"Brian Plante - Papa Rat" - читать интересную книгу автора (Plante Brian)

he changed the subject before she got started. Maybe it was time to tell her what he had been up to
lately.

"Corva, I'm not a rat catcher any more. I closed the business over a week ago."

Corva's mouth hung wide open in a silent "O" and she stared at him, unbelieving.

"I sold the equipment and put the money into the stock market. Options, to be precise. Puts and calls,
they're called. You can make a lot of money fast with options. You can lose fast too, if you're not
careful."

"Huh? Dennis, what are you talking about? You don't know anything about the stock market."

"I've been studying up on this for a little while," Dennis said confidently. "It's not nearly as hard as most
people think it is. In only a couple of weeks I'm up twelve thousand. Just on paper, that is."

"Huh? Is this for real?"

"It's all right, Honey. I know what I'm doing."
Corva continued staring and shook her head in dismay. "Is this what all the magazines are for?"

"These?" Dennis said, looking down at the stack. "No, these are biological abstracts. I've been looking
into the literature on these smart rats. It seems it's caused by a virus."

"Huh?"

"A virus. Maybe something that got out of a lab when one of the subjects got too smart for the
experimenter. It somehow activates the unused parts of the rat's brain. Some of the rats get smart. Nearly
all the rats have the virus by now, but only one in ten thousand is predisposed to becoming a 'smart' rat.
It's some sort of genetic quirk, so they say. All the children of the smart rats have the same
predisposition, and the smart ones are better survivors, so it's inevitable that the smart rats will eventually
take over the whole rat population before too long."

Corva looked at the newspaper-shrouded cage on the coffee table. "You mean that thing in the cage has
a virus?" she said with a quiver of concern in her voice.

"Without a doubt."

Dennis walked over to the cage and started pulling the paper away through the cage. When enough
paper was cleared away, he peeked inside. The stainless steel spout had been removed from the water
bottle, allowing the water to drip into the layer of newspaper below. The tubular spout had been wedged
between the metal feeding dish and the cage wires and manipulated to spread the wires in one spot to
make a small gap. A lever and a fulcrum.

The rat was gone.

"Good luck, Papa Rat," Dennis said. "Sorry about what I did to your family."

"That thing's not loose in my home, is it?"