"I'm not spying!" George exclaimed. "I just came to ask you to please remove the trap."
he man from the F.B.I. looked at him with something close to pity. "It's not that simple any more," he said. "Don't you realize what a threat you comprise?"
"No," George said, scampering up the leg of the table and walking to its center. "We're not a threat to anybody. We're just mice. It's not our nature to be a threat to anybody."
Then, as he looked around the table at the seven huge faces that surrounded him, he immediately saw that they were all scared half to death because he was a mouse, and he had a sudden premonition that he would not come out of the meeting alive. So he opened his mind to let his family and all the other telepathic mice hear everything that was happening.
"Don't tell me you don't fully realize," the Fish and Wildlife man demanded sarcastically, trying to hide his terror beneath a blustering tone, "that from one mouse, your great-great-grandfather Michael, there must be now at least twelve billion descendants—or six times the human population of Earth!"
"No, I didn't know," George said, interested despite himself.
"Don't tell me it never occurred to you," the man from the F.B.I. said, shaking a finger at him, while George could see that he kept the other hand on the revolver in his pocket, "that you mice have access to and could destroy every secret file we have!"
"No, it didn't," George said, shrinking from that huge, shaking finger. "We mice would never destroy anything uselessly."