“Whoa! What’s going on, guy?” Vlad says, looking around confused. “That’s a fear response. As if there’s a predator around. These are human raised so I’ve never seen one do it unless you expose them to cat urine.”

The mouse, they all realize, is not actually still. Despite its pinioned head it is attempting to crouch lower and lower until it is in complete supplication, its eyes rolling up so that there is pink exposed underneath those black orbs, and it is shifting, trying to flatten even more, but since it cannot it only engages in a slow undulate movement, tracing out a circle one creeping haunch movement at a time, its eyes rolling ever upward.

All three humans crane their necks to stare perplexed up at the totally empty and unthreatening expanse of the concrete ceiling.

“What’s above us?” Kierk asks.

Vlad shrugs. “Just the roof.”

Of course it takes Kierk forever to find Williams’ office again—where he had thought it located is now occupied by a janitorial closet. But Kierk has found that the best strategy for locating anything in the CNS is not a purposeful search but rather a random drunkard’s walk. Only after he’s been meandering about does he find the door with Williams’ name on it. But as he goes to knock he realizes that he has been hearing something as he approached in the background of his consciousness, a stream of steady sound from behind the door. It’s oddly constant, not like a conversation at all. Leaning in at first the mumbling is indistinct. Then Kierk crouches down and presses his ear directly against the keyhole, and the mumbling, which is actually more of a chant, comes into aural focus. It is definitely Williams’ voice but speaking strangely in low constant tone:

“. . . to lay with the sinner is to eat of the apple and smote the tree of knowledge and to eat of the sinner’s body is to enter the womb of the earth for there is cultivated the sin of cannibalism of the worm of one’s own self and so it is from our birthplace we will travel through the black gulf to bring the song of warning to stop the fruit being plucked and stop the worm of self from being eaten as we bear wisdom beyond ken that lo shall put an end to a terrible mewling and striving that must not be . . .”

Kierk pulls away in shock. It is definitely Williams’ voice but quickened and nonsensical. He doesn’t recognize anything but vague biblical allusions—what it had sounded like was the free verse of a man possessed. His face puzzled, he withdraws, the mumbling becoming a continuous low drone, until Kierk, backing away, leaves the portent of the door. Everything but suspicion forgotten he searches for a way out.