The Cassandra Complex - Brian Stableford [28]
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