Olyn caught his reflection in the glass and ran a hand through his hair. Going gray a little early, but in his academic line of work that was a plus. Any veneer of respectability might bring early tenure. Angling his chin up a bit he made the second one disappeared as if by magic. With a hand he brushed hair down over the temples of his glasses and the tops of his too-tall ears.

Then the sun sank lower in the upriver sky and the glass was no longer a mirror. He went back to work, preparing for his fall classes.

Olyn was certain that Oriental Bible College was merely a steppingstone for him. Nothing more. In a thousand years he wouldn't have pictured himself here. A summa cum laude and graduate school star, he was headed to Woods Hole, Scripps or some other marine sciences mecca, when his career had been knocked off the tracks by an unfortunate incident with a student who turned out to be the favorite niece to the chairwoman of his thesis committee. A misunderstanding, but it had cost him any chance of a job not just on Cape Cod but in Raleigh and Chapel Hill, too. Even the hyphenated campuses turned him down.

So here he was, a practicing atheist teaching at a Bible college. There was nothing to do but make the best of it. But that would take some doing.

For "Mint" Cert (the inevitable nickname had been hung on him back in junior high) the most annoying part about being marooned at Oriental Bible College was the constant correcting that came in e-mail or conversation with his peers, fellow-students who had landed themselves in Ph.D. programs at larger, more prestigious universities.

"Asian Bible College," they would say, tsk-tsking. Surely even someone as misguided as Mint knew that the term "oriental" is considered offensive.

Then he would have to explain to them, very slowly, that Oriental is the name of a town in Pamlico County, where the Neuse River estuary is five miles wide. That the town was named for a Yankee ship, the USS Oriental, sunk by Confederates during the Civil War.

What did his friends think, anyway? That he'd gone to the wilds of northeast North Carolina to teach Leviticus to Japanese?

Once, talking on the phone to an old friend in California, he'd gone on to explain that the town of Oriental was originally called Smith's Creek, and that it had been settled by Midgetts.

"No, no, not short people." But it was too late, and there came another corrective lecture that boiled down to: no "midgets," only height-challenged individuals.

Despite his obtuse friends, Mint Cert believed that his steppingstone was appropriately placed. The Neuse River flowed just outside the door of the laboratory where he would be doing research on a remarkable class of critters called dinoflagellates, the microorganisms responsible for creating the aquatic death-zones known as red tide. But Olyn wasn't interested in just any dino -- his specialty was the species called, in the popular press at least, "The Cell From Hell!" Pfiesteria! Rhymes with Hysteria! (Technically, the genus name of Pfiesteria piscicida is pronounced FEE-steria, but headline writers had to be served.)

Pfiesteria devotees claimed the beastie had killed 10 million fish in a single summer. Indeed, about that many fish went belly-up in the Neuse River in 1995. But scientists more familiar with the river knew that in the heat of late summer the lower Neuse is to fish kills what the Niagara River is to waterfalls. For years they had attributed the kills to too many nutrients -- mainly fertilizer and "hog waste" -- and too-low levels of dissolved oxygen in the water. Fish died by the millions, but they didn't gain any celebrity until a researcher at the land grant college in Raleigh happened upon some unusual dinoflagellates in one of those piscine logjams.

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