So Oscar took a deeply shadowed backseat, well behind the throne. The new year ground on. Many scientists found the Strike to be an ideal opportunity to quietly resign and leave, but that left the remaining hard-core scientists saturated with revolutionary fervor. Like revolutionaries everywhere, they were discovering that every trifling matter was a moral and intellectual crisis. Every aspect of their former lives and careers seemed to require a radical reformulation. These formerly downtrodden wretches spent most of their free hours raising one another’s consciousnesses.