The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents

what they were for.
    Maurice thought about the good old days before his brain had started whizzing like a firework. He'd turn up at the door of the University kitchens and look sweet, and then the cooks would try to work out what he wanted. It was amazing! They'd say things like 'Does oo want a bowl of milk, den? Does oo want a biscuit? Does oo want dese nice scraps, den?' And all Maurice would have to do was wait patiently until they got to a sound he recognized, like 'turkey legs' or 'minced lamb'.
    But he was sure he'd never eaten anything magical. There was no such thing as enchanted chicken giblets, was there?
    It was the rats who'd eaten the magical stuff. The dump they called 'home' and also called 'lunch' was round the back of the University, and it was a university for wizards, after all. The old Maurice hadn't paid much attention to people who weren't holding bowls, but he was aware that the big men in pointy hats made strange things happen.
    And now he knew what happened to the stuff they used, too. It got tossed over the wall when they'd finished with it. All the old worn-out spell-books and the stubs of the dribbly candles and the remains of the green bubbly stuff in the cauldrons all ended up on the big dump, along with the tin cans and old boxes and the kitchen waste. Oh, the wizards had put up signs saying 'Dangerous' and 'Toxic', but the rats hadn't been able to read in those days and they liked dribbly candle ends.
    Maurice had never eaten anything off the dump. A good motto in life, he'd reckoned, was: don't eat anything that glows.
    But he'd become intelligent, too, at about the same time as the rats. It was a mystery.
    Since then he'd done what cats always did. He steered people. Now some of the rats counted as people too, of course. But people were people, even if they had four legs and had called themselves names like Dangerous Beans, which is the kind of name you give yourself if you learn to read before you understand what all the words actually mean, and read the notices and the labels off the old rusty cans and give yourself names you like the sound of.
    The trouble with thinking was that, once you started, you went on doing it. And as far as Maurice was concerned, the rats were thinking a good deal too much. Dangerous Beans was bad enough, but he was so busy thinking stupid thoughts about how rats could actually build their own country somewhere that Maurice could deal with him. It was Peaches who was the worst. Maurice's usual trick of just talking fast until people got confused didn't work on her at all.
    'Ahem,' she began again, 'we think that this should be the last time.'
    Maurice stared. The other rats backed away slightly, but Peaches just stared back.
    'This must be the very last time we do the silly "plague of rats" trick,' said Peaches. 'And that's final.'
    'And what does Hamnpork think about this?' said Maurice. He turned to the head rat, who had been watching them. It was always a good idea appealing to Hamnpork when Peaches was giving trouble, because he didn't like her very much.
    'What d'you mean, think?' said Hamnpork.
    'I… sir, I think we should stop doing this trick,' said Peaches, dipping her head nervously.
    'Oh, you think too, do you?' said Hamnpork. 'Everyone's thinking these days. I think there's a good deal too much of this thinking, that's what I think. We never thought about thinking when I was a lad. We'd never get anything done if we thought first.'
    He gave Maurice a glare, too. Hamnpork didn't like Maurice. He didn't like most things that had happened since the Change. In fact Maurice wondered how long Hamnpork was going to last as leader. He didn't like thinking. He belonged to the days when a rat leader just had to be big and stroppy. The world was moving far too fast for him now, which made him angry.
    He wasn't so much leading now as being pushed.
    'I… Dangerous Beans, sir, believes that we should be thinking of settling down, sir,' said Peaches.
    Maurice scowled. Hamnpork wouldn't listen to Peaches, and she knew it, but Dangerous Beans was the nearest thing the rats had to a wizard and even big rats listened to him.
    'I thought we were going to get on a boat and find an island somewhere,' said Hamnpork. 'Very ratty places, boats,' he added, approvingly. Then he went on, with a slightly nervous and slightly annoyed look at Dangerous Beans, 'And people tell me that we need this money stuff because now we can do all this thinking we've got to be eff…