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have enough of those.”
    â€œWell, Doctor Foxe?”
    â€œI 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.
    â€œI 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 …”
    â€œYour SG 19 made those rats good?”
    â€œNo, 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 thefailure to demonstrate the normal range of stress symptoms an indication of what you call ‘goodness’?”
    â€œCertainly. Certainly.”
    â€œBut it was unnatural behaviour, surely.”
    â€œMy 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.
    â€œBut 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.”
    â€œDoctor, 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.
    â€œLook 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