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Show 26 thick plastic bags, and take them off for disposal, but now Robeck stares down through the plexiglas, at the litter of dead rats. He has seen hundreds of animals dead in the years he has spent in biology laboratories, most of them dead more cruelly than these, but he has never quite noticed the deadness before. He stares down into the cage, at one particular random rat, observing the stillness, the unbreathingness, the absolute motionlessness of it. He knows he should stay, console Liller,- begin the unattractive and discouraging task of cleaning up, but he cannot; there is a pressure in his chest and that now-familiar knotting in his abdomen and he needs to get out, away. "Sorry, Liller," he says as he passes Liller's door, but he is out, gone, with the hurried, awkward, slightly bowed gait that is now his, and takes with him the alternating pictures of the rats and Liller's head, weeping in fury at his desk. |