“Can I bring you anything else?”
“Not right now,” Theo said.
Jenny looked at Val Riordan and decided that whatever she needed right now was not on the menu. Val was sitting there wide-eyed, as if someone had slapped her with a dead mackerel. Jenny backed away from the table. She couldn’t wait for Betsy to come in to relieve her for the lunch shift. Betsy always waited on Joseph Leander when he came in the cafe and made comments about him being the only guy with two children who had never been laid. She’d be blown away.
Betsy, of course, already knew.
Gabe
Gabe tied Skinner up outside and entered the cafe to find all the tables oc-cupied. He spotted Theophilus Crowe sitting at a four-top with a woman that he didn’t know. Gabe debated inviting himself to their table, then de-cided it would be better to approach Theo under the pretense of a rat news update and hope for an invitation.
Gabe pulled his laptop out of his shoulder bag as he approached the table.
“Theo, you won’t believe what I found out last night.”
Theo looked up. “Hi, Gabe. Do you know Val Riordan? She’s our local psychiatrist.”
Gabe offered his hand to the woman and she took it without looking away from his muddy boots. “Sorry,” Gabe said. “I’ve been in the field all day. Nice to meet you.”
“Gabe’s a biologist. He has a lab up at the weather station.”
Gabe was feeling uncomfortable now. The woman hadn’t said a word. She was attractive in a made-up sort of way, but she seemed a little out of things, stunned perhaps. “I’m sorry to interrupt. We can talk later, Theo.”
“No, sit down. You don’t mind, do you, Val? We can finish our session later. I think I still have twenty seconds on the books.”
“That’s fine,” Val said, seeming to come out of her haze.
“Maybe you’ll be interested in this,” Gabe said. He slipped into an empty chair and pushed his laptop in front of Val. “Look at this.” Like many sci-entists, Gabe was oblivious to the fact that no one gave a rat’s ass about research unless it could be expressed in terms of dollars.
“Green dots?” Val said.
“No, those are rats.”
“Funny, they look like green dots.”
“This is a topographical map of Pine Cove. These are my tagged rats. See the divergence? These ten that didn’t move the other night when the others did?”
Val looked to Theo for an explanation.
“Gabe tracks rats with microchips in them,” Theo said.
“It’s only one of the things I do. Mostly, I count dead things on the beach.”
“Fascinating work,” Val said with no attempt to hide her contempt.
“Yeah, it’s great,” Gabe said. Then to Theo, “Anyway, these ten rats didn’t move with the others.”
“Right, you told me this. You thought they might be dead.”
“They weren’t, at least the six of them that I found weren’t. It wasn’t death that stopped them, it was sex.”
“What?”
“I live-trapped twenty of the group of rats that moved, but when I went to find the group that hadn’t, I didn’t have to trap them. There were three pairs, all engaged in coitus.”
“So what made the others move?”
“I don’t know.”
“But the other ones were, uh, mating?”
“I watched one pair for an hour. They did it a hundred and seventeen times.”
“In an hour? Rats can do that?”
“They can, but they don’t.”
“But you said they did.”
“It’s an anomaly. But all three pairs were doing it. One of the females had died and the male was still going at her when I found them.”
Theo’s face was becoming strained with the effort of trying to figure out what in the hell Gabe was trying to tell him, and why he was telling him in the first place. “What does that mean?”
“I have no idea,” Gabe said. “I don’t know why there was a mass evacuation of the large group, and I don’t know why the smaller group stayed in one place copulating.”
“Well, thanks for sharing.”
“Food and sex,” Gabe said.
“Maybe you should eat something, Gabe.” Theo signaled for the waitress.
“What do you mean, food and sex?” Val asked.
“All behavior is related to obtaining food and sex,” Gabe said.
“How Freudian.”
“No, Darwinian, actually.”
Val leaned forward and Gabe caught a whiff of her perfume. She actually seemed interested now. “How can you say that? Behavior is much more complex than that.”
“You think so?”
“I know so. And whatever this is, this radio rat study of yours proves it.” She swiveled the screen of the laptop so they all could see it. “You have six rats that were engaged in sex, but if I have this straight, you have, well, a lot of rats that just took off for no reason at all. Right?”
“There was a reason, I just don’t know it yet.”
“But it wasn’t food and it obviously wasn’t sex.”
“I don’t know yet. I suppose they could have been exposed to television violence.”
Theo was sitting back and watching now, enjoying two people with three decades of education between them puffing up like schoolyard bullies.
“I’m a psychiatrist, not a psychologist. Our discipline has moved more toward physiological causes for behavior over the last thirty years, or hadn’t you heard?” Val Riordan was actually grinning now.
“I’m aware of that. I’m having the brain chemistry worked up on animals from both groups to see if there’s a neurochemical explanation.”
“How do you do that again?” Theo asked.
“You grind up their brains and analyze the chemicals,” Gabe said.
“That’s got to hurt,” Theo said.
Val Riordan laughed. “I only wish I could diagnose my patients that way. Some of them anyway.”
Val
Val Riordan couldn’t remember the last time she’d enjoyed herself, but she suspected it was when she’d attended the Neiman-Marcus sale in San Francisco two years ago. Food and sex indeed. This guy was so naive. But still, she hadn’t seen anyone so passionate about pure research since med school, and it was nice to think about psychiatry in terms other than finan-cial. She found herself wondering how Gabe Fenton would look in a suit, after a shower and a shave, after he’d been boiled to kill the parasites. Not bad, she thought.
Gabe said, “I can’t seem to identify any outside stimulus for this behavior, but I have to eliminate the possibility that it’s something chemical or envir-onmental. If it’s affecting the rats, it might be affecting other species too. I’ve seen some evidence of that.”
Val thought about the wave of horniness that seemed to have washed over all of her patients in the last two days. “Could it be in the water, do you think? Something that might affect us?”
“Could be. If it’s chemical, it would take longer to affect a mammal as large as a human. You two haven’t seen anything unusual in the last few days, have you?”
Theo nearly spit his coffee out. “This town’s a bug-house.”
“I’m not allowed to talk about my patients specifically,” Val said. She was shaken. Of course there was some weird behavior. She’d caused it, hadn’t she, by taking fifteen hundred people off of their medication at once? She had to get out of here. “But in general, Theo is right.”
“I am?” Theo said.
“He is?” Gabe said.
Jenny had returned to the table to fill their coffees. “Sorry I overheard, but I’d have to agree with Theo too.”
They all looked at her, then at each other. Val checked her watch. “I’ve got to get to an appointment. Gabe, I’d like to hear the results of the brain chemistry test.”
“You would?”
“Yes.”
Val put some money on the table and Theo picked it up and handed it back to her, along with the dollar he’d put there earlier for her fee. “I need to talk to you about that other matter, Val.”
“Call me. I don’t know if I can help though. Bye.”
Val left the cafe actually looking forward to seeing her patients, if for no other reason than to imagine grinding up each of their brains. Anything to address the responsibility of driving an entire town crazy. But perhaps by driving them a little crazy, she could save some of them from self-destruction: not a bad reason for going to work.
Gabe
“I’ve got to go too,” Theo said, standing up. “Gabe, should I have the county test the water or something? I have to go into San Junipero to the county building today anyway.”
“Not yet. I can do a general toxins and heavy metals test. I do them all the time for the frog population studies.”
“You wanna walk out with me?”
“I have to order something to go for Skinner.”
“Didn’t you say that you had ten rats that diverged from the pack?”
“Yes, but I could only find six.”
“What happened to the other four?”
“I don’t know. They just disappeared. Funny, these chips are nearly indestructible too. Even if the animals are dead, I should be able to pick them up with the satellites.”