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"Hey, Deenah, want to come down to the grav-lab with me? I hear the physics department is putting on a wild party tonight. Free-fall twister, skate around the edge of the black hole... That sort of thing."

Deenah put down the annulator she was using to fine-tune the wires in her hackishly made brain-wave generator. Wespirtech was legendary for its parties, and the physics department hadn't thrown one since Deenah arrived. She was sorely tempted to put her work aside and accompany Rayston...

"I can't," she said. "I have a project review tomorrow. If I get this working... get some visible progress..." she trailed off. "I'm afraid if I don't, they'll take my grant money away."

Rayston looked over the pair of brain-scanners, connected together by trailing wires. They looked like something you'd see in a hair salon: blue Naugahyde chairs with hollow metal boxes attached at the top, where the head goes. Except for the monitor screens in front. Chairs in a hair salon probably wouldn't have those.

"You want help with that?" Rayston asked, finishing his perusal.

Deenah was surprised. Rayston was a chemist; she didn't think he knew anything about brains. "With projecting a complex brain pattern from one creature into the brain of another?" she asked him. "In an interpretable form?"

"No, no, not with the neuro-stuff." He shuddered.

Deenah raised her eyebrows and gestured for Rayston to continue, but he was caught up in his head, imagining all the neuroscience he didn't know. "So..." Deenah prompted, "What kind of help did you mean?

"Oh, spin," he said, as if that explained it all. Deenah rolled her eyes in impatience, and this time he caught on. "You know, spinning your project, so the grant analyst is blown away by how profitable it'll be and wants to give you lots of money to keep working on it."

"Spin?" Deenah said, incredulous.

"Yeah, spin. How do you think I get them to keep letting me work on cold fusion?"

That one was a mystery. Deenah tilted her head acknowledging his point. Yet, she didn't think spin alone could keep the government pouring money down the bottomless hole of cold fusion. No, Rayston had a knack for inventing useful objects along the way: endo- and exothermic candies, heat-wave trees, marketable science.

"No thanks," Deenah said. "I'm close. I can feel it. And, if I can just get this working - I'll be one step closer to making the translator work, and it doesn't take much spin to convince the government to fund work on a Universal Translator."

Rayston shrugged. "Suit yourself, but I'll be down at the grav-lab playing swoop-ball, if you change your mind." He pulled the door to the lab open and stepped through. It had almost shut behind him when he poked his head back in. "Oh, and feel free to wake me up any time tonight - I know how important grants are."

Deenah listened as Rayston's footsteps receded down the hall. She suppressed the urge to follow him, and instead returned to connecting the wires between the two diagnostic brain-scanners she'd jerry-rigged together. "They'll throw another party..." she muttered to herself. "I wonder what swoop-ball is like?"

She uploaded her new edits to the software - a few debugs and a new algorithm for simplifying the test-subject's brain pattern.

"This time..." she said, looking at the test-subject: one of the biology department's colour-changing cats. "This time, I'll find out what it's like to be a cat." The cat crouched, staring at her, green eyes fixed but every other colour in its body flickering and melting as its tabby stripes crawled from the base of its ears down to the tip of its tail. The biologists called their new breed of scrolling-striped tabbies Marquise cats.