The Star Mouse
By FREDRIC BROWN
Robinson Crusoe ... Gulliver ... Paul
Bunyan; the story of their adventures
is nothing compared to the Saga of Mitkey.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories Spring 1942.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Mitkey, the mouse, wasn't Mitkey then.
He was just another mouse, who lived behind the floorboards and plasterof the house of the great Herr Professor Oberburger, formerly ofVienna and Heidelberg; then a refugee from the excessive admiration ofmore powerful of his fellow-countrymen. The excessive admiration hadconcerned, not Herr Oberburger himself, but a certain gas which hadbeen a by-product of an unsuccessful rocket fuel—which might have beena highly-successful something else.
If, of course, the Professor had given them the correct formula. Whichhe—Well, anyway, the Professor had made good his escape and now livedin a house in Connecticut. And so did Mitkey.
A small gray mouse, and a small gray man. Nothing unusual about eitherof them. Particularly there was nothing unusual about Mitkey; he had afamily and he liked cheese and if there were Rotarians among mice, hewould have been a Rotarian.
The Herr Professor, of course, had his mild eccentricities. Aconfirmed bachelor, he had no one to talk to except himself, but heconsidered himself an excellent conversationalist and held constantverbal communion with himself while he worked. That fact, it turnedout later, was important, because Mitkey had excellent ears and heardthose night-long soliloquies. He didn't understand them, of course. Ifhe thought about them at all, he merely thought of the Professor as alarge and noisy super-mouse who squeaked over-much.
"Und now," he would say to himself, "ve vill see vether this eggshausttube vas broperly machined. It should fidt vithin vun vun-hundredththousandth uf an indtch. Ahhh, it iss berfect. Und now—"
Night after night, day after day, month after month. The gleaming thinggrew, and the gleam in Herr Oberburger's eyes grew apace.
It was about three and a half feet long, with weirdly shaped vanes, andit rested on a temporary framework on a table in the center of the roomthat served the Herr Professor for all purposes. The house in which heand Mitkey lived was a four room structure, but the Professor hadn'tyet found it out, seemingly. Originally, he had planned to use the bigroom as a laboratory only, but he found it more convenient to sleep ona cot in one corner of it, when he slept at all, and to do the littlecooking he did over the same gas burner over which he melted downgolden grains of TNT into a dangerous soup which he salted and pepperedwith strange condiments, but did not eat.
"Und now I shall bour it into tubes, und see vether vun tube adjacendtto another eggsplodes der secondt tube vhen der virst tube iss—"
That was the night Mitkey almost decided to move himself and his familyto a more stable abode, one that did not rock and sway and try to turnhandsprings on its foundations. But Mitkey didn't move after all,because there were compensations. New mouse-holes all over, and—joy ofjoy!—a big crack in the back of the refrigerator where the Professorkept, among other things, food.
Of course the tubes had been not larger than capillary size, or thehouse would not have remained around the mouse-holes. And of courseMitkey could not guess what was coming nor understand the HerrProfessor's brand of English (nor any other brand