The Life photo essay horrifies him: a sad, indelible feeling as he flips through the sickeningly permanent pages. Perpetual artifact, preserved in a thousand long-term vaults. A million copies faithfully reproduce his every imperfection. Too late to recant: his face, his thin nose, his words badly quoted and out of context, his arrogant self-assurance — Stuart Ressler, rising science star, split, flapped, and pinned out like a cat in undergraduate anatomy. Proliferated throughout the English-speaking world.
The fallout of bad-faith fame follows him into his first office visit following publication. Minor notoriety will not help patch matters between Ressler and his increasingly erratic office mate. Ressler braces on entering and shouts out something friendly. But Lovering just sits among the ruined piles of papers, his Baalbek of print, indifferent and still. Walking toward his desk, head down, hands in pocket, Ressler is shaken by Joe's voice, struggling to shake off catatonia. "Do you know the price we're all paying to improve the world?"
Ressler stops and faces Lovering. He chooses each word, multiplying the odds against the growing sentence a hundred thousand times per syllable. "I'm not sure what you mean, Joe."
"What I mean? The world. The world. Toot la moaned. The big picture. Come on. We're both adults. We don't have to get into semantics here." Ressler can't even respond. Scrambling through the repertoire, all inappropriate, he just bobs his head on its universal joint. "Unnatural prospect! All the way back, all the way back to fires in caves." Lovering drops into a movie monotone. "And I work for them!"
"Who do you work for, Joe?"
"Who the hell knows? Big state school. The money's been washed through so many agencies it's wetter'na Baptist, But it's the government at bottom, isn't it? All that dough."
The logic eludes Ressler. "Half the scientists in this country have worked for the government since the war."
"What do you mean, 'since'? Who told you they've stopped shooting?" Ressler backs toward his chair, out of the stumbled-upon line of fire. He can say nothing. "What does it cost to eradicate the Black Death? Ask GM. Ask Coke."
"Joe—"
"Shut up." Brutal, suppliant, drunken. "I'm talking." Ressler wants only to be out of the room, to allow the fit of latent humanity to work itself out in privacy. But Lovering won't release him. He stares at Ressler, pleading, the look of a spaniel, hindquarters smashed beneath the wheel of a car, asking why his years of service have been so rewarded. His smile changes to pity. "Education, learning, progress. You know what we're going to find out, we researchefs? We're going to finally get down to that old secret code in the cell, and the string is going to come out spelling D-U-M-B space S-H-I…"
"Joe. Would you like to go out for a beer?" Ressler's intonation is so soft it startles the man silent. The invitation sounds slightly frayed coming out of his mouth. He has forgotten how to ask the question right. But Lovering remains distracted.
"What? Out? Why? Corn as high as an elephant's eye. Big, hulking, behemoth state school, out in the middle of godforsaken nowhere." He brightens, addresses Ressler as an old friend. "I've got a job offer, you know. As soon as Sandy finds someone to replace her at her office, we're outta this hole. Someplace new, fresh, different."
"Terrific, Joe. Could be exactly what you're looking for. Where are you going?"
"Ann Arbor."
Late that evening he sees Lovering again, ducking into the department's small-animal room. The lines of cages always have an edgy hysteria to them, as if the rodents know where their cage-mates disappear to. Ressler pokes his head into the room. He watches Lovering pick up a cage, shake it. Above the animal squeaks and pleas, Ressler hears Lovering doing a poor but obligatory Cagney: "You dirty rats."
"Dr. L. Which way are you headed?"
Lovering sets the cage down quickly. "Nowhere. Why?"
Ressler makes the beer offer again, but Lovering smiles and shags him off, saying he isn't ready to leave just yet. Ressler wishes him good night, and Joe replies in like manner. The next morning, Ressler notices an unnatural silence emanating from the cage room. He looks inside. The place is stripped clean. The animals are gone, cages and all. The answer stands just down the hall, where Woyty, Botkin, Koss, and Ulrich gather in a stunned lump. He walks into the circle, which opens to him with a look shared and obscene.
"You've heard?" Ulrich asks.
"Not a thing."
"Apparently, Joe Lovering drove out of here last night in a rented truck loaded with the department lab animals." The others, hearing the tale for the second time, seem unable to get past the beginning. "He drove the whole shipment back to his apartment__"
"Apartment? Didn't he say…?"
Ulrich insists. "Apartment; there is, apparently, no new purchased home. He stacked all the stolen cages neatly around his garage. Albino rats together, all the cavia…" Ressler nods hurriedly. Get on with it.
"His landlady heard the engine running about eleven o'clock last night. The garage door was locked and wadded with rags. She had to let herself in through his apartment." Ulrich takes a breath, the same deep breath Joe's landlady took before racing to the truck to shut off the engine. "It seems Joe's decision to join the specimens was an impulse. There was a badly burned TV dinner in the oven, and a burned-out cigarette on the edge of a counter." Ulrich clears his throat, debating whether to suppress the next detail. "A Sears catalog open to the lingerie pages in the bathroom. A pocket-size spiral notebook with grocery list. At the bottom, in the same handwriting slant, an afterthought, he'd written, 'Send the checks to the Anti-Vivisectionist Society.' He was in the front seat of the truck, lying gently on the wheel. He'd left the passenger door open. Presumably because it vented more closely onto the tailpipe."
The stunned cluster of survivors turns toward Ressler, waiting. "How did you hear?" he asks Ulrich.
"Landlady called his mother. Mother called me early this morning."
"Has anybody gotten in touch with his girlfriend? Sandy? She might know something__"
Ulrich snaps at his stupidity in the face of the obvious. "There is no girlfriend." Sandy is a simulation.
Ressler spends two days pacing between office and lab, fiddling with beakers, doing nothing. Ulrich distributes the official notice through the department and announces a memorial service to be held at the First Church of Christ Scientist. The service is ecumenical, so much so that it carries almost no religious overtone at all. What's left of Cyfer, their families, and the man's mother comprise the entire congregation. Each team member makes a prepared speech. Ulrich talks about Joe's sharp mind, how quickly he picked up the complexities of machine programming. Woyty, on dangerous ground, saved only by the difficulty he has controlling his voice, remembers Joey's pathological fear of catching cold, hints at the irony that another virus, in the end, got him. Botkin reads from her beloved Rilke: Wir sind nicht einig. We do not agree. Sind nicht wie die Zugvögel verständigt. Do not correspond like the migratory bird. Blühn und verdorm ist uns zugleich bewß. Bloom and withering come on together.
Koss assumes the pulpit, mouths the expected homilies. She turns to descend, but stops, unable to sit down without really speaking. Levering was a scientist, she insists. A scientist going after the code. And the end of all codebreaking is to get behind the outward trappings of a thing to meaning. Joey lost the signal. Read the message wrong. The congregation makes a scuffle of collective objection, propriety offended. Ressler alone is quiet, loving her more than he has ever loved her for delivering this tract and no other. Who is the graveside speech for, after all, if not the survivors?