Doctor Who_ Warlock - Andrew Cartmel [82]
He drained the cup in one long swallow and discarded it. Then he dried his hands carefully to avoid any risk of an electric shock and switched off the desk lamp. The annexe was plunged into darkness again, but that didn’t bother Tommy. He wasn’t afraid of the dark. He knew he was the most dangerous animal in the lab.
Tommy went around the corner and back into the main lab where he had to finish checking the laboratory guillotine for readiness. The guillotine was an impressive device, solid and precision‐built from stainless steel. It was specifically designed for laboratory rats.
Rats were remarkable creatures, reflected Tommy Hunnicutt. Take number 417, for instance. This was a mature male who was helping Tommy with a unilateral experimental project involving the shuttlebox.
The shuttlebox was a small unit with electrical current supplied by wires that ran under the flooring. The circuitry was organized in two symmetrical systems so that current could be run to either the left or right section of the floor. When one section of the floor was electrified, the rat who was placed in the box received a shock. He could escape by jumping a partition into the other side of the box which, according to the design of the experiment, might or might not be similarly electrified.
The device was designed for use in alertness experiments. When a pharmaceutical manufacturer wanted to market a new tranquillizer he had to gather data on its effectiveness. One way of doing this was by dosing a laboratory rat and checking his reaction time on the electric floor, compared with an undosed subject.
Rat number 417 wasn’t part of any drug trial, however, and he wasn’t dosed with anything – unless you counted the natural fight‐or‐flight chemicals that were no doubt gathering in his small body as a result of being made to dance on the electric floor.
Number 417 was an interesting case study. When Tommy first put him in the shuttlebox he had administered twenty shocks and the rat had only managed to avoid one. The following day, he had achieved four leaps. On successive days his escape ratio had steadily improved until their nineteenth session. That was when the really interesting thing had happened.
Number 417’s escape average had begun to drop again. It was as if, having reached his optimum behaviour pattern, the rat had suddenly lost heart. After all, no matter how many times he jumped back and forth, there was no escape. Even if he jumped every time, he would continue to be placed in a box and given electric shocks.
So, from a near perfect average, number 417’s jump rate had steadily declined. It was as though he just didn’t care any more. He recognised the futility of resistance and simply gave up. Who could have imagined such subtle and complex – Tommy was almost tempted to call it philosophical – behaviour from a creature as tiny as a rat?
Tommy had noticed something similarly fascinating with regard to the guillotine. When it came time to make the clinical sacrifice he invariably brought the rat cages over and put them on the bench by the guillotine, close at hand for the repetitive work of dispatching the subjects. And as work progressed it became evident that the rats waiting in the cages knew something was up.
Their behaviour became increasingly disturbed as their turn approached. This was true even if Tommy piled textbooks between their cage and the guillotine. There was no way they could actually see what was going on. And yet they knew. Whether by sound, smell, or some subtle form of social signalling, Tommy couldn’t be sure.
But they knew.
Who would have believed that of a creature