Walking Dead

by Peter Dickinson

  “This rat’s taking his time,” he said.

  Foxe turned with relief to the runs. Ladyblossom had finished his food and was quietly grooming. Lionel had found his way to the fourth gate and was trying to trigger it as though it were the second.

  “Yes, he’s out of time,” said Foxe. “Would you like to see a complete run?”

  “Please.”

  Foxe went into the maze-room, removed the mirror panels, lifted out Lionel and Ladyblossom and took them to their cages in the animal room. He came back and sprayed the runs, then fetched Michael and Marion and dropped them into the starting boxes, replaced the mirror and came out to the observation area.

  “This is the learning-enhancement project, I believe,” said Doctor Trotter, who had been chatting quietly with the man beside him.

  “That’s right,” said Foxe, startled.

  “How’s it going?”

  Foxe mumbled. There was no way of catching Dreiser’s eye, to see how much he might be expected to reveal. But if the Prime Minister knew about Galdi’s work …

  “Well?” said Doctor Trotter.

  “The trouble is I don’t yet know how I’m getting on, sir,” said Foxe. “The Company has supplied me with two substances to compare. I imagine one of them’s inert, and the other one may or may not have some effect on learning ability. At a later stage in the experiment I’ll send a telex to my co-ordinator who will tell me which is which. The Company likes to play this sort of project very close to its chest. I mean there may be up to thirty people working on aspects of it round the world, none of them having much idea what the rest are up to.”

  “Yes, I know your Company is neurotic about security.”

  “It isn’t just that, sir. You actually get more reliable results this way. For instance, perhaps what I’m doing is a re-run of someone else’s work, to check it over. If I know how he’s set about it and what his results are, then I may be influenced to produce similar results, consciously or unconsciously. But if I don’t know, and I get comparable results, then that’s a much better indication of their validity. Of course my briefing from the co-ordinator is carefully framed so that I don’t start doing a quite different set of experiments.”

  “I see,” said Doctor Trotter a little less genially. “So what are you doing?”

  “Well, sir, you’ll see those are identical mazes. We start by letting the rats simply find their way through. We always race the same pairs of rats against each other. This is the M pair, Michael and Marion—that’s what the letters on their backs mean. When they’ve learnt the maze we block it off with gates which they have to find, and when they’ve learnt that we put simple triggers on the gates so that the rats have to learn to open them. The gates are all connected electrically to the logic room, where there are machines which time every run, so we can compare all the learning-speeds, both for the different drugs and for different doses of each drug. In effect we put in three layers of learning and then test whether the drug has any effect on the ability to retain the earlier layers.”

  “And unlearning? That is most important, you know.”

  “We’re into that, sir. At a later stage I will alter sections of the maze and study the effect.”

  Doctor Trotter watched the rest of the run in silence, broken by a few chuckles. The only other sound was the woman’s voice chanting what seemed to be some kind of spell, dreary and repetitive, but Foxe found it difficult to concentrate on the rats. Marion seemed to get through the maze pretty fast, but Michael was off form and barely triggered the last gate when the timing-light winked on. Foxe went into the maze-room and fetched them out.

  “I expected them to be white,” said Doctor Trotter.

  Foxe slid Marion into his pocket and held Michael up for inspection, a handsome hundred-day rat, glossy with well-being, white but patched black over his head and along one haunch and the opposite foreleg. The nude tail dangled, looking vulnerable and ridiculous, like an attempted obscenity which has somehow got misdirected and become an absurdity instead. Foxe enjoyed the excuse to handle a rat more than he should. It was a nonsense experiment anyway.

  “Some people do work with albinos,” he said. “But the Company has its own strain of these hooded rats—they’re a little less biddable than albinos, but a lot hardier. You weren’t in very good form this morning, were you, mate?”

  “I see you let him have his reward,” said Doctor Trotter. “He barely deserves it after taking so long.”

  “You have to reward them, sir. They need the stimulus to learn.”

  “Stimulus is not only by reward, doctor. Will you race us another pair? Mother, come and look at this.”

  Foxe would have liked to refuse. He could have said, with perfect truth, that he only injected three pairs of rats in a batch so that he could be sure of running them a precise time after their injections, thus eliminating one minor variable. Nor could he run uninjected rats, because each run was a learning process and a pair that had had an extra run would cease to be comparable with the rest. Foxe’s reputation, his value to the Company, was built on considerations such as these, but the Prime Minister’s presence was a variable of a different order. As he sprayed the runs he was aware of the woman’s voice drifting nearer.

  “… and long as that melon-flower stay in that woman’s maddress,” she was croaking, “her man got nothing to give her. He try all night, but no fun for that woman. What that stink?”

  “I have to spray the runs, ma’am,” said Foxe without looking up. “Rats have a very keen sense of smell, and I need to be sure that they aren’t finding their way through the run by following a trail of scent left by other rats. This stuff does the trick.”

  “How can you be sure?” said Doctor Trotter. “You are not a rat.”

  Still spraying, Foxe explained how the tests had been done.

  “Good,” said the woman. “I take that can when we go.”

  “Now, mother,” said Doctor Trotter. “You can’t possibly need …”

  “Visitors do come to this earth,” she said in a sombre voice. “Hunting with their noses. Smelling for a man in the no-moon dark.”

  Doctor Trotter laughed indulgently.

  “If you’ve got a spare can, Doctor Foxe …”

  “Of course, sir.”

  Foxe put the can down and fetched Quentin and Queenie. It didn’t really matter giving them an extra run, because even this early he knew he’d be leaving Quentin out of his final figuring. Bred from the same small gene pool as every other rat in the cages, showing no sign of aberrance during Foxe’s selection tests, Quentin had quickly developed into a classic nutter. Foxe put him and Queenie into the starting boxes and walked up to the other end of the run to refill the reward dishes.

  “What you give them?” called Mrs Trotter through the door. “I tell you what. You want indelligent kids, what you give them? I want a boy get to be Prime Minister one day, what I give him? I give him crushed prawns!”

  She had abandoned Dreiser to shout at Foxe, who as he came out of the maze-room looked at her properly for the first time. She was a short woman, but proportionately even broader than her son, and wore a pink satin jacket and yellow satin trousers. Her hair was dyed deep amber and stood out in a crimped fuzz all round her flat, yellowish grey face. Her eyes were hidden behind polarised dark glasses in which Foxe could see his reflection, double, tiny.

  “Yes, they all get crushed prawn, ma’am,” he said.

  Doctor Trotter’s laugh was like gunfire.

  “Don’t I keep telling you that all science is one, Mother?” he said.

  Mrs Trotter was watching Foxe, her head cocked a little to one side. Dreiser too was staring at him, in plain bewilderment which cleared to a small smile—presumably he’d decided that Foxe had told a politic fib. Doctor Trotter continued to chuckle while Foxe gave the rats a few seconds to settle before he opened the starti
ng gates. They came out of the traps with that characteristic and strangely pleasing scuttle which makes it look as if their motive power were a blob of mercury; ears half-pricked, noses inquisitive and eager.

  “What that mark?” snapped Mrs Trotter. “Why he got the mark?”

  “You’re seeing it the wrong way up, Mother,” said Doctor Trotter in an odd voice, both soothing and teasing. “It’s only a big Q, upside down. Look, the other one’s got a small q.”

  She grunted, unsatisfied. The rats made no mistake in the first section, Quentin reaching the gate a couple of seconds before Queenie. But Quentin made a muddle over the trigger and Queenie was half way along the second section before he got it right.

  “This section’s the mirror image of the previous one,” said Foxe. “They’ve got to take the left fork this time. Look, Queenie’s got it wrong. No … he’s remembered. Now he’ll back out. Quentin’s got it wrong too …”

  Foxe was mildly interested in Quentin’s behaviour, apart from the rat’s status in the experiment. Normally he was careful not to get even distantly involved with any particular animal, partly because his own attention might marginally affect the rat’s behaviour, and partly because he preferred not to finish an experiment mashing up the brains of an animal he had, so to speak, known personally. But sometimes the relationship grew, unwilled.

  Quentin paused, his nose twitching at the blank side wall of the run as though he expected to find a gate there. He lost interest and leaned against the wall like a bum on a street corner. Foxe knew quite well that Quentin was only making room to scratch an ear with a hind leg, but the effect was exactly as if he had yawned, shrugged and lit a battered fag-end.

  “You have a subversive there,” said Doctor Trotter.

  He was joking, of course, but from his tone it was a joke on a serious subject, like a priest’s mild blasphemies. Foxe’s eye was caught by a movement from beyond Mrs Trotter—the brown, long-fingered hand of the man who had so far been no more than a vague presence, sliding up a khaki-trousered thigh to caress the butt of a big pistol that dangled there in a leather holster. Foxe looked back at the runs. Queenie had reached and passed the second gate and was well on his way to the third, but somehow Quentin occupied the attention as he backed lethargically to a turning-space.

  “No-good rad,” said Mrs Trotter.

  “You feel like a God?” said Doctor Trotter. “I do not speak of the Lord Almighty, just in literary terms. A God above Troy, watching the heroes scuttle round the walls. What if we are only rats, and somewhere above us there is a scientist, timing us and taking notes?”

  “If there’s a God like that he’s running a very messy experiment,” said Foxe.

  “You think you could teach him something, Doctor? No, it’s in the nature of the experiment. Man is a messy animal. And you know what that God is looking for? Not intelligence, my friend—oh, no. He is looking for virtue. Have you considered developing a drug which would make men good?”

  “Good?”

  “Good.”

  Foxe decided to back out.

  “I’m not on the development side, sir. My job is controlling and interpreting the behaviour of animals.”

  “So is mine. Let us consider this problem.”

  “Besides, how are you going to measure goodness?”

  Again the Prime Minister’s big laugh blanketed the laboratory, but this time not in pure good humour. There was an undertone of roaring.

  “How would you measure goodness, Captain Angiah?” he said.

  The man with the gun moved so that he could look directly at Foxe. He was as tall as Doctor Trotter, but no more than ordinarily broad. He might have been almost startlingly handsome—his face was narrow and fine-boned, his skin a very clear brown, but his nose ended at a curious angle, displaying large black nostrils.

  “I begin with crime statistics,” he said. “We have enough of those.”

  “Well, Doctor Foxe?”

  “I don’t know …”

  Foxe found it difficult not to show that he found the whole question boring. They waited for him, all staring, ignoring the rat-runs. He remembered an incident that might inject a bit of practicality into all this muzzy guff.

  “I mean, what makes a good rat?” he said. “For instance, a couple of years ago I was evaluating a stuff called SG 19. I’d pretty well finished the experimental part when I got called away for a fortnight. I don’t normally use assistants, but I left my rats in charge of an experienced girl, but she got hurt in a road accident and somebody quite inexperienced took over. It was just a matter of feeding and cleaning, but for some reason he put my rats, which I’d left in separate boxes like these, into two larger communal cages. It was quite a normal thing to do, as a matter of fact. Unfortunately the cages he chose weren’t big enough. Now, rats are semi-social animals in the wild state. They don’t live in organised packs, but they like a bit of company and get on pretty well—just the odd nip to establish the hierarchy. But at a certain point of over-crowding—there’s a lot of work been done on this, and the sequence is well known—they suddenly manifest stress symptoms of an extreme form, including murder and cannibalism. Well, I got back to the lab at this point, and I found that the control group, which hadn’t been having SG 19, were already well into their stress behaviour. Their cage was a real mess, blood and fur and excreta everywhere, and a third of them dead. But the other group—well, they were quite a mess too, but they hadn’t been going for each other in the same way. They were mostly still alive, and the dead ones seemed to have suffocated or had heart-failures …”

  “Your SG 19 made those rats good?”

  “No, sir. I mean it was one possible cause of their behaviour, but this wasn’t a controlled experiment. I can think of half a dozen other possible causes. But suppose it had been the SG 19; was the failure to demonstrate the normal range of stress symptoms an indication of what you call ‘goodness’?”

  “Certainly. Certainly.”

  “But it was unnatural behaviour, surely.”

  “My dear Doctor, all virtue, I say all virtue, consists in the suppression of some natural instinct. It is the nature of man to lie, to steal, to murder. Virtue consists in the suppression of such instincts, as Captain Angiah will tell you.”

  The Captain’s long, puritanical face nodded, unsmiling. Foxe guessed that the Prime Minister had chosen his body guard partly for his look of refined self-denial. They made a good contrast, at least.

  “But presumably, sir,” Foxe said, “stress behaviour has a function. It’s a reaction to circumstances in which the population can’t survive without reducing itself drastically. So in evolutionary terms the rats in the SG 19 group were behaving badly, by not killing each other off.”

  “Doctor, to be good is to obey the will of God. In your laboratory you are God. If you wished your rats to kill each other off, then they were being good. If not … what is it, Mother?”

  Foxe had been vaguely aware that Mrs Trotter, though amused for a while by the rat-runs, had been as bored as he was by the argument about virtue. She had wandered into the logic-room and was trying to open the window.

  “Look there at that no-good man,” she snapped.

  Doctor Trotter strolled over. Foxe returned to the runs and saw that Queenie had made very good time and was now nosing at the final gate—it was almost as if he was better off without his injection. Quentin on the other hand had found the second gate at last and got through it, but was now staring at its other side with twitching whiskers, just like a householder who has gone out, closed his front door and then realised that he has left all his keys on the hall table.

  “Do none of these windows open, Doctor?” called the Prime Minister. “I want to shout at that idle ruffian.”

  “They’re all sealed, sir. The nearest one which opens is out in the corridor.”

  “Stir him up for me, please, Ca
ptain.”

  Foxe, going towards the group in the logic-room, passed Captain Angiah going in the other direction. The Captain’s face had a look like the death-mask of a saint, stiff and drained of all emotion, but still somehow bearing the print of ecstasy. He must have been moving fast, for by the time Foxe was standing beside Dreiser and gazing down at the sleeping gardener, the corridor window was swinging open. Its glass hid the shape behind it, then a fine-boned hand steadied a big pistol on the sill. The snap of the shot was sharp and deep. The gardener’s hat leaped like a large springing beetle. For a moment Foxe thought that Captain Angiah’s idea of stirring a man up was to shoot him dead, but at last the gardener blinked. His head craned, blearily. Still supine he reached for his hat, stared at it and poked a dark finger through the bullet hole in its brim, then peered, with all the whites of his eyes showing, at the stillness around him. The corridor window was shut by now. Doctor Trotter was grinning, watching the scene with narrowed eyes, but the group in the laboratory must have been invisible behind the tinted glass.

  The gardener convulsed to his feet and ran a few steps, stopped, scuttled back for his rake.

  “The rake will come apart in his hands,” said Foxe.

  It did, of course. The man stared for a dazed instant at its fallen head, tossed the handle down, ran to his satchel, grabbed a small object out and hurled it into the trees like a grenade. Before it had fallen he was scampering, head ducked, round the corner of the building.

  “How you know that?” said Mrs Trotter. “The rake break when you say. How you know that? Whad that thing he throw away, Foxy?”

  Nobody had called Foxe that since his schooldays. Ancient miseries, long thought dead, twitched. Unthinkingly he responded in the old way, with the schoolboy’s shield of casual apathy.