Fredric Brown - The Second Fredric Brown Megapack

“Vot a dream! I go to sleep thinking of der vhite mouse und vhite paint on mein hands und I dream—”

He stretched and yawned, and stood up.

But a small white spot, a white something had just appeared at the baseboard of the room again. Another joined it. The professor blinked his eyes and watched them. Could he be dreaming, standing up?

A scraping sound, something being shoved across the floor, and as the first two white spots moved away from the wall, two more appeared. Again in rectangular formation, they started across the floor toward the door.

And the scraping continued. Almost as though the four —could they be white mice?—were moving something, two of them pulling it and two pushing.

But that was silly.

He reached out beside him for the switch of the light, and clicked it. The light momentarily blinded him.

“Stobp!” High and shrill and commanding.

The professor could see again now, and it was four white mice. They had been moving something, a strange little object fashioned around what looked like one of the cells of his own pencil-type flashlight.

And three of the mice were now doing the moving, frantically, and the fourth had stepped between him and the strange object. It pointed what seemed to be a small tube at the professor’s face.

“If you moofe, I gill you,” shrilled the mouse with the tube.

It wasn’t completely the threat of the tube that kept the professor motionless. He was simply too surprised to move. Was the mouse with the tube Whitey? Looked like him, but then they all looked like Whitey, and anyway Whitey was on his way to the moon.

“But vot—who—vhy—?”

The three mice with the burden were even now vanishing through the hole in the screen door. The fourth mouse backed after them.

Just inside the screen door, he paused.

“You are a vool, Brofessor,” he said. “All men are vools. Ve mice vill take care uf that.”

And it dropped the tube and vanished through the hole.

Slowly the professor walked over and picked up the weapon the white mouse had dropped. It was a match-stick. Not a tube or a weapon at all, just a burned safety match.

The professor said, “But how—vhy—?”

He dropped the match as though it were hot, and took out a big handkerchief to mop his forehead.

“But how —und vhy —?”

He stood there what seemed to be a long time, and then slowly he went to the icebox and opened it. Back in a far corner of it was a bottle.

The professor was practically a teetotaler, but there comes a time when even a teetotaler needs a drink. This was it.

He poured a stiff one.

Night, and it was raining in Hartford.

Old Mike Cleary, watchman for the Hartford Laboratories, was taking a drink, too. In weather like this, a man with rheumatism in his bones needed a drink to warm his insides after that walk across the yard in the rain.

“A foine night, for ducks,” he said, and because that drink had not been the first, he chuckled at his own wit.

He went on into building number three, through the chemical stockroom, the meter room, the shipping room. His lantern, swinging at his side, sent grotesque shadows before him.

But these shadows didn’t frighten Mike Cleary; he’d chased them through this building for nights of ten years now.

He opened the door of the live-stock room to look in, and then left it wide behind him and went on in. “Begorra,” he said, “and how did that happen?”

For the doors of two of the large cages of white mice were open, wide open. They hadn’t been open when he’d made his last round two hours before.

Holding his lantern high, he looked into the cages. They were both empty. Not a mouse in either.

Mike Cleary sighed. They’d blame him for this, of course.

Well, and let them. A few white mice weren’t worth much, even if they took it out of his salary. Sure, let them take it out if they thought it was his fault.

“Misther Williams,” he’d tell the boss, “those doors were closed when I went by the first time, and open when I went by the second, and I say the catches on them were worthless and dee-fective, but if you want to blame me, sorr, then just deduct the value of the—”

A faint sound behind him made him whirl around.

There in a corner of the room was a white mouse, or what looked like a white mouse. But it wore a shirt and trousers, and—

“Ye Gods,” said Mike Cleary, and he said it almost reverendy. “Is it the D.T.’s that I’m—”

And another thought struck him. “Or can it be, sorr, that you are one of the little folk, please, sorr?”

And he swept off his hat with a trembling hand.

“Nudts!” said the white mouse. And, like a streak, it was gone.

There was sweat on Mike Cleary’s forehead, and sweat trickling down his back and under his armpits.

“Got them,” he said. “Oi’ve got them!”

And quite illogically, since that was now his firm belief, he took the pint bottle from his hip pocket and finished the rest of its contents at a single gulp.

Darkness, and roaring.

And it was the sudden cessation of the roaring sound that wakened Mitkey. Wakened him to utter and stygian blackness of a confined space. His head ached and his stomach ached.

And then, suddenly, he knew where he was. The rocket!

The jets had stopped firing, and that meant he was over the line and falling, falling toward the moon.

But how—? Why—?

He remembered the radio pick-up that would be broadcasting sounds from the rocket to the professor’s ultra-short-wave receiver, and he called out despairingly, “Brofessor! Brofessor Oberburger! Help! It iss—”

And then another sound drowned him out.

A whistling sound, a high shrill sound that could only be the rush of the rocket through air, through an atmosphere.

The moon? Was the professor right and the astronomers wrong about the moon, or was the rocket falling back to Earth?

At any rate, the vanes were gripping now, and the rocket was slowing rather than accelerating.

A sudden jerk almost knocked the breath out of him. The parachute vanes were opening now. If they would—

Crash!

And again blackness behind the eyes of Mitkey as well as before them. Blackout in blackness, and when two doors clicked open to admit light through balsa bars, Mitkey did not see them.

Not at first, and then he wakened and groaned.

His eyes came to focus first on the wooden bars, and then through them.

“Der moon,” he muttered. He reached through the balsa-bar gate and unlatched it. Fearfully, he stuck his little gray nose out of the door and looked around.

Nothing happened.

He pulled his head back in and turned around to face the microphone.

“Brofessor! Can you hear me, Brofessor? Iss me, Mitkey. Dot Vhitey, he double-grosses us. Vhite paint I got on me, so I know vhat happened. You vere nodt in on it, or der vhite paint vould not be.”

“It vas dreachery, Brofessor! By mine own kind, a mouse, I vas doublegrossed. Und Vhitey—Brofessor, he has der X-19 brojector now! I am avraid vhat he may be blanning. Iss wrong, or he vould haf told me, no?”

Then silence, and Mitkey thinking deeply.

“Brofessor, I got to get back. Nodt for me, but to stop Vhitey! Maybe you can help. Loogk, I can change der broadcaster here into a receifer, I think. It should be easy; receifers are simpler, no? Und you quick build a ultra-shordt sender like this vun.”

“Yess I stardt now. Goot-bye, Brofessor. I change der vires.”

“Mitkey, can you hear me, Mitkey?”