Oh, jeez; some guy with a weird name - Fogg? Flagg?"

Szilard sagged against the countertop. "Was it . . . Fig?"

"Yeah, that's it, Fig! I wonder if - "

"Denise," he said weakly. "I'm out of Pepto-Bismol."

Szilard sat dazedly in the family dining room. He had been home for hours, having taken the rest of the afternoon off. Much to his chagrin, his wife Regina had insisted upon an early meal. His 4-dialing physician friend had prescribed some mild sedatives and a powerful antiemetic. It seemed they had yet to kick in.

Across the table, their two small children kicked each other savagely. "Quit it!"

"No, you quit it, poopy!"

"Yah! Take that!"

A spoonful of creamed spinach sailed across the room and impacted wetly with Szilard's face. He absently dabbed at it with a paper napkin.

Regina took Pierre's spoon away from him. "Just what kind of behavior is that? Your father has had a very stressful day."

"Maybe we'd be nicer if you hadn't named us after a bunch of radioactive freaks." Marie stuck out her tongue.

"Now, settle down. Why don't you tell your father what you learned in school today?"

"I got an A in Creation Science!" warbled Pierre.

"Wonderful, wonderful," cried Szilard, his voice warm with fatherly approval.

Marie piped up loudly, mouth full of spinach. "Our physics teacher showed us how to make a perpetual motion machine!"

"Splendid, good job, superb."

The rest of the dinner passed by in a haze, Szilard nodding vaguely at appropriate times. He swept most of his casserole onto the floor for the family dog, then remembered that they didn't have one.

Finally Regina began clearing the table. "You see; isn't it wonderful when we can have a relaxed family dinner?"

She picked up a plate of light desserts. "Fig Newton?"

"No, thank you," he said quietly. "I think I'll just go lie down."

The next morning Szilard felt remarkably improved. They were out of milk; he cheerfully munched his Raisin Bran with orange juice. He drove most of the way to work behind a caravan of four mobile homes, their swaying lassitude arousing not a particle of ire. On arriving at the department building Szilard walked past the secretary's empty desk into the copy room. He reeled off the handouts in no time at all.

He returned to the lab. Denise had sent back the crates of requisitioned goods; Sharky was struggling with a repo man in the hall over his Affymetrix sound system. Szilard pushed aside his gels from last week and reached for the Maniatis chapter on retrovirology.

Szilard had pictured the scene countless times in his mind, interspersing his thoughts with bouts of relaxational yoga for safety's sake. He would stalk into the darkened office, eyes ablaze, hands outstretched toward Martens' throat. "I've had dry heaves for five days, you freak!" would be his righteous battle cry.

But no. If the past week had taught him anything it was that there was always a better way. He stepped into the office with a cheery smile.

"Good morning, Martens!"

"Well, now, that's quite an improvement! How's my star patient?" The shrink rose from his chair to clasp Szilard in a warm handshake.

"Never better, doctor. Never better."

"Ouch!" Martens jerked his arm back, wincing in pain.

Szilard dropped his syringe unobtrusively behind the couch. "Oh, sorry, hangnail."

He let the psychologist talk on for more than half an hour, the better to allow viral penetration and uncoating to begin.

"I think you'll find that we're about to experience an unprecedented renaissance of emotional intelligence," Martens was saying. "The remarkable synergies of psychotherapeutic retrovirology are only beginning to . . ."

Szilard slowly arose from the couch and kicked the empty syringe into view. "And I think you'll find, Dr. Martens, that you're about to experience a bitter taste of your own medicine."

"What?" Martens finally awoke to the dull tingling that had been pulsing in his limbs. Eyes bulging, he reached for a dish of elderberry-flavored nutraceuticals.

Szilard gave a deprecatory laugh. "Your antidote won't help you now. I've made quite a few changes in the viral LTR. In fact," he said serenely, "I've incorporated a novel promoter element activated by arrogance and the use of trite buzzwords."

Martens swallowed heavily. Large quantities of toxin had been synthesized in his system over the last half hour. "Szilard," he moaned. "You can't do this to me!"

Szilard favored him with a sunny smile. "I suggest that you take a relaxed view of the matter. I know I do."

He closed the door as he left.