Remember

“How many?”

“Hundreds! Hundreds of them. And do you know how many articles were written about the fourth?”

“How many?”

“Two. Count them.” John held up two fingers. “Two.”

“So you figured it had to be the last bond.”

“Yup. It had to be. We’ve studied so much about the first three, that if the answer was there, there’s no way we wouldn’t have found it by now.”

John stood up, arched his back and stretched out his aching muscles. “Well, I’m beat. I’m going to head home.”

“Yeah,” said Robert. “Me too.”

The two took off their lab coats and headed to the door.

“I can’t wait ‘til the professor comes back,” said John, “he’s going to flip!”

“I hope you mean in a good way.”

As they left the room, John reached back and turned out the lights. “So, same time tomorrow?”

The next day dawned and John headed down to the basement lab right after breakfast. When he arrived, Robert wasn’t there. Well, he thought, just as well. Maybe he’d really get some work done then.

After he put on his coat, he sauntered over to the mouse cage and found that nearly half of all the mice from last night had died.

“What the…?”

He examined the bodies and found that all the test group rodents had died, except for one. The dead ones looked fairly normal on cursory inspection. There was a trace of blood, however, that had clotted in their eyes and on their noses.

The one that had remained alive was behaving abnormally. It was deathly still. Even the normal foraging behaviours of the animal were gone. It simply sat there in the corner, breathing and nothing else. John watched him for a while and found that it didn’t even blink.

John drifted back to the work bench to get his notebook, but then noticed something else. The mouse was following him with his eyes. No matter where he might wander to in the room, the mouse would stare after him. Fascinated, John edged back to the cage and bent down to look at the rodent more closely.

He tapped on the wire. “Hey, little guy. How are you doing?”

The mouse turned its head slowly and looked him straight in the eye.

“What’s wrong?” John eased his face in closer to the glass.

The mouse just stared.

“Are you sick?”

The mouse shook its head slowly, from one side to the other, once.

All the rest of that day, John tried to engage the mouse but it wouldn’t respond anymore. He picked it up and put it into the test cage, to see if it would cooperate and perform on some of the standard test tasks.

At first, the mouse just sat down where John placed him and didn’t move. One of the tests in the lab, involved the animal pressing down on a lever a set number of times to release a treat. This was one of the tests that John had tried on the group yesterday.

After a few minutes of just sitting, the mouse turned and looked at John over its shoulder. Then, at a solemn march, it went off to this one test, and began to press down on the lever repeatedly. The treats were rewarded in the usual fashion, but the mouse didn’t stop pressing on the lever to go and pick them up.