Lisa was tempted to tell Mike that he couldn’t have it both ways—that she couldn’t consider the possibility that Morgan might be responsible for this mad caper while simultaneously motivating herself with the thought that he might be in mortal danger—but the complaint died on her lips. Whichever one of the two possibilities was right, she didhave to solve the puzzle as quickly as was humanly possible, and she wasthe person best placed to do so. If she failed, everybody might suffer.

Probably, she thought, that was why the intruders had come to her apartment—not to rob, but to discredit her; to do as much as they could to earn her the mistrust of Peter Grimmett Smith and his merry MOD men. If so, she had to hope that Mr. Smith wouldn’t fall for it—and whether he did or not, she had to bend every atom of her intelligence and of her knowledge of Morgan Miller’s life and work to figuring out exactly what kind of mess he had gotten himself into.

First Interlude

THG POLITICS OF MOUSEWORLD

The tour that Morgan Miller gave Lisa when he welcomed her to the department began with the lab space in which she would be working and the parallel spaces occupied by her fellow research students, then progressed to his own territory. There was far too much for her to take in all at once, and too many names to remember, but it was obvious from the start that Miller was a misfit. It wasn’t just the fact that he was the only person except for the departmental secretaries who wasn’t wearing a white coat; it was the slight wariness haunting the attitudes other people struck when they spoke to him. Some of them, Lisa assumed, must have been working cheek-by-jowl with him for years, but not one of them gave the impression of actually knowing him.

Miller was not a tall man—his height was almost exactly the same as Lisa’s—but he gave the impression of being loftier than he was. His frame was slim and his face rather gaunt. She guessed that he was in his late thirties, but there was a stern agelessness about his hard features that suggested he wouldn’t look substantially different in twenty years’ time. No one would have described him as handsome, but the narrowness of his jaw made the upper half of his face seem uncommonly wide, exaggerating the width of his forehead and making his dark-brown eyes seem a trifle overlarge. When he had been a child, Lisa thought, those eyes must have seemed plaintive and adorable, but now that he was a man, they seemed intimidatingly cool and contemplative. The whole ensemble gave the impression of a penetrating intelligence quietly lurking in the depths of an unusual mind. Had he not possessed such a luxuriant head of dark-brown hair—which certainly wasn’t a wig—Miller might have have resembled a stereotyped cartoon egghead, but there was something about him that resisted submission to any kind of category.

It wasn’t until the end of the tour that he took her into Mouseworld. He ushered her through the door with a wry smile, as if he were ashamed to have to stoop so low as to use it as a kind of punch Une but had no alternative. It was an awesome sight, and it stopped her in her tracks for a moment. Miller had obviously seen similar reactions many times before, and the wryness of his smile twisted his thin lips into an unclassifiable grimace.

“Four hundred and fifty thousand, give or take ten percent,” he said, anticipating the question that had indeed sprung unbidden to Lisa’s lips—although she had not actually intended to voice it, because she knew how lame it would sound. “That’s in the one big experiment distributed around the four walls. The mice in the central block are taking part in several hundred different enterprises of considerably more importance, so we take care to give them all the space they need. Ours are in this sector here.”

Miller moved toward the central H-shaped complex, but Lisa didn’t move with him, even though she had noted that he’d said “ours” rather than “mine.” She couldn’t take her eyes off the walls.

The four cities were not identical in terms of their layout—London had to accommodate the door to the lab, Paris was interrupted by two large windows, Rome by two smaller ones, and New York by a huge cupboard—but all four were “open” in the sense that all of the internal partitions contained doorways and all of the rooms had openings in the floor and ceiling, connected by ladders to the floors above and below. Although each city’s space was divided into dozens of floors and each floor into hundreds of compartments, every mouse could get to any location within its own city, always provided that the other mice in the sector would permit it to pass.

Lisa observed that the automatic feeding mechanism was simple in its basic design but amazingly intricate in its construction, making a supply of food pellets and water continuously available to every compartment. She also saw that each compartment had its own built-in cleaning system, equally simple in design, which continuously replaced the sawdust-like matrix that soaked up the urine. The system must have been wondrously efficient, because the stink, though distinct, was by no means nauseating. Such quasiclinical observations were, however, utterly overwhelmed by the impression created by the restless mice as they swarmed in vast numbers through the mazy complexes, like wheat fields blown by a wayward wind, or an ocean stirred by lashing rain and turbulent eddies.

She had never seen anything like it, nor had she ever imagined anything like it. She had never seen Ufe in such awful, chaotic profusion.

“It must cost a fortune,” was the observation she actually made when she finally found her voice, but it was a ridiculous understatement of her actual response.

“Compared with what?” Miller retorted wryly. “A cyclotron? Ofsted? Back in seventy-four, the university’s one and only computer filled a dedicated building and cost millions—Mouseworld must have seemed trivial by comparison. But you’re right, of course. The startup cost was far too high even in the context of thirty years ago, at the optimistic height of one of the rosier interludes of the old boom/bust cycle. Fortunately, the population explosion was a hot topic then, thanks to Paul Ehrlich and a few other best-selling alarmists. There were big grants to be had. That was before the ostrich factor took hold.”

It was the manner in which he spoke that kept everyone at a distance, Lisa realized. It wasn’t that he was contemptuous, or hostile, or unduly arrogant—but there was something in his manner that emphasized a detachment so extreme as to constitute removal.She knew it wasn’t the kind of trait that most women would find attractive, but most women didn’t consider themselves natural-born forensic scientists. Why, she wondered, didn’t he wear a lab coat?

“Ostrich factor?” she queried, while her captive eyes roamed the four walls of Mouseworld, refusing even to see the central block, where all the compartments were neatly separated from one another and at least one mouse in ten was a Morgan Miller, gloriously secure in its own abundant personal space.

“Head in the sand,” Miller told her. “If we refuse to see the problem, it doesn’t really exist. The phrase is Garrett Hardin’s, but the book that contains it didn’t get anywhere near the best-seller lists, thus proving its own thesis. You should come along to my third-year lectures on the population dynamics module—I kick off with an introduction to the neoMalthusians in three weeks time. It’s usually rather lively, even nowadays, when little short of a neutron bomb can be relied upon to raise the majority of students out of their appalling apathy. No offense intended.”

“None taken,” she assured him. She knew what he meant. She’d taken undergraduate courses in Practical Transgenics and Bioethics—topics that raised a storm wherever the chattering classes gathered for a dinner party or paused to gossip in Waitrose or the GP’s waiting room, but couldn’t even raise a ripple at home. Anyone who bothered to sign up for such courses was already numbered among the converted, and the students were relentlessly agreeable in the face of their teachers’ preachings. It was almost as if they were members of some beleaguered cult.