Marathe & Steeply, the outcropping (pp. 421–422)
He felt often with U.S.O.U.S. like a caged rodent being regarded blandly by bland men in white coats.
Context
The other side of the liaison, from Marathe's chair: his "arrangement with the Office" is not a partnership but a series of "numerous tests and games of truth and betrayal," and he experiences himself inside it as a lab animal watched by indifferent scientists. It reframes every outcropping meeting — the philosophy, the needling, the shared vista — as an experimental protocol run on Marathe, the intelligence relationship reduced to observation of a subject who knows he's being observed and can do nothing but perform for the bland men. (The image rhymes cruelly with 096's p-terminal rats, and Marathe surely feels it.)