The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents Read Free Page B

dribbly candles and the remains of the green bubbly stuff in the cauldrons all ended up on the big dump, along with the tin cans and old boxes and the kitchen waste. Oh, the wizards had put up signs saying DANGEROUS and TOXIC , but the rats hadn’t been able to read in those days, and they liked dribbly candle ends.
    Maurice had never eaten anything off the dump. A good motto in life, he’d reckoned, was: Don’t eat anything that glows.
    But he’d become intelligent, too, at about the same time as the rats. It was a mystery.
    Since then he’d done what cats always did. He steered people. Now some of the rats counted as people too, of course. But people were people, even if they had four legs and had called themselves names like Dangerous Beans, which is the kind of name you gave yourself if you learned to read before you understood what all the words actually meant, and reading the warning notices and the labels on the old rusty cans gave you names you liked the sound of.
    The trouble with thinking was that, once you started, you went on doing it. And as far as Maurice was concerned, the rats were thinking a good deal too much. It was Peaches who was the worst. Maurice’s usual trick of just talking fast until people got confused didn’t work on her at all.
    â€œAhem,” she began. “We think that this should be the last time.”
    Maurice stared. The other rats backed away slightly, but Peaches just stared back.
    â€œThis must be the very last time we do thesilly ‘plague of rats’ trick,” said Peaches. “And that’s final.”
    â€œAnd what does Hamnpork think about this?” said Maurice. He turned to the head rat, who had been watching them. It was always a good idea appealing to Hamnpork when Peaches was giving trouble, because he didn’t like her very much.
    â€œWhat d’you mean, think?” said Hamnpork.
    â€œI…sir, * I think we should stop doing this trick,” said Peaches, dipping her head nervously.
    â€œOh, you think too, do you?” said Hamnpork. “Everyone’s thinking these days. I think there’s a good deal too much of this thinking, that’s what I think. We never thought about thinking when I was a lad. We’d never get anything done if we thought first.”
    He gave Maurice a glare too. Hamnpork didn’t like Maurice. He didn’t like most things that had happened since the Change. In fact, Maurice wondered how long Hamnpork was going to last as leader. He didn’t like thinking. He belonged to the days when a rat leader justhad to be big and mean. The world was moving far too fast for him now, which made him angry.
    He wasn’t so much leading now as being pushed.
    â€œI…Dangerous Beans, sir, believes that we should be thinking of settling down, sir,” said Peaches.
    Maurice scowled. Hamnpork wouldn’t listen to Peaches, and she knew it, but Dangerous Beans was the nearest thing the rats had to a wizard, and even big rats listened to him.
    â€œI thought we were going to get on a boat and find an island somewhere,” said Hamnpork. “Very ratty places, boats,” he added approvingly. Then he went on, with a slightly nervous and slightly annoyed look at Dangerous Beans: “And people tell me that we need this money stuff because, now that we can do all this thinking , we’ve got to be eff…efit…”
    â€œEthical, sir,” said Dangerous Beans.
    â€œWhich sounds unratty to me. Not that my opinion counts for anything, it seems,” said Hamnpork.
    â€œWe’ve got enough money, sir,” said Peaches. “We’ve already got a lot of money. We have got a lot of money, haven’t we, Maurice.” It wasn’t a question; it was a kind of accusation.
    â€œWell, when you say a lot —” Maurice began.
    â€œAnd in fact we’ve got more money than we thought,” said Peaches, still in the same tone of voice.