Intuition by Allegra Goodman Page B

finger the mouse was up and about again, nosing for food.
    “This stuff never works like it's supposed to,” Feng said companionably.
    For the first time, working with Feng, Cliff felt a superstitious chill come over him. “Hey, man, don't bet against me like that.” He stuffed another mouse into the mason jar.
    Puzzled, Feng turned to Cliff as he handed him a fresh syringe.
    “It's bad luck to bet against people.” Cliff was wrought up, or he would have remembered that Feng believed the opposite was true. “Anyway, this is partly your work too. You shouldn't bet against yourself.”
    “If this doesn't work,” Feng said, “there will be more experiments.”
    “For you, there will be,” said Cliff. “Not for me. For you, it doesn't really matter as much. Shit!” He realized he'd left the mouse in the jar. He rushed to unscrew the top and set the mouse down on the table. The animal lay still.
    Cliff bent down over the tiny body. Almost imperceptibly, the mouse's rib cage expanded and contracted. It was breathing.
    “Cliff,” Feng chided, “you're talking like the unlucky one now. You shouldn't think that way.”
    “How am I supposed to think?” Cliff exploded. He poked and prodded the mouse's wrinkly skin. His needle slipped into the loose folds. “This has to work. It has to!”
    It was childish, Cliff knew, to stand there and will experiments to work, throwing a tantrum and expecting results to come. The forces of disease arrayed themselves in the experimental mice and all the lab's glassware and machines, just as they did outside in the world. Shouting about it was as futile as standing outside and raging against a thunderstorm. There were no imperatives in research. Even for Marion, there was no experiment that would succeed because it ought. No line of inquiry had to be right just because it matched the investigator's intuition. Cliff knew all this, but he'd been up almost twenty-four hours, and he couldn't think straight.
    He was frightened sometimes by the intensity of his emotions. There were days when he envisioned such success that he felt a kind of awe, as though the lab were already covered with clouds of glory. There were days when he could almost taste the future before him: the results, the publications, the prizes. But there were times, as well, when Cliff imagined all his good fortune evaporating; the remission of the mice nothing more than a freak occurrence; the idea of using R-7 only a beautiful dream. He swung sickeningly between delight and despair.
    He had never felt this way about research before. He worked on tenterhooks, alert to the slightest changes in the mice, nervous about even discussing his experiments. He had seen this in other people, but never felt it fully himself: the propulsive energy of scientific questions, the relentless force of an investigation that might succeed. He began to forget about winter: the slush, the outside world; the city out there, cloaked in white. He stopped reading the newspaper or listening to the news. He wore the same blue jeans and brown sweater every single day. He paced restlessly, feverish with calculations, touchy, paranoid. He lost track of time, but he was obsessed with time. He was the victim of his changing moods, run ragged by his own imagination. Jubilant, confused. Lovesick.
    He could not tell exactly when it happened—whether it began when he despaired, or when he'd been called back into favor—but this winter a fraying chord, his own perception of himself, had broken inside of him. It seemed to him now that all his previous work had given him nothing, and that he, in his thirty years, had given nothing to the world. This was his chance now, and with it came a weight of hope and expectation that he could hardly bear.
             
    By early February tumors had begun to form on the mice in the experimental groups. Pale and smooth, the size of pimples, tiny bumps had emerged on the flanks of the animals. Five weeks after