were dead. Very dead. But those that weren’t yet dissected… they
came back. Within a few hours. Lying there in the lab trays… they
just. .. started twitching, squirming. Bleary-eyed, weak at first…
but they came back. Soon they were on their feet, scurrying about their
cages, eating-fully alive. Which no one had anticipated, not at all.
Oh, sure, before the mice were killed, they’d had tremendously enhanced
immune systems, truly astonishing capacity to heal, and life spans that
had been dramatically increased, but Rachael raised her head, opened her
eyes, looked at Ben. “But once the line of death is crossed… who’d
imagine it could be recrossed?”
Ben’s hands started shaking, and a wintry shiver followed the track of
his spine, and he realized that the true meaning and power of these
events had only now begun to sink in.
“Yes,” Rachael said, as if she knew what thoughts and emotions were
racing through his mind and heart.
He was overcome by a strange mixture of terror, awe, and wild joy,
terror at the idea of anything, mouse or man, returning from the land of
the dead, awe at the thought that humankind’s genius had perhaps
shattered nature’s dreadful chains of mortality, joy at the prospect of
humanity freed forever from the loss of loved ones, freed forever from
the great fears of sickness and death.
And as if reading his mind, Rachael said, “Maybe one day… maybe even
one day soon, the threat of the grave will pass away. But not yet.
Not quite yet. Because the Wildcard Project’s breakthrough is not
entirely successful. The mice that came back were. . . strange.”
“Strange?”
Instead of elaborating on that freighted word, she said, “At first the
researchers thought the mice’s odd behavior resulted from some sort of
brain damagemaybe not to cerebral tissues but to the fundamental
chemistry of the brain-that couldn’t be repaired even by the mice’s
enhanced healing abilities. But that wasn’t the case. They could still
run difficult mazes and repeat other c,2mplex tricks they’d been taught
before they’d died “So somehow the memories, knowledge, probably even
personality survives the brief period of lifelessness between death and
rebirth.”
She nodded. “Which would indicate that some small current still exists
in the brain for a time after death, enough to keep memory intact
until… resurrection. Like a computer during a power failure, barely
holding on to material in its short-term memory by using the meager flow
of current from a standby battery.”
Ben wasn’t sleepy anymore. “Okay, so the mice could run mazes, but
there was something strange about them.
What? How strange?”
“Sometimes they became confused-more frequently at first than after
they’d been back with the living awhile-and they repeatedly rammed
themselves against their cages or ran in circles chasing their tails.
That kind of abnormal behavior slowly passed. But another, more
frightening behavior emerged… and endured.”
Outside a car pulled into the motel parking lot and stopped.
Rachael glanced worriedly at the barricaded door.
In the still desert air, a car door opened, closed.
Ben sat up straighter in his chair, tense.
Footsteps echoed softly through the empty night. They were heading away
from Rachael’s and Ben’s room. In another part of the motel, the door
to another room opened and closed.
With visible relief Rachael let her shoulders sag. “Mice are
natural-born cowards, of course. They never fight their enemies.
They’re not equipped to. They survive by running, dodging, hiding.
They don’t even fight among themselves for supremacy or territory.
They’re meek, timid. But the mice who came back weren’t meek at all.
They fought one another, and they attacked mice that had not been
resurrected-and they even tried to nip at the researchers handling them,
though a mouse has no hope of hurting a man and is ordinarily acutely
aware of that.
They flew into rages, clawing at the floors of their cages, pawing at
the air as if fighting imaginary enemies, sometimes even clawing at
themselves. Occasionally these fits lasted less than a minute, but more
often went on until the mouse collapsed in exhaustion.”
For a moment, neither spoke.
The silence in the motel room was sepulchral, profound.
At last Ben said, “In spite of this strangeness in the mice, Eric and