I met Hans the next day at Room 201 on the second floor of the Annexation Building. Charlie Deckard, the mouse sexer, was with him. We entered the room. The mice were already there, in cages on a couple of carts.
“Alright, let’s do this” said Charlie. “Hans and Justin, just feed me the cages. Two mice per cage, same sex. I’ll put males on my right, females on my left. Every second or third mouse makes a pair, right? Then take that cage away, put a lid on it, and give me the next cage. You ever seen this before, Justin?”
“No.” I replied “How do you tell which is which?”
“I just ask them.” Deckard answered. “And if they don’t tell me, then I pick ’em up by the tail and look at their privates.”
I chuckled. Typical Deckard humor. He was about my height, 5′ 10″, and had an unassuming, average build. But he could probably break me in half with his left pinky finger. He was an Ironman Triathlete. He was also very intelligent; a PhD who had worked his way up from lab tech.
So we started. Deckard would pick up a mouse by its tail, look at the immature crotch, decide what he was seeing, and put it in the appropriate cage. Hans and I would swap cages as necessary and put them on cage racks. The idea was simple: we didn’t want baby mice during the experiment, so we’d put two males in a cage, or two females in a cage. Charlie was the designated sexer, so he got to spend the morning looking at mouse crotch.
Once we were done, we discussed the experiment.
“For this first phase,” Hans began, “we’ll have four groups: control, radiation injection, irradiation, and both injections and irradiation. This will imitate a dirty bomb explosion. Some get radiation exposure, some ingest inhale or are impaled with radioactive material, and some get both external and internal exposure.”
“For those injected,” he continued “Justin, you can set up your gamma radiation counter over here.” He pointed to a spot in the corner of the room, away from the cages, which would be putting out a fair bit of radiation after the injections.
“Yeah, that looks good” I said. “Hopefully that will be far enough away to not interfere with the counting. I’ll set up some lead to keep background down. Too much background radiation will make the count time higher.”
“OK” said Hans. “Here’s a key to the room. We’re planning to do this next week. Does that give you time to set up?”
“Sure” I said. “I’ll start today.”
Shocked in the Suburbs 