'Of course,' said Sarah, 'I'm making it look like the outside. So I don't forget.'
At the Sears in the Mall she got matte black paint and smaller brushes. She returned to her room, passing the Cafeteria, where thousands stood in line for something that smelled of onions and salt and hot fat, Sarah had not eaten in twenty-four hours and felt great— it was a day to fast. Back in her room she cleared away a Times page announcing a coup in Africa and sat on her bed to contemplate her forest. Infinitely better than the old wall, yet still just a rude beginning— every patch of color could be subdivided into a hundred shades and crisscrossed with black branches to hold it all up. She knew she'd never finish it, but that was fine. That was the idea.
Casimir immediately went into action. He had already daydreamed up this plan, and to organize the first stages of Project Spike did not take long. Since Sharon had sunk completely into a coma, Casimir had taken over the old professor's lab in the Burrows, spending so much time there that he stored a sleeping bag in the closet so he could stay overnight.
This evening— Day Three— he had found six rats crowded into his box trap near the Cafeteria. Judging from the quantity of poison scattered around this area, they were of a highly resistant strain. In the lab, he donned heavy gloves, opened the trap, forced himself to grab a rat, pulled it out and slammed shut the lid. This was a physics. not a biology, lab and so his methods were crude. He pressed the rat against the counter and stunned it with a piece of copper tubing, then held it underwater until dead.
He laid it on a bare plank and set before him an encyclopedia volume he had stolen from the Library, opened to a page which showed a diagram of the rat's anatomy. Weighing it open with a hunk of lead radiation shield, he took out a single-edged razor and went to work on the little beast. In twenty minutes he had the liver out. In an hour he had six rat livers in a beaker and six liverless rat corpses in the wastebasket, swathed in plastic. He put the livers in a mortar and ground them to a pulp, poured in some alcohol, and filtered the resulting soup until it was clear.
Next morning he visited the Science Shop, where Virgil Gabrielsen was fixing up a chromatograph that would enable Casimir to find out what chemicals were contained in the rat liver extract. 'We're ready for your mysterious test,' said Virgil. 'Hope you don't mind.'
'I love working with mad scientists— never dull. What's that?' 'Mostly grain alcohol. This machine will answer your question, though, if it's fixed.'
A few hours later they had the results: a strip of paper with a line squiggled across it by the machine. Virgil compared this graph with similar ones from a long skinny book.
'Shit,' said Virgil, showing rare surprise. 'I didn't think anything could live with this much Thalphene in its guts. Thalphene! These things have incredible immunities.'
'What is it? I don't know anything about chemistry.' 'Trade name for thallium phenoxide.' Virgil crossed his arms and looked at the ceiling. 'Dangerous Properties of Industrial Materials, my favorite bedtime reading, says this about thallium compounds. I abbreviate. 'Used in rat poison and depilatories … results in swelling of feet and legs, arthralgia, vomiting. insomnia, hyperaesthesia and paresthesia of hands and feet, mental confusion, polyneuritis with severe pains in legs and loins, partial paralysis and degeneration of legs, angina, nephritis, wasting, weakness … complete loss of hair . . ha! Fatal poisoning has been known to occur.''
'No kidding!'
'Under phenols we have.. . 'where death is delayed, damage to kidneys, liver, pancreas, spleen, edema of the lungs, headache, dizziness, weakness, dimness of vision, loss of consciousness, vomiting, severe abdominal pain, corrosion of lips, mouth, throat, esophagus and stomach'.'
'Okay, I get the idea.'
'And that doesn't account for synergistic effects. These rats eat the stuff all the time.'
'So they go through a lot of rat poison, these rats do.'
'It looks to me,' said Virgil, 'as though they live on it. But if you don't mind my prying, why do you care?'
Casimir was slightly embarrassed, but he knew Virgil's secret, so it was only fair to bare his own. 'In order for Project Spike to work, they have to be heavy rat-poison eaters. I'm going to collect rat poison off the floors and expose it to the slow neutron source in Sharon's lab. It's a little chunk of a beryllium isotope on a piece of plutonium, heavily shielded in paraffin— looks like a garbage can on wheels. Paraffin stops slow neutrons, see. Anyway, when I expose the rat poison to the neutrons, some of the carbon in the poison will turn to Carbon— 14. Carbon— 14 is used in dating. of course, so there are plenty of machines around to detect small amounts of it. Anyway, I set this tagged poison out near the Cafeteria. Then I analyze samples of Cafeteria food for unusually high levels of Carbon— 14. If I get a high reading. .
'It means rats in the food.'
'Either rats, or their hair or feces.'
'That's awesome blackmail material, Casimir. I wouldn't have thought it of you.
Casimir looked up at Virgil, shocked and confused. After a few seconds he seemed to understand what Virgil had meant. 'Oh, well, I guess that's true. The thing is, I'm not that interested in blackmail. It wouldn't get me anything. I just want to do this, and publicize the results. The main thing is the challenge.'
A rare full grin was on Virgil's face. 'Damn good, Casimir, That's marvelous. Nice work.' He thought it over, taken with the idea. 'You'll have the biggest gun in the Plex, you know.'
'That's not what I'm after with this project.'
'Let me know if I can help. Hey, you want to go downstairs to the Denny's for lunch? I don't want to eat in the Cafeteria while I'm thinking about the nature of your experiment.'
'I don't want to eat at all, after what I've just been doing,' said Casimir. 'But maybe later on we can dissolve our own livers in ethanol.' He put the beaker of rat potion in a hazardous-waste bin, logged down its contents, and they departed.
And lest anyone get the wrong idea, a disclaimer: I did not know about this while it was going on. They told me about it later. The people who have claimed I bear some responsibility for what happened later do not know the facts.
'What makes you think you can just play a record?' said Ephraim Klein in a keen, irritated voice. 'I'm listening to harpsichord music,'
'Oh,' John Wesley Fenrick said innocently. 'I didn't hear it. I guess my ears must have gone bad from all my terrible music, huh?' 'Looks that way.'
'But it's okay, I'm not going to play a record.'
'I should hope not.'
'I'm going to play a tape.' Fenrick brushed his finger against an invisible region on the surface of the System, and lights lit and meters wafted up and down. The mere sound of Silence, reproduced by this machine, nearly drowned out the harpsichord, a restored 1783 Prussian model with the most exquisite lute stop Klein had ever heard. Fenrick turned on the Go Big Red Fan, which began to chunk away as usual.
'Look,' said Ephraim Klein, 'I said I was playing something. You can't just bust in.'
'Well,' said John Wesley Fenrick, 'I said I can't hear it. If I don't hear any evidence that you are playing something, there's no reason I should take your word for it. You obviously have a distorted idea of reality.'
'Prick! Asshole!' But Klein had already pulled out one of his war tapes, the 'Toccata and Fugue in D Minor' as performed by Virgil Fox (what Fenrick called 'horror movie music') and snapped it into his own tape deck. He set the tape rolling and prepared to switch from PHONO to TAPE at the first hint of offensive action from Fenrick.
It was not long in coming. Fenrick had been sinking into a Heavy Metal retrospective recently, and entered the competition with Back in Black by AC/DC. Klein watched Fenrick's hands carefully and was barely able to squeeze out a lead, the organist hitting the high mordant at the opening of the piece before the ensuing fancy notes were stomped into the sonic dust by Back in Black.
From there the battle raged typically. A hundred feet down the hall, I stuck my head out the door to have a look. Angel, the enormous Cuban who lived on our floor, had been standing out in the hallway for about half an hour furiously pounding on the wall with his boxing gloves, laboriously lengthening a crack he had started in the first week of the semester. When I looked, he was just in the act of hurling open the door to Klein and Fenrick's room; dense, choking clouds of music whirled down the corridor at Mach 1 and struck me full in the face.
I started running. By the time I had arrived, Angel had wrapped Fenrick's long extension cord around the doorknob, held it with his boxing gloves, put his foot against the door, and pulled it apart with a thick blue spark and a shower of fire. The extension cord shorted out and smoked briefly until circuit breakers shut down all public-area
