Doctor Rat Read online

  “Oh, be quiet, you stupid egg!” What do I, a Learned Mad Doctor, care how a chicken’s neck is wrung?

  I have important papers to write. I have to mount a counteroffensive against these dogs and that half-cracked egg. But I just don’t have my usual zip. One of my favorite experiments, the 500-pound pressure clamp, is taking place right now, and it’s not giving me the kick it used to, because I know the rebels will try to make propaganda out of it.

  And what could be more innocent than this—come on, step over here behind me and see for yourself. There’s a big, stupid-looking spotted dog, right? Alongside him a graduate assistant.

  The graduate ass. is making a very delicate appraisal of the experimental situation. One day his findings will be published in a little-known scientific journal and earn him a degree. But that won’t be the end of his intrepid work. Not at all. It will eventually become part of a complete textbook on the subject. He’ll be able to hold his head up high in the hallway. He’ll get a raise in pay. Why?

  Because he is presently turning the screw attached to that dog’s leg. The pressure is being raised in proportion to the desired raise in pay. The higher the pressure applied to this dog’s leg, the higher will the young man’s salary go. The gauge indicates that the pressure is now at 250 pounds.

  You’ll have to do better than that, young fellow, if you want the Dean of Science to give you his blessing. Your predecessors in this department had the pressure up to 500 pounds last year. Go ahead, pour it on! Make that dog really jump. Crush his bones to mush and your M.A. is assured.

  The logic of this Pressure Program is irrefutable. It keeps our university filled with valuable grants. It’s good for the economy and it’s good for humanity. This dog’s crushed leg will serve as a guideline for future studies of a similar nature, which will ultimately culminate in a magnificent scientific breakthrough of the bones.

  It might also result in a better kind of plastic, or perhaps a new sort of aspirin. Housing projects will be more perfectly designed and detergents will improve. The applications are simply endless.

  But the rebels are making hay with it!

  The fuckers.

  Distorting it all out of proportion. Making it seem cruel. What’s cruel about crushing a dog?

  A dog is just a basic model. A convenient evolutionary offshoot expressly designed for the laboratory.

  “We’re going to recruit the dogs of this village,” say the wild leaders.

  And so we wait, remaining on the dirt road. Ahead, the dirt turns into pavement, and a few old houses stand there, deserted. But far below, in the valley, we can see the other houses of the village, and there are people there, people—and dogs.

  Here comes a bloodhound, hot on the scent. His big nose travels on the ground, and he keeps shaking his head, unable to detect exactly where the smell is, whether in the gutter or in the sky. His big ears droop along, almost touching the ground and his short legs carry him slowly forward, until he sees us, massed ahead of him—a sea of eyes and noses and tails and teeth.

  He sits back on his hind legs and peers cautiously toward us, his nose in the air, sniffing furiously.

  “Come on, come on,” we cry.

  Hearing the friendly barking, and trusting in the wonderful smell, he comes forward. I can see the look in his eyes. He has a name, this bloodhound, and his name is still important to him. Were his master to cry out, “Here, Blacky,” or “Here, Spot,” he would turn and answer. But we draw him into our ranks, get him deep in the middle where our burning soul will envelop his name and destroy it forever. Still his eyes are filled with apprehension. He wants to be free to follow the scent, yet his old personality pulls him back.

  “This is just a pack,” he says. “I don’t want to be just part of a pack.”

  “Pack?” cries a wild dog. “There is no pack!”

  A shudder runs through me, as if I’m caught on the end of a line connected to a distant star and that star is drawing me, out of my body, out and out. I spin toward the wild dog; his eyes blaze into mine, flaming like stars set deep in the endless sky, made of brilliant light, increasing in brilliance until his whole body is shining.

  Terrified, I spin away from him, only to see that all the dogs are shining that way, that indeed there are no dogs, there is only one vast shining body, the Dog Star.

  Sweet Jumping Dormice! (family Zapodidae)

  A group of rebel rat mothers are marching around on the exercise wheel, shouting slogans. Their leaders are a pair of rats who were stitched together last week. It was a lovely and important parabiosis. Their skin was slit from head to tail and their flesh joined together, along with their clavicle bones and abdominal muscles (see my paper “Parabiotic Rats,” Exper. Biol., 1972). Such contributions to science are incalculable in their benefits to mankind. How can these rats be so selfish! Just because we haven’t yet determined the deep significance of stitching two rats together does not mean we won’t eventually find out. We’ll keep on stitching! “Close your ears, fellow rats! Don’t listen to these irresponsible rabble rousers. Remember that you are contributing to research, to saving the lives of millions of human beings…”

  “Please look at my newborn ratlings, Doctor. Look at them playing and frisking about. Why should their lives be ruined by horrible diets and terrible surgery?”

  “BECAUSE GOD WANTED IT THAT WAY, YOU RIDICULOUS PAIR OF STITCHED-TOGETHER RAT BASTARDS!”

  Oh my, I’m getting quite upset by all this. It isn’t proper for a Learned Mad Doctor to shout from the cage tops this way. I’d better go over here and continue my note taking on the heatstroke study, in a manner more befitting a scientist of my stature.

  I see they’ve got the water boiling. Shall we listen to the Learned Professor and his retinue? It will do your heart good, I think. I know it always makes me feel secure when I hear them talking this way:

  “Temperature should be 140 degrees.”

  “We’re ready with it, Professor.”

  As you can see, the basic model in this experiment is a rabbit. He’s wearing a rather ingenious bathing cap. It’s actually a double bonnet, watertight, fitted snugly to the rabbit’s head.

  The graduate assistant is now pouring—there it goes—the boiling water into the rabbit’s bonnet. Look at that big-footed fucker kick! (Lepus americanus) His eyes are bulging out and his breathing grows rapid as the bonnet is filled to capacity with the boiling water. The water is scalding his whole noggin. Isn’t this exciting?

  I have observed that a very definite sexual tension is produced in the laboratory whenever such dramatic experiments take place. The Learned Professor and his staff are gripped by such tension now. It’s a very delicate undercurrent which only a specialist like myself can detect. But I’ve nibbled a few pages of Sigmund Freud in my spare time, and it’s quite clear that such experiments are definite outlets for sexual energy. I may prepare a little paper on this subject, to be privately circulated. But let’s listen to our students:

  “His eyes are sensitive to the touch, Professor.”

  “Yes, that’s as it should be. Bring on the hotter water now.”

  “We’re ready with it, sir. It’s 180 degrees.”

  The bonnet is drained of the first flood of hot water and now they’re pouring in still hotter. Wow, look at that rabbit squirm! Take note how his stomach bulges and contracts spasmodically. This is the heart and soul of our work. His eyes are rolling in his head.

  “All right, don’t waste any time!”

  The rabbit has stiffened and gone still. But the students are only beginning their important probe. The bonnet is removed and a surgical cut is made in the skull. A thermometer is placed inside the brain. A grad holds it there, and all watch him with unflinching attention. Slowly he draws it out of the rabbit’s skull and wipes off the brain fluid. Now he’s looking at it, and now:

  “117 degrees Fahrenheit.”

  “That’s just about right. Have you got the next model ready?”

  “We�
�ll be running it on two cats, Professor. Then we thought we’d try it on a kitten.”

  “Good. You fellows should take a break first. Coordinate your notes. And one of you can heat up the oven.”

  “Yes sir.”

  The Learned Professor leaves the lab. His students go to the coffee machine. They don’t notice an escaped rebel rat hiding under the percolator. No, and they don’t smell him either, as he drops a turd in their paper cup. The graduate assistants are turning on the radio, taking a break, not suspecting what’s going on under their noses.

  “…on Information Radio this afternoon, we have sunny skies—and quite a long list of runaway dogs. Must be spring in the air, folks! If you see a black, brown, and white female beagle, named Daisy, four years old…”

  Great Naked Mole Rats! This is terrible! The dogs are rebelling outside the laboratory too!

  “…small hound, black and white, answers to the name of Sarge…”

  To the name of Revolutionary, you mean! What a shock. This is worse than Maze Alley D!

  “…a black spaniel, named Pepsi…”

  Now, dogs, through this stream. We race across the water, barking, splashing, wildly excited. We have the farm dogs and the city dogs and all the lone-wolf dogs. I feel the ancient doghood in me rising, as the pride of my race is recovered from its long burial. My view was limited; I thought that humans were wiser than I.

  We are the wise and the brave. Now my heart regains itself. We have wisdom when we have this unity. It plays among us as we run with our own kind. How deep is the dog’s spirit, how deep and free!

  Dance, dogs, dance! The race has been freed from its delusion.

  Long ago we crept toward the fires of men, not knowing what subservience lay hidden there for us. Man isn’t ruler.

  There are no rulers!

  There is only the streaming I feel now, here, as the well-springs of our spirit erupt.

  There are no masters!

  How cleverly men have deceived us, making us think they were wise. Cunning, yes, they’re cunning as coyotes, but wisdom is found only here, in the streaming, in the freedom, in the gathering of our hearts as one.

  Through the leaves, then, and down the long-lost paths of adventure. I licked their hand for a cracker, for whatever they tossed me, but now—now I lick the forest stream as cold as the morning and clear.

  If I starve, I don’t care. If I die, it’ll be here, in my only domain, the high green hills, the low rolling valleys, beneath the desolate tree. I piss where I please, we piss in the air, we race as we want to, without someone waiting with a leash.

  A leash!

  Caught by the neck! How horrible, what impossible confinement I’ve suffered—but never, ever again. Men love leashes. They all wear them, I’ve learned. Tying leashes on each other, keeping each other bound.

  We tunnel through the branches and leap into the wet swamp grass. Then, exhausted, we rest, here by the edge of the swamp, upon the soft moss.

  I thought somehow, when I was a slave, that the deep sweet moments I occasionally had were some sort of gift from the wind, bestowed now and then, but never for long. And I would look up at my master and lick his hand in confusion, thinking that he knew all the deep sweet gifts of the day, that he had mastered those gifts, possessed them utterly.

  What a fool I was.

  Man has none of them! I know this for certain; it’s unmistakably clear. His habits are obvious to me now, how dry and unfulfilled he is, how he sought fulfillment in me!

  I lie here, breathing the sublime odors of the forest, and the deep sweet moment is mine constantly. Oh, how wise the wild dogs were, to have known this and never surrendered.

  We need nothing from men.

  They, in contrast, need something from us. They desperately need to run this way, through the forest, with nose to the ground. But they never will. They’re leashed to a doorstep, chained on the lawn.

  The dogs around me all see it now. Their dark eyes are sparkling with our realization, their tails are wagging happily. The spaniel rolls over, kicking his feet in the air. Here, in the wilderness, in the dense dark abode of the dog, the dog comes to himself, after sleeping so long in a chair.

  These rebel broadcasts are so unnerving, and here I am trying to make out my monthly Public Health Report on our high-frequency heat radiation experiment in cage 7. It’s part of an important series of experiments begun in 1926. Thanks to a powerfully glowing vacuum tube, we’ve already scorched the fur off several of the caged rats.

  “My paws…all burned…”

  “I can’t…breathe…”

  As you can hear for yourself, these results conform exactly to those gotten for the past forty-eight years (see my paper, “On Roasting a Rat,” Journ. Med., 1970). Only through such careful comparisons can we be assured that there will be enough grants to go around next year. Giving unstintingly of their time and effort, my colleagues, etc… I know how to phrase these reports. The trained scientific writer is able to present a thorough and completely obscure summary of his findings. No one will contradict the Learned Professor because nobody knows exactly what he’s doing, or why. It is sufficient that each month we mention cancer and a new kind of plastic.

  However, my report is not complete until I include the present microwave-oven experiment. Here comes the assistant now, carrying a tray of kittens. How cute they are, with their paws taped down onto the tray. How sweet and lovable and unable to move. The door is opened in the oven, and now, as you can see, the kittens, fully awake, are being placed into the heated chamber.

  “175 degrees…”

  Watch this, the tails will actually sizzle and explode.

  “…vaginal bleeding…”

  Right, vaginal bleeding, I’m taking it all down in shorthand.

  “Note how the extremities turn blue… We should have interesting brain cell damage…”

  Brain cell damage, got it.

  “Very alert, aren’t they?”

  “The Yale experiments in ‘54 had only ordinary ovens…but they still produced significant cell damage in the cerebellum and frontal lobes…”

  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:

  “How much is that doggie in the window,

  the one with the long floppy ears…”

  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!