But the slight bitterness in the voice of the professor was nothing to the growing bitterness in Mitkey’s little mind.
For Mitkey was Mitkey again, now. Memory intact, if a bit confused and spotty. His dreams of Moustralia, and all.
His first sight of Minnie after his return, and the blackout-step onto tinfoil charged with electricity that had ended all his dreams. A trap! It had been a trap!
The professor had double-crossed him, had given him that shock deliberately to destroy his intelligence, perhaps even to kill him, to protect the interests of the big awkward lumbering race of men from intelligent mice!
Ah, yes, the professor had been smart, Mitkey thought bitterly. And Mitkey was glad now that he had not called out “Brofessor” when it had come to him to do so. The professor was his enemy!
Alone and in the dark, he would have to work. Minnie first, of course. Create one of the X-19 machines the Prxlians had showed him how to make, and raise Minnie’s intelligence level. Then the two of them—
It would be hard, working in secret without the Professor’s help, to make that machine. But maybe…
A bit of wire on the floor under the workbench. Mitkey saw it and his bright little eyes gleamed and his whiskers twitched. He waited until Professor Oberburger was looking the other way, and then softly ran toward the wire, and with it in his mouth he scurried for the hole in the wall.
The professor didn’t see him.
“Und for der uldra-vafe brojector…”
Mitkey safe in darkness with his bit of wire. A start! More wire, he would need. A fixed condenser—the professor would have one, surely. A flashlight cell—that would be hard to handle. He’d have to roll it across the floor after the professor was asleep. And other things. It would take him days, but what did time matter?
The professor worked late that night, very late.
But darkness in the workshop came at last. Darkness and a very busy little mouse.
And bright morning, and the ringing of a doorbell.
“Package for Professor—uh—Oberburger.”
“Yah? Vot iss?”
“Dunno. From the Hartford Laboratories, and they said to carry it careful.”
Holes in the package.
“Yah, der mouse.”
The professor signed for it, and then carried it into the workroom and unwrapped the wooden cage.
“Ah, der vhite mouse. Liddle mouse, you are going a long, long vay. Vhat shall ve call you yet? Vhitey, no? Vould you vant some cheese, Vhitey?”
Yes, Whitey wanted cheese all right. He was a sleek, dapper little mouse with very close-set beady eyes and supercilious whiskers. And if you can picture a mouse to be haughty, Whitey was haughty. A city-slicker type of mouse. A blue-blood of the laboratories, who had never before tasted cheese. Nothing so common and plebian as cheese had entered his vitamin-infested diet.
But he tasted cheese and it was Camembert, good enough even for a blue-blood. And he wanted cheese all right. He ate with daintiness, a well-bred sort of nibbling. And if mice could smile, he would have smiled.
For one may smile and smile and be a villain.
“Und now, Vhitey, I show you. I put der pick-up by your cage, to see if it iss set to broadcast der vaint sounds you make eating. Here. I adchust—”
From the speaker on the corner table a monstrous champing sound, the magnification a thousand times of the sound of a mouse eating cheese.
“Yess, it vorks. You see, Vhitey, I eggsplain—Vhen der rocket on der moon lands, der combartment door it opens. But you can nodt get out, yet. There vill be bars, of balsa vood. You vill be able to gnaw through them, und you vill do so, to get out. If you are alife, see?”
“Und der sound of your gnawing vill be on der ultra shordt-vafe to vhich I shall stay duned-in, see? So vhen der rocket lands, I vill listen on my receifer, und if I hear you gnawing, I vill know you landed alife.”
Whitey might well have been apprehensive if he had understood what the professor was saying, but of course he didn’t. He nibbled on at the Camembert in blissful supercilious indifference.
“Und it vill tell me iff I am right about der admosphere, too, Vhitey. Vhen der rocket lands und der combartment door opens, der air vill shut off. Unless air iss on der moon, you vill liff only fife minutes or less.”
“If you keep on gnawing through der balsa vood after dot, it is because admosphere iss on der moon und der astronomers und der spegtroscopes are vooling themselfes. Und vools they are vhen they vail to subtract der Liebnitz revraction lines avay from der spectrum, no?”
Over the vibrant diaphragm of the radio speaker, the champ-chomp-chomp of chewing cheese.
Yes, the pick-up worked, beautifully.
“Und now to install it der rocket in…”
A day. A night. Another day. Another night.
A man working on a rocket, and within the wall behind him a mouse working even harder to complete something much smaller, but almost equally as complex. The X-19 projector to raise the intelligence of mice. Of Minnie, first.
A stolen pencil stub became a coil, a coil with a graphite core. Across the core, the stolen condenser, nibbled to within a microfarad of the exact capacity, and from the condenser a wire—But even Mitkey didn’t understand it. He had a blueprint in his mind of how it was made, but not of why it worked.
“Und now der flashlight dry-cell vhich I stole from der—” Yes, Mitkey, too, talked incessantly to himself while he worked. But softly, softly so the professor wouldn’t hear.
And from the wall, the rumble of a deeper guttural voice:
“Und now to put der pick-up der combartment in…”
Of men and mice. Hard to say which was the busier of the two.
Mitkey finished first. The little X-19 projector was not a thing of beauty to the eye; in fact it resembled the nucleus of an electrician’s scrap pile. Most definitely it was not streamlined and gleaming like the rocket in the room outside the wall. It had rather a Rube Goldberg look about it.
But it would work. In every essential detail it followed the instructions Mitkey had received from the Prxlian scientists.
The final wire, so.
“Und now to bring mine Minnie…”
She was cowering in the far corner of the house. As far as possible from those strange neuric vibrations that were doing queer things inside her head.
There was panic in her eyes as Mitkey approached. Sheer panic.
“Mine Minnie, nothing iss to be avraid about. You must closer come to der brojector und then—und then you vill be an indelligent mouse, mine Minnie. You vill dalk goot English, like me yet.”
For days now she had been puzzled and apprehensive. The strange actions of her consort, the strange noises he made that were not sensible mouse-squeaks at all, terrified her. Now he was making those weird noises at her.
“Mine Minnie, it iss all right. To der machine you must come closer, und you vill be able to dalk soon. Almost like me, Minnie. Yess, der Prxls did things to mine vocal chords so mine voice it sounds bedder yet, but effen mitout, you vill be able to—”
Gently Mitkey was trying to wedge his way in behind her, to push her out of the corner and edge her in the direction of the machine behind the wall of the next room.
Minnie squealed, and then she ran.
But alas, only a few feet toward the projector, and then she turned at right angles through the hole in the baseboard. Scurried across the kitchen floor and through a hole in the screen of the kitchen door. Outside, and into the high unmown grass of the yard.
“Minnie! Mine Minnie! Come back!”
And Mitkey scurried after her, too late.
In the foot-high grass and weeds he lost her completely, without a trace.
“Minnie! Minnie!”