Doctor Rat (6 page)

This is the sort of gratifying sight the taxpayers don’t usually have a chance to see—two young scientists in front of the oven, baking a trayful of cats. This is where your taxes are going, fellow Americans, contributing to a better and lasting etcetera.

“…Rochester University…1969…”

“…microwave damage indistinguishable from fever in general…”

All right, I think that should do nicely, fellows. The Public Health officials will be impressed by your brain cell damage, and I myself am quite pleased to see that whole tray of dead kitties.

“NO MORE ANIMAL EXPERIMENTATION!”

“We want our rights!”

Oh my goodness, the rebel rats are screaming from their cages! How unseemly. I’m only glad that our two young cat-baking graduates aren’t able to detect these intuitive signals. It would interfere with their concentration, and they have important dissection to perform now on the dead kittens. I’ll have to deal with these rowdy rebels:

“Please, my dear fellow rats, your demands are simply outrageous. Restrain your tails in a turkish towel, folded along the line C-D (Fig. 19) and fasten them with safety pins (“Restraining the Rat,”
Mag. Psych. Gen.,
1965).”

Fortunately, there’s only one more experiment left on the schedule for today. Let me see…yes…carbon monoxide…very good.

Please step over here to the glass enclosure. It’s the perfect size for a beagle hound, isn’t it. And here comes the dumb mutt now, his ears flopping as he’s led toward the enclosure. I’m actually very fond of dogs, in their place.

Come on, Doggie, just step this way. Don’t worry about this strange-looking glass room. It’s just a shower bath. Yes, that’s right, we’re just going to give you a little shower and get rid of your fleas. Lots of nice beagles have taken this shower bath, that’s a good doggie, step right through the door.

The beagle is safely enclosed inside the shower room. And now the graduate assistant starts up the small gasoline motor which exhausts itself into the glass cage. The beagle looks around nervously, and now his long nose is twitching in the air as he smells the exhaust. Sing:

He paws at the glass, peering out at us, panic in his eyes. The graduate assistants, I’m happy to say, remain calm and clinically alert. They aren’t taken in by that hang-dog look, as the beagle flops on the floor of the shower room, unable to stand. Do you like your nice shower, Doggie? You won’t have to scratch those nasty fleas anymore.

“Are you timing it?”

“Yes, I’ve got it marked down.”

Very good, students, timing is essential. Not every dog dies quite the same way in this chamber. Some are more resistant than others. If we could understand those differences in resistance to the deadly fumes, we might succeed in producing a better shoe polish for the army. Of course, it will require a great many more beagles, but we’ve got them, my friends, and the Pentagon’s got the funds. You two students can look forward to at least three years’ research right here at the shower baths.

The dog is crawling weakly around the glass, his eyes clouded over. Look—he wagged his tail!

Well, now, there—his tongue has flopped out and he’s rolling over on his side. A last twitch of his hind leg, and—his shower is over. That didn’t take too long, did it? What a good stiff doggie.

Take him right to the incinerator, boys. We won’t need any dissecting of the corpse. The timing is the important factor. That’s it, just wrap him in a newspaper. The university incinerator is plenty big enough to handle him. This potential enemy of the state has yielded an important piece of scientific evidence, and soon he’ll be a little curl of smoke in the air, blowing over the campus. Do you see, rebellious animals—the only way you’ll ever escape from here is out the chimney, ha ha!

A long hard day at the lab. The grads and the Learned Professor are removing their white coats and hanging them up in the corner. Don’t worry, gentlemen, the faithful Doctor Rat will watch over the lab for you during the night. I won’t let these rebels get away with any funny business.

See you tomorrow.

Lights out, door closing,
click.

I guess I’ll go over to the bookshelf and do a little light nibbling. A Learned Mad Doctor has got to keep up with the latest texts on who drove whom whacky and how.

What’s that shadow I see slipping along the shelf?

An escaped rebel rat! He’s racing along toward the laboratory radio. Wrapping his tail around the knob, he switches it on!

“…authorities continue to be concerned by the growing number of dogs that have gathered together at the outskirts of the city. Unconfirmed reports from other parts of the state have indicated that the phenomenon may be widespread. State and local police are now on the alert for packs of…”

I slept in the cave of the ancients. I lay hidden in the secret den. I arose and left my cave, for my sleep was troubled. And the wind carried me. I blew over the land, gathering the scattered limbs of my body. Now I am He of a Million Eyes. Now I have many teeth and many tails. Now run, dogs, run! Run with me, to the City of Blood, where Death does his long-dying dance!

I am a howling river, a torrent of raging power. I am the Ancient Dog, He of a Million Tails. Through the meadows I rush, and through the broken lanes of the forest. The City of Blood lies not far ahead. I know the way, for its smell has long troubled my sleep and its cries have ruined my dreams.

Their crying brought me awake. Astonished, I saw them being bred by men for their flesh, being herded and tortured, imprisoned and maimed. They cry out from the moment of birth to the hour of death, and their crying has brought me awake. It cannot go on this way. The law has been violated. We are all one creature, except for man, who refuses to recognize himself in our eyes. I, the Lord of Animals, protest!

I have taken the form of the dog, friend of man. I am the beagle and the Doberman, the spaniel and the terrier, the collie and the setter, the greyhound and the wild dog, the stray dog and the old dog, the ruined and the wise dog, the timid and the fierce dog. I run to the edge of the City of Blood.

I am the shadow upon the hill. My million red eyes stare down.

“What a pile of dog shit this is, my fellow rats! Don’t let these fragmentary delusions of grandeur provoke you…”

It’s that damned dog in the pressure clamp. Do you see the fearful image he’s sending out on the intuitive band? “Go on, get back in your basket, you Pomeranian piss pot!”

Fortunately, these intuitive signals have no basis in reality. They’re loose hypnogogic fantasies; a few stray dogs, perhaps, have gotten together and are making a lot of noise in an alley somewhere, and these rebels are trying to blow it up into something great and grand.

But a Learned Mad Doctor isn’t taken in so easily. Recall: the memoirs of Michael Mus Musculus, the lunatic mouse who believed he’d created the world out of his excrement.

So ignoring these paranoids, let’s just slip out of Maze Alley D, and go along here to the laboratory library. Curl your tail up and let’s continue reading this Johns Hopkins University research report. Valuable, authenticated material, not some Pekingese pipe dream. Now, Johns Hopkins, let’s hear what your students have been doing:

We pinched their tails, their feet, and their ears. We picked them up by the loose skin of the back and shook them. We spanked them and determined their response to restraint…quite intense and prolonged nociceptive stimuli were applied… Such procedures as tying her in the dorsal decubitus on an animal board, picking her up by the loose skin of the back, and vigorously shaking her, spanking her, or pinching her tail as hard as possible between thumb and forefinger elicited only a few plaintive meows. When her tail was grasped between the jaws of a large surgical clamp and compressed sufficiently to produce a bruise she cried loudly and attempted to escape…during the 139 days of survival she was subjected, every two or three days, to a variety of noxious stimuli…on one occasion her tail, shaved and moistened, was stimulated tetanically through electrodes connected with the secondary of a Harvard inductorium, the primary circuit of which was activated by 4.5 volts. When the secondary coil was at I3, she mewed; at 11 there was loud crying…at the end of the 5-second stimulation with the secondary at 5
she screamed loudly and spat twice. The last of these stimulations produced a third-degree electrical burn of the tail.

Brilliant! What intelligent use of a cat. These Johns Hopkins boys are way ahead of the field. I must show this material to my Learned Professor and…

Holy Hopping Horned Toads! (genus
Phrynosoma)
What’s going on with all of our exercise wheels? They’re buzzing and humming violently. The rebel rats are on the wheels, turning them furiously. What determined exercise: the cyclometers are clicking wildly and…a strange electrical pulsation is rising from the center of these spinning wheels!

Radiant colors rising from the whirling vortex! I’ve never seen anything like this in all my life. Wheels turning, blurring, and circular bubbles of color floating out of them. The wheels turn still faster, the bubbles are getting larger and within them—

Oh no!

It’s a rebel broadcast! They’ve created a new intuitive signal. Beautiful full-color reception in every one of the bubbles, complete with stereophonic sound track!

Coming in clearer, growing ever stronger—what the hell is going on here?

I see a pair of horns, and hoofs. Intuitive camera is drawing back for a full, wide-angle shot. Hundreds of horns and hoofs!

We stand, nervously waiting. Something is certainly not right. Overhead I hear a crow calling and there is a faint odor of rotting flesh in the air. We traveled all night in rumbling cars, our bodies pressed tightly together. Now the cars have stopped and the doors are opening. The light breaks over us, but it quickly disappears as we’re pushed forward into a dark shed, our movement defined by a long narrow runway through which we move one at a time, crying our long, low, tongue-tied moo.

There are voices of men somewhere up ahead, and the sound of heavy machinery, as you sometimes hear near our fields in springtime. We grazed in the fields. Our herd was a great thing. Now we stand in this narrow runway. Our eyes are red, our legs weak, our stomachs nervous. I can still smell the warm scent of our herd, as on the fields in summer. But there is another smell, raw and unpleasant.

We move forward slowly. Our hoofs sound loud on the runway and the air is filled with our stupid grunts. An explosion rings out, hurting my ears, but we’re pushed forward and I can see down into this building. The machinery is loud and dark red objects swing along, hanging from the ceiling. I can see them better now, I—

MOTHER! HELP ME, MOTHER!

My brothers hang there with their stomachs cut open and their heads cut off! I smell their open flesh; I see their dead hoofs. And on a metal hook I see all of their tongues, cut out and pierced by the sharp metal, pierced through the root and hanging there, mute and bloody!

The heads are lined up on the floor! A young man is cutting off the cheeks with his knife, slicing through the tender flesh. Now he kicks the heads down through a hole in the floor!

I stumble forward. Fear runs through me and my fear flows backward to the rest of the herd. How good it was to be with them, rubbing against them in the moist night air. Surely this must be a dream.

Headless bodies swing along on huge chains.
I
MUST GET OUT! HELP! HELP ME!

There’s no way to move; my heart is pounding wildly. I’m sick inside, my nature churning violently, my innards all jumbled, my throat dry and constricted. The explosion rings out ahead of me and the brother in front of me moves forward. I must follow him, prodded from behind.

Upon a hook, I see hearts, pierced through and hanging, hearts that still speak to me, crying brother, brother, brother.

Below on the floor I see blood, a river of blood, and white-uniformed men covered with blood, the life of our herd. The men are talking unconcernedly, as if nothing unusual were happening. In the night sometimes they sang out over our herd, and it was a soothing sound.

The explosion again!

I stumble forward. I feel like a young calf, my legs wobbly, so wobbly I can hardly walk. There is a man just ahead. He’s holding something to the head of the brother in front of me.

The sound, the awful exploding sound!

My brother groans and slumps down. The floor opens before my eyes and he slides down it, falling away into the river of blood. The floor closes up again. I’m next!

I’m pushed from behind. It’s my turn. I plead with my eyes toward the men. They’re laughing together, talking softly, and they hardly even notice me. Perhaps if I stand here quietly, listening to them…

…he puts his hand on my head, still talking with the other man.

A loud barking sounds outside, a long wild howl. The man turns away. The howling grows louder. Light suddenly bursts into this dark cold place. A dog streaks across the floor, snarling angrily. He’s followed by others, many others. They snap and bite at the hearts that hang like fruit on a tree. I stamp my hoofs. We stamp our hoofs. The men are fleeing from the charging dogs. The eyes of the dogs are inflamed, their voices strained and frenzied. We kick. We lower our horns and drive against the barricades. There is no one to stop us. The dogs are calling, urging us to join them. Our great bull-leader crashes through the barrier, destroying it, splinters flying from his horns. We follow him, out of the house of death, into the night. Run, steers, run!

We leap the fences that sought to hold us. How puny such fences are. Trampling over them, we flee, feeling our strength, the surging of our full power. We race the streets. My hoofs sound loud upon the stone.

We follow the bull-leader, his muscles quivering and rolling as he looks around, leading us. We thunder and swerve, following his powerful hump—into bursts of light, into explosions!