"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."