Oh, Rats!
Galaxy Magazine, December 1961
Orthedrin, maxiton and glutamic acid—they were the prescription that
made him king of his world!
SK540, the 27th son of two very
ordinary white laboratory rats, surveyed his world.
He was no more able than any
other rat to possess articulate speech, or to use his paws as hands. All he had
was a brain which, relative to its size, was superior to any rat’s that had hitherto
appeared on Earth. It was enough.
In the first week of gestation
his embryo had been removed to a more suitable receptacle than the maternal
womb, and his brain had been stimulated with orthedrin, maxiton and glutamic
acid. It had been continuously irrigated with blood. One hemisphere had been
activated far in excess of the other, since previous experiments had shown that
increased lack of symmetry between the hemispheres produced superior mentality.
The end-result was an enormous increase in brain-cells in both hemispheres. His
brain showed also a marked increase in cholinesterase over that of other rats.
SK540, in other words, was a
super-rat.
The same processes had been
applied to all his brothers and sisters. Most of them had died. The few who did
not, failed to show the desired results, or showed them in so lopsided and
partial a manner that it was necessary to destroy them.
All of this, of course had been
mere preparation and experimentation with a view to later developments in human
subjects. What SK540’s gods had not anticipated was that they would produce a
creature mentally the superior, not only of his fellow-rats, but also, in some
respects, of themselves.
He was a super-rat: but he was
still a rat. His world of dreams and aspirations was not human, but murine.
What would you do if you were a
brilliant, moody young super-rat, caged in a laboratory?
SK540 did it.
What human beings desired was
health, freedom, wealth, love, and power. So did SK540. But to him health was
taken for granted; freedom was freedom from cages, traps, cats, and dogs;
wealth meant shelter from cold and rain and plenty to eat; love meant a constant
supply of available females.
But power! It was in his longing
for power that he most revealingly displayed his status as super-rat.
Therefore, once he had learned
how to open his cage, he was carefully selective of the companions—actually,
the followers—whom he would release to join his midnight hegira from the
laboratory. Only the meekest and most subservient of the males—intelligent but
not too intelligent—and the most desirable and amiable of the females were invited.
Once free of the cages, SK540 had
no difficulty in leading his troop out of the building. The door of the
laboratory was locked, but a window was slightly open from the top. Rats can
climb up or down.
Like a silver ribbon they flowed
along the dark street, SK540, looking exactly like all the rest, at their head.
Only one person in the deserted streets seems to have noticed them, and he did
not understand the nature of the phenomenon.
***
Young Mr. and Mrs. Philip Vinson
started housekeeping in what had once been a mansion. It was now a rundown
eyesore.
It had belonged to Norah Vinson’s
great-aunt Martha, who had left it to her in her will. The estate was in
litigation, but the executor had permitted the Vinsons to settle down in the
house, though they weren’t allowed yet to sell it. It had no modern
conveniences, and was full of rooms they couldn’t use and heavy old-fashioned
furniture; but it was solidly built and near the laboratory where he worked as
a technician, and they could live rent-free until they could sell the house and
use the money to buy a real home.
“Something funny happened in the
lab last night,” Philip reported, watching Norah struggle with dinner on the
massive coal-stove. “Somebody broke in and stole about half our experimental
animals. And they got our pride and joy.”
“The famous SK540?” Norah asked.
“The same. Actually, it wasn’t a
break-in. It must have been an inside job. The cages were open but there were
no signs of breaking and entering. We’re all under suspicion till they find out
who-dunit.”
Norah looked alarmed.
“You too? What on earth would
anybody want with a lot of laboratory rats? They aren’t worth anything, are
they—financially, I mean?”
“Not a cent. That’s why I’m sure
one of the clean-up kids must have done it. Probably wanted them for pets. They’re
all tame, of course, not like wild rats—though they can bite like wild rats if
they want to. Some of the ones missing are treated, and some are controls. It would
just be a nuisance if they hadn’t taken SK540. Now they’ve got to find him, or
do about five years’ work over again, without any assurance of as great a
success. To say nothing of letting our super-rat loose on the world.”
“What on earth could even a
super-rat do that would matter—to human beings, I mean?”
“Nobody knows. Maybe that’s what
we’re going to find out.”
***
That night Norah woke suddenly
with a loud scream. Philip got the gas lighted—there was no electricity in the
old house—and held her shaking body in his arms. She found her breath at last
long enough to sob: “It was a rat! A rat ran right over my face!”
“You’re dreaming, darling. It’s
because I told you about the theft at the lab. There couldn’t be rats in this
place. It’s too solidly built, from the basement up.”
He finally got her to sleep
again, but he lay awake for a long time, listening. Nothing happened.
Rats can’t talk, but they can
communicate. About the time Norah Vinson dropped off after her frightened
wakening, SK540 was confronting a culprit. The culprit was one of the liberated
males. His beady eyes tried to gaze into the implacable ones of SK540, but his
tail twitched nervously and if he bared his teeth it was more in terror than in
fight. They all knew that strict orders had been given not to disturb the
humans in the house until SK540 had all his preparations made.
A little more of that silent
communication, and the rat who had run over Norah’s face knew he had only two
choices—have his throat slit or get out. He got.
“What do you know?” Philip said
that evening. “One of our rats came back.”
“By itself?”
“Yeah. I never heard of such a
thing. It was one of the experimental ones, so it was smarter than most, though
not such an awful lot. I never heard of a rat with homing instinct before. But
when we opened up this morning, there he was, sitting in his cage, ready for
breakfast.”
“Speaking of breakfast, I thought
I asked you to buy a big box of oatmeal on your way home yesterday. It’s about
the only thing in the way of cereal I can manage on that old stove.”
“I did buy it. Don’t you
remember? I left it in the kitchen.”
“Well, it wasn’t there this
morning. All I know is that you’re going to have nothing but toast and coffee
tomorrow. We seem to be out of eggs, too. And bacon. And I thought we had half
a pound left of that cheese, but that’s gone too.”
“Good Lord, Norah, if you’ve got
that much marketing to do, can’t you do it yourself?”
“Sure, if you leave the car. I’m
not going to walk all that way and back.”
So of course Philip did do the
shopping the next day. Besides, Norah had just remembered she had a date at the
hairdresser’s.
***
When he got home her hair was
still uncurled and she was in hysterics.
One of the many amenities
great-aunt Martha’s house lacked was a telephone; anyway, Norah couldn’t have
been coherent over one. She cast herself, shuddering and crying, into Philip’s
arms, and it was a long time before he got her soothed enough for her to gasp: “Philip!
They wouldn’t let me out!”
“They? Who? What do you mean?”
“The—the rats! The white rats.
They made a ring around me at the front door so I couldn’t open it. I ran to
the back and they beat me there and did the same thing. I even tried the
windows but it was no use. And their teeth—they all—I guess I went to pieces. I
started throwing things at them and they just dodged. I yelled for help but
there’s nobody near enough to hear. Then I gave up and ran in our bedroom and slammed
the door on them, but they left guards outside. I heard them squeaking till you
drove up, then I heard them run away.”
Philip stared at her, scared to
death. His wife had lost her mind.
“Now, now, sweetheart,” he said
soothingly. “Let’s get this straight. They fired a lab boy today. They found
four of our rats in his home. He told some idiotic story of having ‘found’
them, with the others missing, running loose on the street that night, but of
course he stole them. He must have sold the rest of them to other kids; they’re
working on that now.”
Norah blew her nose and wiped her
eyes. She had regained her usual calm.
“Philip Vinson,” she said coldly.
“Are you accusing me of lying, or just of being crazy? I’m neither. I saw and
heard those rats. They’re here now.
What’s more, I guess I know where that oatmeal went, and the eggs and bacon
too, and the cheese. I’m—I’m a hostage!
“I don’t suppose,” she added
sarcastically. “That your SK540 was
one of the ones they found in the boy’s home?”
“No, it wasn’t,” he acknowledged
uneasily. A nasty little icy trickle stole down his spine. “All right, Norah, I
give in. You take the poker and I’ll take the hammer, and we’ll search this
house from cellar to attic.”
“You won’t find them,” said Norah
bitterly. “SK540’s too smart. They’ll stay inside the walls and keep quiet.”
“Then we’ll find the holes they
went through and rout them out.”
They didn’t, of course. There
wasn’t a sign of a rat-hole, or of a rat.
They got through dinner and the
evening somehow. Norah put all the food not in cans inside the old-fashioned
icebox which took the place of a refrigerator. Philip thought he was too
disturbed to be able to sleep, but he did, and Norah, exhausted, was asleep as
soon as her head touched the pillow.
His last doubt of his wife’s
sanity vanished when, the next morning, they found the icebox door open and
half the food gone.
***
“That settles it!” Philip
announced. “Come on, Norah, put your coat on. You’re coming with me to the lab
and we’ll report what’s happened. They’ll find those creatures if they have to
tear the house apart to do it. That boy must have been telling the truth.”
“You couldn’t keep me away,”
Norah responded. “I’ll never spend another minute alone in this house while
those dreadful things are in it.”
But of course when they got to
the front door, there they were, circling them, their teeth bared. The same
with the back door and all the first floor windows.
“That’s SK540 all right, leading
them,” Philip whispered through clenched jaws. He could smash them all, he
supposed, in time, with what weapons he had. But he worked in the laboratory.
He knew their value to science, especially SK540’s.
Rats couldn’t talk, he knew, and
they couldn’t understand human speech.
Nevertheless, some kind of
communication might establish itself.
SK540’s eyes were too intelligent
not to believe that he was getting the gist of talk directed to him.
“This is utterly ridiculous,”
Philip grated. “If you won’t let us out how can we keep bringing food into the
house for you? We’ll all starve, you and we together.”
He could have sworn SK540 was
considering. But he guessed the implicit answer. Let either one of them out,
now they knew the rats were there, and men from the laboratory would come
quickly and overwhelm and carry off the besiegers. It was a true impasse.
“Philip,” Norah reminded him. “If
you don’t go to work, they know we haven’t a phone, and somebody will be here
pretty soon to find out if anything’s wrong.”
But that wouldn’t help, Philip
reflected gloomily; they’d let anyone in, and keep him there.
And he thought to himself, and
was careful not to say it aloud: rats are rats. Even if they are 25th
generation laboratory-born. When the other food was gone there would be human
meat.
He did not want to look at them
anymore. He took Norah’s arm and turned away into their bedroom.
They stayed there all day, too
upset to think of eating, talking and talking to no conclusion. As dusk came on
they did not light the gas. Exhausted, they lay down on the bed without
undressing.
After a while there was a quiet
scratching at the door.
“Don’t let them in!” Norah
whispered. Her teeth were chattering.
“I must, dear,” he whispered
back. “It isn’t ‘them,’ I’m sure of it—it’s just SK540 himself. I’ve been
expecting him. We’ve got to reach some kind of understanding.”
“With a rat?”
“With a super-rat. We have no
choice.”
Philip was right. SK540 alone
stood there and sidled in as the door closed solidly again behind him.
How could one communicate with a
rat? Philip could think of no way except to pick him up, place him where they
were face to face, and talk.
“Are your—followers outside?” he
asked.
A rodent’s face can have no
expression, but Philip caught a glance of contempt in the beady eyes. The
slaves were doubtless bedded down in their hideaway, with strict orders to stay
there and keep quiet.
“You know,” Philip Vinson went
on, “I could kill you, very easily.” The words would mean nothing to SK540; the
tone might. He watched the beady eyes; there was nothing in them but
intelligent attention, no flicker of fear.
“Or I could tie you up and take
you to the laboratory and let them decide whether to keep you or kill you. We
are all much bigger and stronger than you. Without your army you can’t
intimidate us.”
There was, of course, no answer.
But SK540 did a startling and touching thing. He reached out one front paw, as
if in appeal.
Norah caught her breath in
astonishment.
***
“He—he just wants to be free,”
she said in a choked whisper.
“You mean you’re not afraid of
him anymore?”
“You said yourself he couldn’t
intimidate us without his army.”
Philip thought a minute. Then he
said slowly:
“I wonder if we had the right to
do this to him in the first place. He would have been an ordinary laboratory
rat, mindless and contented; we’ve made him into a neurotic alien in his world.”
“You’re not responsible, darling;
you’re a technician, not a biochemist.”
“I share the responsibility. We
all do.”
“So what? The fact remains that
it was done, and here he is—and here we are.”
The doorbell rang.
Philip and Norah exchanged
glances. SK540 watched them.
“It’s probably Kelly, from the
lab,” Philip said. “Trying to find out why I wasn’t there today. It’s just
about quitting time, and he lives nearest us.”
Norah astonished him. She picked
up SK540 from the bed-side table where
Philip had placed him, and hid
him under her pillow.
“Get rid of whoever it is,” she
said defensively. Philip stared for an instant, then walked briskly downstairs.
He was back in a few minutes.
“It was Kelly, all right,” he
told her. “I said you were sick and I couldn’t leave you to phone. I said I’d
be there tomorrow. Now what?”
SK540’s white whiskers emerged
from under the pillow, and he jumped over to the table again. Norah’s cheeks
were pink.
“When it came to the point, I
just couldn’t,” she explained shamefacedly. “I suddenly realized that he’s a person. I couldn’t let him be taken back
to prison.”
“Aren’t you frightened anymore?”
“Not of him.” She faced the
super-rat squarely. “Look,” she said. “If we take care of you, will you get rid
of that gang of yours, so we can be free too?”
“That’s nonsense, Norah,” Philip
objected. “He can’t possibly understand you.”
“Dogs and cats learn to
understand enough, and he’s smarter than any dog or cat that ever lived.”
“But—”
The words froze on his lips.
SK540 had jumped to the floor and run to the door. There he stood and looked
back at them, his tail twitching.
“He wants us to follow him,”
Norah murmured.
There was no sign of a hole in
the back wall of the disused pantry.
But behind it they could hear
squeaks and rustlings.
SK540 scratched delicately at
almost invisible cracks. A section of the wall, two by four inches, fell out on
the floor.
“So that’s where some of the
oatmeal went,” Norah commented. “Made into paste.”
“Shh!”
SK540 vanished through the hole.
They waited, listening to incomprehensible sounds. Outside it had grown dark.
***
Then the leader emerged and stood
to one side of the long line that pattered through the hole. The two humans
stared, fascinated, as the line made straight for the back door and under it.
SK540 stayed where he was.
“Will they go back to the lab?”
Norah asked.
Philip shrugged.
“It doesn’t matter. Some of them
may...I feel like a traitor.”
“I don’t. I feel like one of
those people who hid escaped war prisoners in Europe.”
When the rats were all gone, they
turned to SK540. But without a glance at them he re-entered the hiding-place.
In a minute he returned, herding two white rats before him. He stood still,
obviously expectant.
Philip squatted on his heels. He
picked up the two refugees and looked them over.
“Both females,” he announced
briefly. “And both pregnant.”
“Is he the father?”
“Who else? He’d see to that.”
“And will they inherit his—his—”
“His ‘super-ratism’? That’s the
whole point. That’s the object of the entire experiment. They were going to try
it soon.”
The three white rats had scarcely
moved. The two mothers-to-be had apparently fallen asleep. Only SK540 stood
quietly eying the humans.
When they left him to find a
place where they could talk in private he did not follow them.
“It comes down to this,” Philip
said at the end of half an hour’s fruitless discussion. “We promised him, or as
good as. He believed us and trusted us. But if we keep to our promise we’re really traitors—to the human race.”
“You mean, if the offspring
should inherit his brain-power, they might overrun us all?”
“Not might. Would.”
“So—”
“So it’s an insoluble problem, on
our terms. We have to think of this as a war, and of them as our enemies. What
is our word of honor to a rat?”
“But to a super-rat—to SK540-”
As if called, SK540 appeared.
Had he been listening? Had he
understood? Neither of them dared to voice the question aloud in his presence.
“Later,” Philip murmured.
“We must eat,” said Norah. “Let’s
see what’s left in the way of food.”
***
Everything tasted flat; they
weren’t very hungry after all. There was enough left over to feed the three
rats. But they had evidently helped themselves earlier; they left the scraps
untasted.
Neither of the humans guessed
what else had vanished from the pantry shelves—what, when he had heard enough,
SK540 had slipped away and sprinkled on the remaining contents of the icebox,
wherever the white powder would not show.
They did not know until it was
too late—until both of them lay writhing in their last spasms on their bedroom
floor.
By the time the house was broken
into and their bodies found, SK540 and his two wives were far away, and safe...
And this, children, is the true
account, handed down by tradition from the days of our great Founder, of how
the human race ceased to exist and we took over the world.
End
As my old man would say, if you can smell a rat, you’re
probably half right. But really, they should have killed the rat, and its
girlfriends, and its unborn little rat-babies when they had the chance.
The image is a free download, available
here.
Louis Shalako books and stories are available
from iTunes. Some are always free.
Thank you for reading.
