1 The rats are certain to attack it.
2 The rats knew what was coming now.
3 Yet the cage with the rats was not two metres away from him.
4 He was falling backwards, into enormous depths, away from the rats.
5 The rat had never come back, but the bugs had multiplied hideously in the heat.
6 The rats were fighting; they were trying to get at each other through the partition.
7 They were at the age when a rat's muzzle grows blunt and fierce and his fur brown instead of grey.
8 The rat,' said O'Brien, still addressing his invisible audience, 'although a rodent, is carnivorous.
9 He must interpose another human being, the BODY of another human being, between himself and the rats.
10 But he had suddenly understood that in the whole world there was just ONE person to whom he could transfer his punishment--ONE body that he could thrust between himself and the rats.
11 He was still strapped in the chair, but he had fallen through the floor, through the walls of the building, through the earth, through the oceans, through the atmosphere, into outer space, into the gulfs between the stars--always away, away, away from the rats.