Damon Knight - Orbit 17

She watches the generations of mice come and go. Watches the maze digest them. Sometimes in the late afternoon, she switches off the machines computing their progress, unable to concentrate on the constantly oscillating lines of their anxiety, the zigzagging pens scratching across revolving graph paper as the mice go mad. She leaves it to him now to focus in on them with the tiny TV eyes implanted in each tunnel, to observe them as they nose helplessly up interconnected corridors, starving, deprived of water, driving on desperate for reproduction. He keeps scrupulous records of their progress. When one advances beyond the rest, he’s removed to breed a new generation of more brilliant mice.

Sometimes at night she wakes to their small screams. At least, what she construes to be screams. Squeaking that has echoed and reechoed down the tubes, amplified by a system of microphones and speakers. She unlatches the tiny gate and puts her ear to the entrance. It’s like a music box of squeals, moans, whispers— strange mouse whispers of generations still circulating, recorded on tapes and played continually throughout the maze for any clues they might provide the current batch of mice. An almost familiar effluvium floats down from the tunnels: of excreta, of disinfectant, of decomposing corpses, of the maze itself. She puts her eye to the opening and peers down the gleaming corridor. It leads to a Y-shaped intersection. She rolls her eye, peering first down one wing, then the other. They both diverge into honeycombed passageways, all empty. The mice are far beyond. She goes to the monitor, turns the dials, scanning the corridors littered with dried pellets, shriveled claws, and cannibalized skeletons, trying to pick up their trails. He’s seldom there now at night as he once was, pouring over genetic files. It’s lonely when she wakes like this, though the sleeping pill is always there beside the Dixie cup of water.

She has begun to recognize the mice as distinct from one another. It seems the longer the experiment continues the less they look alike. Perhaps that’s because they’re larger—easily the size of rats. Except they don’t look like rats. They’ve changed gradually, so no matter what they look like she still thinks of them as mice. Mice with swollen, misshapen heads, mice nearly erect like kangaroos, mice that stare back into your eyes.

It was the females in the nursery she first came to know, something in their eyes as they stared back at her when she’d watch them nursing their litters. The baby mice bald, pink, and sucking, resembling piglets. She gave the mamas names: Sweet Rosalie Fang, Monkey Jane, Tillie the Thumb. She saves pieces from her grilled-cheese sandwiches, even though she knows feeding them these little crumbs interferes with the carefully programmed nutrients of their control groups. He’s never there to catch her anyway. Nobody’s there. They don’t even remember she’s in here. They’ve stopped bringing a change of uniforms. Her clothes are turning grey. They don’t lower their voices when they talk outside the door. She’s heard rumors, unbelievable snatches of conversation about experiments that go on at night. She recognizes the names of those involved—his friends: the famous one who works on radioactive mutation, and the other, the biochemist from Taiwan.

It didn’t matter feeding them the cheese bits. After a while they wouldn’t eat them anyway. And they left the pieces lying at the bottom of the cage, and he found them and doesn’t even bring the cheese sandwich anymore. That’s punishment. And all the work and all those years. Where’s the reward?

Now that new mice are brought into the lab every day, the differences between them and the maze mice are staggering! Were their ancestors really that tiny and mindless? The maze mice have evolved metabolisms that require the corrupting flesh of other mice. So that’s what he brings in. Bushel baskets full of dead mice crawling with maggots. They have to sit on the radiators and rot. He had the lab insulated so the smell wouldn’t escape, and comes to work wearing a gas mask, surgical gloves, and waders. —You’re used to the stench, he says. One gets used to anything if they have to, she thinks. Like the maze mice eating each other’s bodies in order to survive their maze treks, till now they relish it, leaping up and snapping their huge tusks as he dangles a rotting carcass above them by the tail, his gas mask somehow suggesting a heartless smile.

The rumors were true. She finally checked the other night. It was as much boredom as curiosity driving her to it. And hunger more than either. Ever since he’s stopped bringing her lunch, her only meal, she’s had to scavenge at night for food. Luckily, they left the grain which the mice used to eat. That and an occasional mouse spitted on a pipette and roasted over a Bunsen burner— one of the freshly dead ones before they’re too rotten. Hardly enough to keep body and soul together: a few dried kernels and a mouse. But never a maze mouse—too close a count on those. Not that she’d eat them anyway. One doesn’t eat one’s friends. Why go on living if they drive you to that? Sometimes she feels she can actually communicate with them, that they keep each other from going insane. Watching them on the TV during the day is better than a lot of women sitting home watching actors on soap operas. They have their problems and conflicting personalities just like people, once you know what to look for. Besides, she couldn’t catch them if she wanted to. They’re too smart and quick for the likes of her. Still slick from birth and already crawling toward the maze like they were born to it. Reminding her of a movie she saw once about baby turtles trying to get to the sea as soon as they broke out of their eggs. There she was sneaking through the corridors, following the sounds. Strange sounds for this place, music and laughter and swearing. One of the orderlies was mopping, and when he saw her he fainted. She crept down past Brain Surgery. They had a dog in there with his brain floating in an illuminated bubbling jar still attached to his empty skull by wires, and when she passed the jar his head began to whimper. They were in the operating room, behind locked doors, but they’d forgotten to cover the little windows. Just like the rumors had it! They’d crossed some kind of big monkey, maybe an orangutan, with an ocelot and God knows what else! There were five of them in there. Strange creatures with hypnotic gold-green eyes. So beautiful that even her old heart began to race like a hamster inside a wheel. They were almost the size of women, but more delicate—like pubescent girls, but girls don’t have curves like that! And covered with a fine golden fur. But their eyes! And their hands with long nails tapering out of their fingers and their graceful long tails like feathered fans they were using to stroke over their bodies, and the men’s bodies, to curl about their necks, poke in their ears, brush across their faces, and all of them sitting there with wine bottles drinking and laughing. And he was there too. At first she didn’t recognize him without his clothes on, but it was him all right.

Another winter? Or last year’s still not ended? Icicles like stalactites. The generations seem to change faster than the seasons. This latest group won’t eat the rotten flesh. All they’ll take is bones. It’s evolved, of course, from maze conditions. They’re so deep now that by the time one generation comes upon the remains of its forebears, bones are all that’s left. He’s given her the job of boiling the meat off the bones. All the soup she can eat. Huge vats always bubbling and boiling, steaming up the windows, and her stirring away with a big wooden spoon.

Just when she thought he was making up, giving her little tasks again, he kicks her out of her stupor, yelling —What have you done to the video! What have you done to the video! But she hadn’t done it. The mice had figured out how to interfere with the video transmission. Some mutation they hadn’t even conceived of had occurred, giving the mice the ability to use the electrowaves of their brains to jam the frequency. Not that it wasn’t possible to predict once they inexplicably developed a sonar-like beep akin to a bat’s. Instead of having to go down each passageway, they beep, and if it bounces back off a dead end, they avoid it. They use a variation of the beep to communicate with each other, too, like a school of porpoises chattering away, squeaking and beeping and whistling. Ever since the beep they haven’t been burning their lives out going berserk, either. Some of them have been around quite a while, actually. And grown quite large. It’s fortunate the tunnels were designed to expand. She could almost climb in there herself now. Perhaps, she allows herself to hope, the little buggers will solve it after all. She thinks of them as “little buggers” because of what’s going on in there. She saw it on the TV before they knocked it out. It’s a result of his being partial to males from the start, using them as explorers, and keeping the females back to breed. He wanted the males driven on with horniness, battering their constant erections against blind alleys. And then, in the old days when they did have litters in there a few times, the others ate the babies. Though certainly that wouldn’t happen now. The young are well taken care of. After reaching a certain point in the maze they’re welcomed, initiated into the group, an actual rite de passage, rather dionysian in character. Probably that’s why they blocked the transmission. There’s things they don’t want to be spied on doing. Things he doesn’t know about, and she’s not going to tell him either.