Doctor Rat (3 page)

“Where are we bound for?” cry some of the doubtful dogs, their old homes still claiming them by a long leash.

“Just follow your nose, brother!” cries a laughing wild one, and away he leaps, with a fantastic spring in his legs. He’s one of the intoxicated, so deep in the scent he seems to be flying along. The sight of his tail disappearing down the golden hallway sets me racing still faster, to catch him, to run with him at the very head of the pack. I exert myself to the fullest, enjoying my run. Without human eyes upon me, I’m unself-conscious. I’m myself, a dog in motion, howling and happy.

We follow that hallway of gold until it turns crimson, and still we run toward the setting sun. Now is the most beautiful running, with all figures blending into one, with all dogs looking the same, one mood upon us all. Where have I done this before? It seems so familiar—yet it’s unlike anything I can remember from puppyhood on. But somewhere, sometime—in dreams, perhaps—I’ve run like this with my brothers, in the twilight of the day.

Feelings so pure and delicate assail my senses I can’t restrain my barking. I yap, I howl, call to them all, saying, “Do you remember, do you remember?”

And “Yes!” they answer. “Yes, we remember!”

“What do you remember?”

“This, this!” they cry, as we run, down the wooded hillside, into the crimson valley, an open sky above our head.

We decide upon the valley as our lodging for the night. It’s near water, and the sun is gone. We lie down and one by one the dogs at the rear of our run come into the valley and join us.

Exhausted, we speak little, wanting just to lie quiet for a while, as the stars slowly appear. Some of us bathe in the water, and some are still chasing around the edge of the pack exuberantly, but most of us lie still, tongues hanging out. The leaders take the center and form a single powerful unit, which we know must represent our will. And at the outer edge, too, there are strong watchers, seated and alert.

As I lie in the stillness, listening to the little brook beside me, the scent seems to be part of me. At the same time I know it’s scattered like mist all around us. But that my own body is part of its chemistry, I can’t deny.

“Where are we bound for?” ask some of the dogs again.

“Lie still, brothers,” say the dogs of the center.

“What a smell, what a smell,” says one old dog, limping out of the shadows. His hair is long and filled with burrs, and his eyes are watery. But he seems not to notice the bad shape he’s in, so rapt is he in the wonder of the smell. “Always this smell,” he says, lying down with the wild dogs. We see that he’s forgotten his body, with all its old-dog woes. He’s the first one to sleep and we see him twitch and run in his dreams, as if he were young again. He whimpers in the night, and he roars and when we wake in the morning he’s dead and we eat him.

“Doctor Rat, Doctor Rat…”

A young female calling to me from her cage. She needs my special counseling, as she’s all in a tizzy about the bandages on her belly. “Yes, my dear, are your bandages too tight?”

“They cut a hole in my stomach!”

“Yes, of course. It’s so that they’ll be able to insert a plastic window there in order to watch your embryonic ratlings develop.”

“I hate it! I’ll gnaw it off! I’ll bite through the bandages!”

“Please, my dear, don’t be hysterical.” I must say she’s not showing the scientific attitude at all. We’ve got to have that window there, so that we can insert a thin hair through it and tickle the little ratlings as they grow inside her. It’s part of a new program, for which I’m preparing extensive notes. A great deal can be learned by tickling an embryo with a hair, but naturally only the most advanced graduate students are qualified for such tickling. How, then, can we expect this female rat to have any appreciation of the fine points of the Stomach-window Program? Nonetheless, it is my duty to make her more receptive to the learned hair.

“Please don’t let them hurt me, please…”

I think a little song might cheer her up:

I must move along here to the next cage, where a special magnesium diet has caused fatal clonic convulsions:

“Doctor Rat, I can no longer eat!”

“Aren’t you the lad whose teeth have been trained to grow into a complete circle, piercing the roof of the mouth?”

“A nightmare, Doctor Rat. My mouth’s a nightmare.”

“We’re watching you with keen interest, my boy. There’s a chance the teeth may actually grow right up and pierce your brain. Come along and sing with me! Sing:

Excuse me, the Learned Professor has picked me up and is tying a string around my upper incisors at the moment. I am now permitted to hang by my teeth in the air as part of a new Insight Therapy Program—what fun, swinging back and forth here.

“Fight them, Doctor Rat! Bite them!”

A young radical rat shouting from his cage. Thus has our youth been corrupted by that goddamn blabber-mouth dog with his intuition-pictures. A rat may be waiting for decapitation, and suddenly he will see an intuitive play of pictures in his brain, sent there by this infernal dog on the treadmill. The rat will seem to participate in the scene, running with the wild dogs. The high intelligence of the dogs makes them very potent broadcasters, and being here under stress conditions adds power to their wavelength. Our lab is buzzing with revolutionary feelings. “You cock-sucking cur, how dare you sow dissent among these happy rats!”

The revolutionary mutt looks at me with red and squinting eyes. You perceived the subtlety of his broadcast, didn’t you, with his sly insinuations of some sort of freedom to be gained by following a peculiar scent? But I know the truth and I’m shouting it to all: “The scent is five percent formaline, Brother Rats, and the only freedom you’ll ever have is death! Death is freedom, that’s the slogan!”

“Hurray for Doctor Rat!”

“You tell ’em, Doc.”

“Thank you, friends and fellow supporters, thank you for your confidence. As you know, the rat is man’s best friend. You’ve seen the advertisements in
Modern Psychology Magazine:
“The Rat Is Our Friend.” Are we going to allow this wonderful friendship to go down the drain along with the cerebrospinal fluid? A rat must give his all! That’s our purpose, that’s why we’re here on earth!”

My throat is certainly getting inflamed from all this. But I can’t allow seventy-five years of laboratory experimentation to be pushed aside by a few revolutionary voices. This dog is in a powerful position, however, running here in our midst, tongue hanging out, legs flopping as the treadmill turns him, on and on. I’ve told the Learned Professor to jack up the heat in the dog’s cage, so we can be finished with him soon. But the Learned Pro turns a deaf ear toward everything I say.

In the meantime, the dog has made numerous converts to his revolutionary cause. The whole Hemorrhagic Sore Cage has gone over to him. And I taught those ungrateful rats how to sing! What betrayal!

“Brother Rats, how can you be so easily swayed by this dirty dog? Look there, to your left. Look at the recipient rat on the surgical table. He’s having a hole bored in his head. Listen to him screaming. The fresh tumor is being plunged into his brain tissue. In two or three weeks he’ll be groveling around, the tumor increasing, obstructing all his bodily movements. That’s reality, foolish rats. That’s scientific reality, not a lot of stupid doggie drivel.”

“Ah, go chase your tail, Doc. You’re washed up around here!”

Those rats need to be shocked a few times down Maze Alleys A and D. They’ve lost all respect for my office. But I’m happy to see one of those rowdy rebel leaders being led to the cardiac puncture table. He’s struggling, his teeth showing white and vicious.

“Fellow rat, now that your supreme scientific moment has come, don’t you want to have a change of heart? Give your all to science happily. Set an example for these other young rats.”

Several revolutionaries quickly move in front of me. “Don’t say another word, Rat. Don’t mock him in his agony.”

“Mocking? Who’s mocking? I’m here to eulogize the fellow, to write him up in glowing terms in the Newsletter. If you’ll permit me to pass…”

The rebels block the way. The Learned Professor is feeling the rat’s chest for the point of maximum palpitation. There, he’s got it now, his thumb and forefinger on the fourth, fifth, and sixth ribs.

Now comes the needle, 26-gauge, half an inch long. The plunger is grasped and the needle is pushed slowly into the rat’s heart. The Learned Pro will be withdrawing about 10 cc’s of blood and that should finish this rebel off.

Good heavens! The blood is squirting right out of the rat’s heart into the Learned Professor’s eye! The Learned Pro is looking around puzzled as the blood drips down his cheek. I certainly won’t be able to use this item in my Newsletter.

Everywhere around me—little accidents, little problems. It’s the effect of the revolutionary dogs, and I fear it’s going to spread like wildfire.

My front paws are tied, but my rear legs are free on the treadmill and forced to run, to go nowhere inside a glass cage. My tongue is hanging out, my body weary. The men have heated the glass cage I’m in, so that it seems I’m running beneath the blazing sun, on and on, going nowhere.

I’ve been on this treadmill all week, and still I’m running, on and on, saliva dripping heavily from my mouth, mixed with bitter bile. The men stand and watch me as I run. I’m caught here, tied and heated, choking with thirst, my body soaked with sweat, my insides churning with pain. Hot like a desert, on and on I run…

…run…run…run…run…run as the wheel keeps turning, keeps clicking. Bright hot coils surround me on all sides, baking me, my cage an oven.

Run. Tongue out, dry and cracked. Run. Legs burning, my skin blistering, I retch up my bilious guts.

Run…run…run…run…run. Run, dogs, run. Run through the day…run through the night…run through the endless desert heat…heat without water…wheel without end…my eyes are on fire, my tongue is swollen, my throat is bubbling.

Run, dogs, run! Free yourselves! Run out into the sun. We’re meeting at the edge of town. See us circling there. Join us there! Come, dogs, come!

“Oh, you disgusting dog! Go back to the alleyway you came from and stop shaming the good citizens of this laboratory with your perverted views of life!”

I think I’ve finally gotten through to the Learned Professor. He turned up the heat in the dog’s cage this morning. The dog’s skin is cracking with blisters and his mouth is foaming. He’ll soon drop. But the Learned P. has twenty-five more dogs standing by to take their turn on the treadmill. And every one of them is a potential revolutionary! “What have you dogs got to complain about! You get your bowl of fox chow every morning, don’t you? What could be nicer than that?”

They just stare at their leader, watching him as he flops along, his legs slapping up and down as the treadmill turns beneath him. Can you see the cloud of forms emanating from him? His revolutionary program billows and drifts all over our laboratory, infiltrating its way into every cage. See it there—dogs floating in the air, in full command of the intuitive band. They’ve taken over the central station. Their broadcast is reaching into the minds and hearts of every animal foolish enough to tune in. The noble function of intuition, through which the age-old secrets of our race are transmitted, is now in the hands of a revolutionary gang of mutts.

“I implore you, fellow rats and fellow animals everywhere—turn to another channel! We’re running a film strip today on mechanical injuries to the teeth of canines. It’s very informative, you’ll see how to fracture a hound’s tooth and bring about some marvelous hypoplastic defects. These will result in slowing the growth of all the other teeth in a dog, and I say that’s a good thing! Dogs have too many teeth. They’re vicious and dangerous and…”

It’s so hard to get their interest. The dog’s program is more subtly suggestive. It works on the weakness of my fellow rats. They don’t realize that we’re the friends of man, that we’re here to serve humanity selflessly in every way we can. For only in man does one find the divine spark. The rest of us live in darkness, without souls.

“You’re all just basic models, fellow rats! Don’t you understand the meaning of that? A basic model has no feelings, has no spirit. Man is able to twist us and starve us and cut off our tails because that’s the law! Haven’t you read St. Thomas Aquinas? Animals have no soul!”

I’m growing hoarse trying to get the truth across to the Experimental Radiation Cage. All the rats in there have clubbed paws and absent toes and you’d think they’d be able to listen to reason. But no—they’re sitting there, staring into space, entranced by the dog’s broadcast.

“Five percent formaline, that’s the scent! Believe me, fellow rats, there is no magic scent in the air. Look there—the dog has collapsed on the treadmill, his legs flopping lifelessly. He’s dead! Look at the eyes rolled into his head and his body thumping along. He’s dead! And death is the only freedom!”

The Learned Professor and his graduate assistants have opened the dog’s cage and are taking him away. His body is thin and dehydrated, but his infernal message goes on!

“Plug your ears, rats. Don’t listen!”

The Learned Prof is leading another dog into the glass chamber, tying his front paws to the rack. Now the power is switched on again and the treadmill is turning once more and another martyr is being created! Professor, I beg of you, get those dogs out of here!

He doesn’t hear me. Professor, you’re playing right into their hands! Don’t let him run along in sight of all the other animals. Because the fumes of revolution are rising out of him already. Can’t you see!