Hartinger's Mouse (Commander Shaw Book 12)

by Philip McCutchan

  Clyde Flaherty gave a brief nod and after that we all waited in a somewhat strained atmosphere, though Harry Kustig did his best to keep some sort of talk going. Inside fifteen minutes Ingram turned up, calm enough on the surface but with agitation showing through the sharp eyes. He came right to the point and attacked me with, “Now, what’s all this about a mouse, Commander?”

  I told my story again. Ingram said, “I knew nothing about this. Clyde?”

  Flaherty said, “Nor me. If I had, why, it wouldn’t have happened! Hartinger had no authority to remove specimens and he would never have got it from me.” He glanced in my direction and added, “Hartinger always was a man who made his own rules, Commander.”

  I said gently, “I think you’d better include me in on this, don’t you, gentlemen?”

  A conference of looks took place. Flaherty, obviously unhappy, muttered, “Seems we don’t have any alternative now, Colonel,” and Ingram agreed. He said, “There’s nothing much in it, Commander, and I doubt if what we can tell you is going to help you. The facts are simple enough. Clyde Flaherty here is doing some probes of his own into the effects of selected moon samples on earth animals. This is being done independently of the outside scientists and let me stress there is no reason why it should not be. Dr Flaherty is acting perfectly properly and with my full assent. But I would also stress that, again quite properly, we do not wish any results Dr Flaherty obtains to be released outside of this base until we are in all respects ready to make an announcement. You understand, Commander?”

  I nodded. “Yes, of course I do. So far as I’m able, I’ll respect your confidence. But you must see that if you can throw any light on what seems to be happening back in Britain, you may have to accept some loss of secrecy.”

  “Sure,” Ingram said at once. “We’re not in business to spread disease, but to control it and prevent any epidemics. And let me repeat what I told you earlier: we have no reason to believe anything precisely harmful has come down from space.” He narrowed his eyes. “What makes you think this mouse of Hartinger’s came from here, anyway?”

  “Nothing more than circumstantial evidence,” I said. “It was a shot in the dark. But on the face of it, Colonel, I don’t think it was a bad shot. Hartinger had come from here, it appears you’re experimenting with mice, Hartinger had smuggled a mouse into Britain, and soon after that he was murdered. I see a nice, clear link because somehow I don’t really think he’d dropped into a pet shop after arrival in London.”

  Ingram nodded, put the tips of his fingers together, and looked at Flaherty. “Maybe you can give an answer to that one, Clyde,” he said. “Have you lost any mice just lately?”

  It was clear to me that Ingram was fully expecting a nil report on that one, but that hope died in his eyes as he saw Clyde Flaherty’s face. With enormous reluctance Flaherty said, “Well, now, in fact I have lost one. Colonel.”

  “Before Hartinger left?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t believe you reported this, Clyde.”

  Flaherty said, “No, I didn’t. I didn’t see any need for that. Under certain circumstances, mice have a habit of cannibalism — you know that, Colonel. I assumed that was what had happened, and in point of fact it could have happened that way, whether or not Hartinger had a mouse in London.”

  Ingram gave a brief, cold smile. “I think,” he said, “we’re going to have some difficulty in persuading Commander Shaw of that now.”

  I said, “I’m sorry to say that’s dead true.”

  There was a silence. Flaherty was looking baffled and angry, Ingram worried, and Kustig diplomatically noncommittal. I said, “I’d like to know what your experiments are, Dr Flaherty.”

  Ingram said, “Clyde, we’d better take him down so he can see for himself. That should satisfy you, Commander, that there’s no connexion with what you’re looking into.” That, I thought, remained to be seen. We all went down again to the sample operations area and Flaherty pulled out a key-ring on a chain fixed to his trousers and opened up the door with the red light in it. We trooped into a long, low room like a tunnel, well lit by guarded electric lights overhead and kept heated at what felt like blood heat. Along the sides were ranged large cages made of glass with fine-mesh metal bars. The floors of these cages were lined with sawdust, each contained a feeding bowl and a water bowl and a lump of cotton-wool for the inmates to use as a bedroom. Each cage contained one mouse and beside each dangled a board with a chart clipped to it, just like a hospital ward back home. I say each cage contained a mouse, but they looked more like rats to me, big ones at that, and I said as much to Ingram.

  “That’s the experiment,” he said. “They’re growing. Some faster than others.”

  I felt a curious shiver in my spine. I asked, “How big are they going to grow?”

  Ingram shrugged. “We can’t say yet. It’s early days. Clyde, you’d better give him a rundown, will you?”

  “Sure,” Flaherty said. He went into his spiel; he liked talking about his work. Apparently, though the public knew nothing, micro-organisms had been found in the moon samples from an earlier space flight and Flaherty had worked on these personally and had produced some kind of a serum after many months of unremitting effort. Just a couple of weeks before — at about the time that the most recent moon-probers had been discharged from quarantine — Flaherty had injected five dozen mice with his serum and had sat back to watch the results. These had been initially speedy; within three days Flaherty had noted an increase in the size of his injected mice as compared with a dozen uninjected controls, and over the succeeding days these mice had continued to grow at a variable rate. All except one, to which fact I drew attention myself when I passed a normal-sized mouse in the fifth cage along on my right. “Hasn’t he had his medicine?” I asked.

  Flaherty said, “Yes, all this batch have — the controls are farther along, right at the end. This one isn’t susceptible, apparently.”

  “Any idea why?”

  “Not yet. I shall hope to find out, of course.”

  I nodded. I felt the whole of this business was horrible. I asked, “What’s the point of this experiment, Doctor — what is the end product to be, apart from a king-size rodent?”

  Flaherty said, “Well, we don’t know. Not all experiments have an end product, exactly. But it’s very interesting just to see what moon-grown organisms can do to life here on earth, wouldn’t you say?”

  “No,” I said, “I wouldn’t. Not me! I suppose it won’t be long before you’ll be wanting to try out your theories on human beings. Isn’t that the next logical step?”

  “I can’t see that ever being done,” Flaherty said, but I didn’t believe him for a moment. Maybe it wouldn’t be contemplated just yet, I would give him that, but it’s surprising how moralities change once a certain amount of progress has been made — the next step doesn’t seem such a big jump, after a time. I walked on down that tunnel-like room, looking at the weirdly growing mice. I almost felt I could see that growth taking place before my very eyes, though I knew that must be sheer imagination. But some of those mice were really big, and their unnatural size had stripped them of their small-boy’s-pet appeal. I’d always rather liked mice, had kept them myself as a boy, and had felt sorry for them in their little scurrying lives. But not any more. They looked loathsome. I suppose it was an interesting experiment to a scientist or a medic and probably it made Flaherty feel quite like God. It was certainly amazing, I must admit; those little animals had grown in perfect proportion — bodies, feet, tails, teeth and whiskers — the lot. There were no apparent abnormalities at all, other than the basic fact of extra growth. Maybe one day they would treat human babies so that you got a kind of Instant Adult. That opened up all sorts of revolting possibilities … a race of giants with baby minds lolloping about the world. Yes, it was amazing all right, but, as Ingram had so correctly said, it quite failed to solve my problem. Maybe Hartinger had bought that mouse in London after all — say as a present for th
e small son of his friends in the north of England, if they had a small son …

  *

  Hartinger may indeed have been totally uninvolved but the fact was he had been murdered while on my tail. Whether or not his intention had been simply to make contact with me — and I would have thought he could have found a simpler way of doing that — it was perfectly possible that his killer had believed that to be his intention. Which meant that Hartinger was not to be allowed to talk to me — which in its turn put Hartinger right back in my court as it were. That night, after Harry Kustig had bought me an excellent dinner in a first-rate night club in Houston, I studied Ingram’s file on Hartinger. Hartinger had been young for his important post with NASA — he had been only thirty-seven at the time of his death, and he’d held his appointment for the past two years. He was married to Lesley DeLong Pullman, only daughter of a Judge Wainwright Pullman of New York — I remembered she had been a real socialite beauty some years before, you couldn’t avoid knowing that if you read the New Yorker. Judge Pullman was a rich man and no doubt some of his wealth had rubbed off on his son-in-law. Hartinger himself came of humble New England stock, his grandfather having emigrated originally from Germany before World War One. Ewart Hartinger had studied medicine at Yale, had subsequently held a number of hospital appointments, going pretty rapidly up the scale, and had acquired some very impressive qualifications along the line. At the age of thirty-two he had started to take a keen interest in aeromedics and the U.S. space programme and ultimately he had taken this up as his specialization and had won himself quick promotion inside NASA. He had been on three space missions himself, two in straightforward earth orbit trying out new docking and space-station techniques, and once he had landed on the moon. Naturally enough, he was one hundred per cent clean securitywise — that, I could take as read, though I did go through the summary just to be able to say I’d done so.

  There didn’t seem to be anything in that file to help me and after a nightcap from the bottle of rye that Kustig had thoughtfully left in my room, I went to bed. It was a delightfully comfortable bed and I was soon asleep, but — it may have been the rye, or the sumptuous meal I’d had — I was plagued and tormented by grotesque nightmares in which I was locked in that experimental chamber with the mice, who had grown so big they had burst from out of their cages and were conferring as to what to do with me, whether to eat me now or keep me for later as a kind of between-meals snack. Then the mice did a quick change into more unpleasant creatures — snakes and snails and slugs — and I woke up trembling and covered with a nasty cold sweat like the trail of one of those nightmare snails and found it was daylight and a telephone bell was blasting away beside my bed. It sounded violently urgent and when I had re-orientated myself I reached out and took the call, which was from Harry Kustig.

  “Good morning,” he said. “Sleep well, Commander?”

  “No,” I said, sourly and ungraciously. “I —”

  “That’s too bad,” he said, cutting me short. I realized now that he sounded urgent and upset. “Look, Commander, how soon can you get along to Doc Flaherty’s office?”

  I said, “If it’s urgent, give me ten minutes.”

  “Right. See you there. We have something you ought to look at.” He rang off. I got up and was in Flaherty’s office dead on time. Ingram was there with Flaherty and Kustig. They all looked really shaken up, especially Flaherty. Ingram said, “You’d better come right down to Sample Operations, Commander. I’d sooner you saw this, than try to tell you about it.”

  By now my flesh was really crawling and when we reached that room I felt one hell of a reluctance to go inside, but I overcame this. I think I’d expected to find the mice of my nightmare, huge beasts ten feet high, but I didn’t. They hadn’t grown during the night, at least not noticeably, and they were scratching around in their sawdust, or sitting beside their feeding-bowls munching grains of rice or nuts or something. But not all of them. As Flaherty led me down the line, I saw that three of them, in adjacent cages, were lying inertly in their cotton-wool bedrooms. I saw something else as well: their skin had gone and they were covered all over with revolting sores. As I watched, one of those poor brutes began an attempt to scratch itself, waving exhausted thin legs blearily in the air and failing to contact the area of itch. It gave a thin, pitiful squeak. I looked in horror at Ingram.

  He lifted his shoulders. “I’m sorry, Commander,” he said quietly. “I guess you were right, after all.”

  *

  I was aboard the next jet out for London, with another passenger taken off the list to accommodate me. A cable had gone ahead of me, in code, warning the Ministry of Health about that captive mouse found in Hartinger’s hotel bedroom. It could be a thoroughly lethal little bundle of fur. Flaherty hadn’t had any notion of anything that might be an antidote to the skin-loss disease; he would of course be working on it hard from now on out, but he couldn’t promise any results, much less quick ones. And there wasn’t a lot of time. The disease was a pretty fast spreader, at least in humans. I had asked Flaherty for his views on why it hadn’t shown earlier in the mice, and also whether he saw any link between it and the growth pattern; and he had said that the answer to both questions might for all he knew lie in a possibility that two different micro-organisms had been present in his serum, one for growth and the other for skin-loss, and the growth one had temporarily inhibited the other — but he didn’t know, it was all conjecture. Something horrible had been released, and now almost without a doubt by Hartinger, who could have been contaminated personally by his illicit mouse — something that was right outside human, earth-bound control. God alone knew how we were going to overcome it. And I still didn’t see how Hartinger and the Houston mice linked in with that yellow dust — that was so far right beyond me. Nor had I a single clue as to why Hartinger had behaved as he had. The only leads I had to follow were, firstly, Hartinger’s wife Lesley, who was still in England — indeed she had only just about arrived really — and might have some ideas, and secondly, those friends of Hartinger’s with whom Lesley would undoubtedly be in contact. Before leaving I had got their address from Colonel Ingram — Hartinger had quoted them as people through whom he could be contacted while he was away — and they lived in Yorkshire of all places — where I had been with Jason Jagger the night the yellow dust fell on his E-type. I imagined there was an element of coincidence in that, though.

  When the jetliner touched down at Heathrow and had taxied to the disembarkation area, I felt the strain in the air. The word had spread from the Customs people that this thing had come in from America, and no-one was happy in handling inward passengers from the States. When I saw the newspapers, I wasn’t surprised at their fears. The thing had been spreading and whole areas were going down with it. The leader writers were making a grisly kind of hay. Panic was about to set in and the public wouldn’t stand for Governmental complacency. The doctors were rushed off their feet, the surgeries went on for hours, and there was something like chaos in the hospital service. No-one knew what to do, how to treat the strange condition. There had been the first death, a child in Pinner; she had virtually scratched herself to death — or so medical opinion asserted, maybe to stop anyone getting the idea the disease was fatal of itself. The curious thing was, the rest of her family hadn’t got it. I found myself mentally adding the one word: yet. In the meantime, all her contacts were being rigorously checked.

  Something had to be done, the papers said.

  Sure — but what? They didn’t go into that.

  *

  “The patient,” Jagger said, “is reported to be well.”

  “The patient? Which patient?” I was in Jagger’s room in the Home Office and gratefully sniffing April Goodhart’s scent, which helped to overlay the smell still in my nostrils of the experimental chamber back in the Lunar Receiving Laboratory. Jagger’s finger, by the way, like mine, had recovered fully.

  He said, “Come off it, sailor. The Ministry mouse.”

  �
��I’m sorry,” I told him, “but this isn’t funny, so please don’t make tasteless jokes.”

  He shrugged, but looked penitent. “Apologies,” he said. “I thought you’d like to know, you see. Hartinger’s mouse hasn’t developed any symptoms, which, in view of what you’ve told me, I find surprising.”

  “I don’t,” I said. “This thing seems to be highly selective. I thought I’d made that plain enough. Remember the police who handled Hartinger’s body came out with the symptoms, though Hartinger hadn’t any himself.”

  “They could have got it from somewhere else. The yellow powder, for instance.”

  “There wasn’t any in their area — not that that has to mean a hell of a lot, either, of course.” I paused and lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. “I’d better have a look at the mouse, I think — I doubt if it’ll tell me much, but you never can tell.”

  Jagger said, “You’ll have to go to Porton Down if you want to do that.”

  I stared at him. “Oh? Why Porton?”

  “Mousie’s on his way there. Special transport laid on, with a police escort.”

  “Why the hell Porton?”

  “Why the hell not? Oh, I know they’re not geared to the moon programme, but a second opinion’s always worth having, isn’t it, and they might come up with something.”

  “Is this just the Ministry of Health passing the buck?”

  Jagger considered the point, sitting on the edge of his desk and displaying brilliant green socks beneath the tight trouser-legs. “That could well be,” he said. “But possibly — and this I believe to be the case — they haven’t quite the facilities for handling the mouse. Or they may merely wish to keep the Ministry of Health healthy.”