vault-room, closed the door and shot the mechanical bolts.

Sure. Someone was out there, but they'd get damned tired before
morning. He flicked on the light and touched the other wall switch
beside it. The powerful blower and sucker fans cleared out the musty
air and rat-stink.

John rustled in the cage, blinking at the sudden light. "Hi, Neff!
Meat! Meat! Meat!"

Smart little devil! Neff sometimes brought him a scrap from his
dinner, but he hadn't thought to tonight. He sucked at his teeth and
pulled out a tiny string of steak. "Here. Bite my finger and I'll poke
both your eyes out."

John picked the thread of gristle from Neff's finger with his
fore-paws and devoured it, trembling with pleasure. Neff lifted the
cage. "Okay, now let's have a few tricks."

At once John made for the can of wheat. "Get outta there!" Neff
scooped him up and dropped him on the desk, snapping his tail with a
forefinger. John whirled, laid his ears back and opened his mouth. At
bay, the brown rat, Neff knew, is the most ferocious rodent of the
2000 species, but Neff held his hand out daring John to bite.

Neff knew all about rats. More than anybody in the world knew about
rats. When you live among them for three decades you find out about
their cunning wariness, fecundity, secretiveness, boldness, omnivorous
and voracious appetites. Fools reviled them as predators and
scavengers. Neff appreciated them for what they really are: The most
adaptable mammal on earth.

John was smart but no smarter than the rest. Neff had proved this by
teaching every rat he captured alive to talk.

Impossible they had told him. Even parrots and parakeets only imitate
sounds in their squawking--yes, and pet crows. Animals don't have
thinking brains, they said. They react, trial and error, stimulus and
response, but they don't _think_.

Neff didn't know about the others, but he knew about rats.

Keep them hungry and lonely for a mate. Hurt them. Torture them. To
hell with this reward business. Rats are like men. Mentally lazy.
They'll go for bait, sure, but they'll go faster to escape pain--a
thousand times faster.

And rats have lived with man from the first. They have a feeling for
language like the human brat. Between partitions, inches from a man's
head when he lies in bed talking to his wife, under a man's feet while
he's eating, over his head in the warehouse rafters while he's
working. Always, just inches or feet away from man, running through