There is a meal waiting on the floor of Randy’s cell, and a rat on top of the meal. Randy usually reacts pretty badly to the sight of rats; they rupture the containment system that his upbringing and his education built around the part of his mind where the collective-unconscious stuff dwells, and send him straight into Hieronymus Bosch territory. But in these circumstances it doesn’t bother him any more than seeing one at the zoo would. The rat has a surprisingly attractive buckskin-colored pelt and a tail about as thick as a pencil that has evidently run afoul of a farmer’s wife with a carving knife, and woggles stiffly in the air like the blunt antenna of a cellphone. Randy is hungry, but he doesn’t want to eat anything that a rat has left footprints on, so he just watches it.