The Margenes by Miriam Allen DeFord

---

THE
Margenes

BY MIRIAM ALLEN DE FORD

The tiny, live, straw-colored circles
were mysterious but definitely harmless.
Yet they were directly responsible for
riots, revolution and an atomic war....

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Worlds of If Science Fiction, February 1956.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

---

There is a small striped smelt called the grunion which has odd egglaying habits. At high tide, on the second, third, and fourth nights after the full of the moon from March to June, thousands of female grunions ride in on the waves to a beach in southern California near San Diego, dig tail-first into the soft sand, deposit their eggs, then ride back on the wash of the next wave. The whole operation lasts about six seconds.

On the nights when the grunion are running, hordes of people used to come to the beach with baskets and other containers, and with torches to light the scene, and try to catch the elusive little fish in their hands.

They were doing that on an April night in 1960. In the midst of the excitement of the chase, only a few of them noticed that something else was riding the waves in with the grunions.

Among the few who stopped grunion-catching long enough to investigate were a girl named Marge Hickin and a boy named Gene Towanda. They were UCLA students, "going together", who had come down on Saturday from Los Angeles for the fun.

"What on earth do you think these can be, Gene?" Marge asked, holding out on her palms three or four of the little circular, wriggling objects, looking like small-size doughnuts, pale straw in color.

"Never saw anything like them," Gene admitted. "But then my major's psychology, not zoology. They don't seem to bite, anyway. Here let's collect some of them instead of the fish. That dingus of yours will hold water. We can take them to the Marine Biology lab tomorrow and find out what they are."

Marge Hickin and Gene Towanda had started a world-wide economic revolution.

None of the scientists at the university laboratory knew what the little live straw-colored circles were, either. In fact, after a preliminary study they wouldn't say positively whether the creatures were animal or vegetable; they displayed voluntary movement, but they seemed to have no respiratory or digestive organs. They were completely anomalous.

The grunion ran again that night, and Gene and Marge stayed down to help the laboratory assistants gather several hundred of the strange new objects for further study. They were so numerous that they were swamping the fish, and the crowds at the beach began to grumble that their sport was being spoiled.

Next night the grunion stopped running—but the little doughnuts didn't. They never stopped. They came in by hundreds of thousands every night, and those which nobody gathered wriggled their way over the land until some of them even turned up on the highways (where a lot of them were smashed by automobiles), on the streets and sidewalks of La Jolla, and as far north as Oceanside and as far south as downtown San Diego itself.

The things were becoming a pest. There were indignant letters to the papers, and editorials were written calling on the authorities to do something. Just what to do, nobody knew; the only way to kill the circular little objects from the sea seemed to be to crush them—and they were too abundant for that to be very effective.

Meanwhile, the laboratory kept studying them.

Marge and Gene were interested enough to come down again the next weekend to find out what, if anything, had been discovered. Not much had: but one of the biochemists at the laboratory casually mentioned that chemically the straw-colored circles seemed to be almost pure protein, with some carbohydrates and fats, and that apparently they contained all the essential vitamins.

College student that he was, Gene Towanda immediately swallowed one of the wriggling things down whole, as a joke.

It tickled a little, but that wasn't what caused the delighted amazement on his face.

"Gosh!" he exclaimed. "It's delicious!"

He swallowed another handful.

That was the beginning of the great margene industry.

It was an astute reporter, getting a feature story on the sensational new food find, who gave the creatures their name, in honor of the boy and girl who had first brought the things to the attention of the scientists. He dubbed them margenes, and margenes they remained.

"Dr. O. Y. Willard, director of the laboratory," his story said in part, "thinks the margenes may be the answer to the increasing and alarming problem of malnutrition, especially in undeveloped countries.

"'For decades now,' he said, 'scientists have been worried by the growing gap between world population and world food facilities. Over-farming, climatic changes caused by erosion and deforestation, the encroachment of building areas on agricultural land, and above all the unrestricted growth of population, greatest in the very places where food is becoming scarcest and most expensive, have produced a situation where, if no remedy is found, starvation or semi-starvation may be the fate of half the Earth's people. The ultimate result would be the slow degeneration and death of the entire human race.

"'Many remedies have been suggested,' Dr. Willard commented further. 'They range from compulsory birth control to the production of synthetic food, hydroponics, and the harvesting of plankton from the oceans. Each of these presents almost insuperable difficulties.

"'The one ideal solution would be the discovery of some universal food that would be nourishing, very cheap, plentiful, tasty, and that would not violate the taboos of any people anywhere in the world. In the margenes we may have discovered that food.'

"'We don't know where the margenes came from,' the director went on to say, 'and we don't even know yet what they are, biologically speaking. What we do know is that they provide more energy per gram than any other edible product known to man, that everyone who has eaten them is enthusiastic about their taste, that they can be processed and distributed easily and cheaply, and that they are acceptable even to those who have religious or other objections to certain other foods, such as beef, among the Hindus or pork among the Jews and Mohammedans.

"'Even vegetarians can eat them,' Dr. Willard remarked, 'since they are decidedly not animal in nature. Neither, I may add, are they vegetable. They are a hitherto utterly unknown synthesis of chemical elements in living form. Their origin remains undiscovered.'"

Naturally, there was no thought of feeding people on raw margenes. Only a few isolated places in either hemisphere would have found live food agreeable. Experiment showed that the most satisfactory way to prepare them was to boil them alive, like crabs or lobsters. They could then be ground and pressed into cakes, cut into convenient portions. One one-inch-square cube made a nourishing and delicious meal for a sedentary adult, two for a man engaged in hard physical labor.

And they kept coming in from the Pacific Ocean nightly, by the million.

By this time none of them had to be swept off streets or highways. The beach where for nearly a century throngs had gathered for the sport of catching grunion was off bounds now; it was the property of California Margene, Inc., a private corporation heavily subsidized by the Federal Government as an infant industry. The grunions themselves had to find another place to lay their eggs, or die off—nobody cared which. The sand they had used for countless millennia as an incubator was hemmed in by factory buildings and trampled by margene-gatherers. The whole beautiful shore for miles around was devastated; the university had to move its marine biological laboratory elsewhere; La Jolla, once a delightful suburb and tourist attraction, had become a dirty, noisy honkytonk town where processing and cannery workers lived and spent their off-hours; the unique Torrey Pines had been chopped down because they interfered with the erection of a freight airport.

But half the world's people were living on margenes.

The sole possession of this wonderful foodstuff gave more power to the United States than had priority in the atomic bomb. Only behind the Iron Curtain did the product of California Margene, Inc. fail to penetrate. Pravda ran parallel articles on the same day, one claiming that margenes—brzdichnoya—had first appeared long ago on a beach of the Caspian Sea and had for years formed most of the Russian diet; the other warning the deluded nations receiving free supplies as part of American foreign aid that the margenes had been injected with drugs aimed at making them weak and submissive to the exploitation of the capitalist-imperialists.

There was a dangerous moment at the beginning when the sudden sharp decline in stocks of all other food products threatened another 1929. But with federal aid a financial crash was averted and now a new high level of prosperity had been established. Technological unemployment was brief, and most of the displaced workers were soon retained for jobs in one of the many ramifications of the new margene industry.

Agriculture, of course, underwent a short deep depression, not only in America but all over the world; but it came to an end as food other than margenes quickly became a luxury product. Farmers were able to cut their production to a small fraction of the former yield, and to get rich on the dizzying prices offered for bread, apples, or potatoes. And this increased the prosperity of the baking and other related industries as well.

In fact, ordinary food costs (which meant margene costs) were so low that a number of the larger unions voluntarily asked for wage decreases in their next contracts. California Margene, Inc. was able to process, pack, and distribute margene cakes at an infinitesimal retail price, by reason of the magnitude of the output.

An era of political good feeling fell upon the western world, reflected from the well-fed comfort of vast populations whose members never before in their lives had had quite enough to eat. The fear of famine seemed to be over forever, and with it the fear of the diseases and the social unrest that follow famine. Even the U.S.S.R. and its satellites, in a conciliatory move in the United Nations Assembly, suggested that the long cold war ought to be amenable to a reasonable solution through a series of amicable discussions. The western nations, assenting, guessed shrewdly that the Iron Curtain countries "wanted in" on the margenes.

Marge Hickin and Gene Towanda, who had started it all, left college for copywriting jobs with the agency handling the enormous margene publicity; they were married a few months later.

And the margenes continued to come in from the sea in countless millions. They were being harvested now from the Pacific itself, near the shoreline, before they reached the beach. Still no research could discover their original source.

Only a few scientists worried about what would happen if the margenes should disappear as suddenly as they had arrived. Attempts at breeding the creatures had failed completely. They did not undergo fission, they did not sporulate, they seemed to have no sex. No methods of reproduction known in the plant or animal kingdom seemed to apply to them. Hundreds of them were kept alive for long periods—they lived with equal ease in either air or water, and they did not take nourishment, unless they absorbed it from their environment—but no sign of fertility ever appeared. Neither did they seem to die of natural causes. They just kept coming in....

On the night of May 7, 1969, not a single margene was visible in the ocean or on the beach.

They never came again.

What happened as a result is known to every student of history. The world-wide economic collapse, followed by the fall of the most stable governments, the huge riots that arose from the frantic attempts to get possession of the existing stocks of margene cakes or of the rare luxury items of other edibles, the announcement by the U.S.S.R. that it had known from the beginning the whole thing was a gigantic American hoax in the interests of the imperialistic bloodsuckers, the simultaneous atomic attacks by east and west, the Short War of 1970 that ruined most of what bombs had spared of the Earth, the slow struggle back of the remnant of civilization which is all of existence you and I have ever known—all these were a direct outgrowth of that first appearance of the margenes on the beach near San Diego on an April night in 1960.

Marge and Gene Towanda were divorced soon after they had both lost their jobs. She was killed in the hydrogen blast that wiped out San Diego; he fell in the War of 1970. "Margene" became a dirty word in every language on Earth. What small amount of money and ability can be spared is, as everyone knows, devoted today to a desperate international effort to reach and colonize another habitable planet of the Solar System, if such there be.

---

As for the margenes, themselves, out of the untold millions that had come, only a few thousand were lucky enough to survive and find their way back to their overcrowded starting-point. In their strange way of communication—as incomprehensible to us as would be their means of nourishment and reproduction, or their constitution itself—they made known to their kin what had happened to them. There is no possibility, in spite of the terrific over-population of their original home and of the others to which they are constantly migrating, that they will ever come here again.

There has been much speculation, particularly among writers of science fiction, on what would happen if aliens from other planets should invade Earth. Would they arrive as benefactors or as conquerors? Would we welcome them or would we overcome and capture them and put them in zoos and museums? Would we meet them in friendship or with hostility?

The margenes gave us the answer.

Beings from outer space came to Earth in 1960.

And we ate them.

Where the PHPH Pebbles Go by Miriam Allen DeFord

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WHERE THE PHPH PEBBLES GO

By MIRIAM ALLEN DeFORD

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Worlds of Tomorrow April 1963
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

---

It was a strange world and a deadly
one, the incredible alien planet—

---

Gral and Hodnuth were playing phph. In case you are not a phph fan, and haven't ever seen Bliten's classic Ways of Improving Your Phph Game, its essence consists in lobbing pebbles at a target as near the horizon as your skill permits. After each throw, you fly over to see how far you went.

It sounds like a simple game, but it has complicated restrictions and rules, and a good phph player can command any amount of heavy service from the spectators. Since a lot of the Ground Dwellers are also phph addicts (they could never become players, of course, being far too small and light to handle the phph pebbles), this means that a real champion never has to do any kind of work again, being fed, clothed, housed and entertained by his admirers, and can devote all his time to the game.

Gral and Hodnuth, having alternated as champions for many a long ganath, had it pretty easy. But neither of them was given to lying back on his laurels and growing soft. This meant that when a match was announced, Ground Dwellers as well as we Real People came by the hanthoids from zygils around to watch through viewing-tubes—and whichever of the two won piled up a lot of bilibs of voluntary service. (Voluntary service, as most economists admit, is true wealth, since the pledge is incumbent on the offerer's heirs until it is fully satisfied, and can likewise be willed by the recipient to his heirs).

Naturally, no phph player is absolutely perfect; if he were, there would be no contest and nobody would bother to attend a game. Pebbles fall short, they go awry, and sometimes they are thrown so hard that they escape altogether from our light gravity and fly into outer space. At the end of the game period the referee (usually a superannuated former champion) tots up the score and announces how many times each player missed the target and by which of these errors he missed it. By a rather confusing arithmetical computation he then determines which of them won, and the winner collects his pledges—and the fans collect the side bets they have been making all through the game.

In this particular game Hodnuth won. But then he won about half the time, so that wasn't what gave it its importance. The Ground Dwellers, as everyone knows, are an excitable and volatile race (which is why we conquered them so easily, with the added advantage of our command of levitation and our immensely greater size and strength), so just an ordinary phph game often looks like a riot. When anything out of the way occurs, such as the appearance of a new young contender to take on one of the champions, the Ground Dwellers simply go wild. And this time they practically exploded. I confess that even we Real People were amazed.

One of the Thinkers was discovered attending the game.

---

Now, when we first arrived here, and cleaned up on the Ground Dwellers and established them in their proper subservient position, the Thinkers were our leaders. It was they who had figured out the whole invasion, had headed the Sixty Hastgunt Flight, and had worked out the tactics and logistics of the Great Conquest. But once we were settled and things were going smoothly, they called a last General Meeting and told us that their part was finished, and that now they were going to retire to the Far Colony and go on with their Thinking. Since then, if a problem arises that our own Council can't handle, one of us has to fly to the Far Colony and obtain the advice of a Thinker. They live together there with their families (supported of course by all of us) and spend all their time in study and research. It is one of the natural advantages of us Real People that we have these specialized Thinkers to do all our intellectual and cultural tasks and teach us what we need to know, leaving us others free for the truly satisfying functions of government and commerce.

Never in all the ganaths since that last General Meeting had a Thinker been seen among us, and that so august a being should condescend to attend a mere phph game was unbelievable. Yet there he was—easily recognizable, naturally, since all Thinkers have long white hair and long white beards. (Even the female Thinkers—though some heretics say their beards are artificial.) In fact, that is the way one knows that a new Thinker has been born. Soon after birth his hair and beard begin to grow, both white, and as soon as he is weaned we fly him to the Far Colony to be reared and educated by his own. If a Thinker has a child who isn't one, they send him back to us.

As soon as the spectators realized that a Thinker was among them, the excitement reached boiling point. The Ground Dwellers almost went crazy—for, of all things, the Thinker had seated himself not in the perches of honor of the Real People, in front, but in the Ground Dwellers' bleachers. We ourselves noticed all the scrambling and heaving, and when some of us flew over to investigate we could hardly believe our eyes.

When I say scrambling and heaving, I don't mean they were mobbing him. They're much too afraid of us for that, and anyway their reverence for the Thinkers is positively religious—much more so than ours. After all the Thinkers are simply specialized members of our own race, and though we revere them we could scarcely worship them, as the Ground Dwellers do. No, they were clearing a respectful space all around him, but then they kept gazing at him in awe, half of them falling on their knees in his presence. I sneaked a glance at the phph players, and as I suspected they were looking anything but happy. Phph champions are pretty vain. They don't care for rival attractions.

One of our party—it was Sephar, who as usual pushed himself forward—bowed to the Thinker and asked if he wouldn't be more comfortable among us. But he shook his white head and said no, he could see better where he was. (I wonder if Thinkers may not have a bit of vanity too, and if he wasn't enjoying seeing all those poor creatures prostrate themselves around him!)

"Then will Your Honor join us when the game is over?" persisted Sephar. "If you would enter my poor pit of a dwelling, it would overwhelm me with pleasure to have you feast with us."

His poor pit of a dwelling, indeed! I wish you could see the palace he lived in—the roof-opening is plated with solid nagh!

---

I was just about bursting with indignation, but I should have known you can trust a Thinker to deflate a fellow like that.

"Thank you, brother," he said mildly, "but I'm here doing some research and I'll have to fly back right after the game."

Sephar opened his mouth to argue, but by that time I had him by the wing and I pulled him back—he said rudely, I say firmly. "Do you want to give us a bad name for presumption, brother?" I whispered. "Don't interfere with a Thinker when he's Thinking!"

Some of the rest of us nodded agreement, so Sephar shut up. But he had a nasty gleam in his eye and I braced myself for trouble later. We bowed and returned to our places. Thanks to Sephar and his performance, I missed the last throw Gral made, which lost him the contest. But I heard the moan from the spectators who weren't watching the Thinker instead, so I knew he'd lobbed a too-high one. It must have been a humdinger—one of the throws into space. I glanced back as I was flying away, and the Thinker was standing up and gazing intently after it. Well, I thought to myself, imagine a Thinker getting worked up over a phph throw!

The game was over soon after that, and Hodnuth went around collecting his pledges while Gral was being consoled by his backers. When I got a chance to look again where the Thinker had been sitting, he had disappeared.

The one who hadn't disappeared was Sephar. He was waiting for me, just as I'd expected.

"Not here!" I snarled at him. "Do you want the Ground Dwellers to see Real People in a brawl?"

So we adjourned to Marnag's courtyard, which was the nearest dueling place, and it was a nice little fight, and I won. Quite a group gathered around, and I was pleased to see that several of my friends were making bets on me. Some of Sephar's sycophants lugged him off to the hospital to have a fractured wing-tip treated. The rest came home with me and we spent our winnings on a good dinner with plenty of mastonyi to wash it down.

Several of us speculated about the Thinker, and we wondered if his "research" wasn't a fake and if he'd just decided to enjoy a game like the rest of us.

"After all," Marnag pointed out, "he might be only a boy. You can't tell with a Thinker. I suppose young Thinkers can be frivolous and rebellious like our own youngsters."

Nipar, who is something of a wag, yelled: "Hey, listen to Marnag—he's Thinking! Come on, Marnag, are you really a Thinker in disguise? Let's see if that green hair of yours is dyed—you could have shaved the beard!"

And he poured a pitcher of mastonyi right over Marnag's head to find out if the color would come off. After that, the party got really rough, and I don't remember the rest of it.

---

A whole ganath after that, the Thinkers sent one of their messengers to tell us in the Council that we were summoned to a meeting in the Far Colony. That doesn't happen often, so we knew something extremely important must be up. I for one was all of a twitter.

Not one of us connected the summons with that Thinker who had come to the phph contest between Gral and Hodnuth. That was our stupidity. We should have guessed it when we found the two champions had been sent for also. Gral flew next to me on the trip, and of all things, both he and Hodnuth were carrying with them several phph pebbles which the Thinkers had ordered them to bring along.

It's hard to tell the Thinkers apart—at least for us who aren't Thinkers—but I recognized the one who had been at the game. He sat right by Hledo, who always acts as their spokesman when we consult them about anything.

"Welcome and thank you for coming so promptly," Hledo began. "Did you two phph players bring the pebbles?"

Gral and Hodnuth handed over the load, and Hledo passed it on to the one we knew.

"This is Myrwan," Hledo said, "and he will tell you the urgent thing he has Thought."

"I became interested a long time ago," Myrwan began in the rather rusty voice all the Thinkers except Hledo have—they spend most of their time in study and meditation, and don't talk much among themselves—"in a question that seems never to have occurred to any of Us.

"Where do phph pebbles go when they are thrown beyond our feeble gravity and escape into outer space? What becomes of them in the end? And who, if anyone, collects them, and what conclusions about them and our world do such persons draw?"

I raised my hand to ask a question, and Myrwan nodded.

"I don't understand." I said politely. (Meaning he was being too abstruse for any of us, for it is understood that there is no keener apprehension in the council than my own.) "Is Your Honor implying that there exist outside our world other intelligences that would be capable of observing and drawing conclusions from the pebbles?"

"Exactly. I know that the general belief is that it is impossible that extraplanetary beings can exist, least of all intelligent beings. That was the belief of my own colleagues until I gave them the results of my recent Thought. It is the reason We have summoned you here.

"For some time now We have been receiving peculiar radio waves from outside the world. We have considered them merely manifestations of random radiation from other planets and stars. But now they have suddenly become—shall I say rhythmical? Measured? Directional? They leave the impression that someone, or something, is trying to communicate with us.

"The astronomers among Us have become more and more concerned. We have finally been led to the reluctant belief that Our former theories have been wrong—that this actually is not the only inhabited planet.

"Now, I need not tell you how disastrous it would be for us if that were true. If there are intelligent beings on other planets, if they are trying to communicate with us, then the next step would be that they would try to visit us."

Marnag raised his hand.

"What harm would that do? If such beings exist, and if they could come here, why couldn't we go there too—wherever it is—and wouldn't that enrich our lives? Of course I'm not a Thinker—" I had a fleeting vision of Nipar and the pitcher of mastonyi!—"but I'm a Real Man and I can see no reason why it would hurt us to find we are not alone in the universe."

"No," said Myrwan dryly. "You are not a Thinker, my friend. We enjoy here a completely stable civilization. It is the best of all possible social systems. We do not want it disturbed."

"I see," said Marnag, and several others nodded. I confess that a heretical idea crossed my mind—that any such disturbance might well dethrone the Thinkers first of all—but I suppressed it. Myrwan went on:

"And that is where the phph pebbles come in. In the course of my researches on these previously unknown waves, I began to wonder what, if anything, had initiated the interest of outsiders in our planet, assuming that outsiders exist. Certainly we had made no move toward trying either to reach or to communicate with any putative dwellers on other planets. There had been no major changes on our planet that could have enlisted the attention of outside astronomers, even granting that they have telescopes as powerful as our own.

"Only one thing, so far as I can ascertain, has ever left this planet for outer space. And that was the phph pebbles.

"We call them pebbles. To beings who might consider us giants—and if there really are intelligent beings in other worlds they might well be of an entirely different size from us, though no less dangerous for all that—they might seem huge meteors. Suppose that, though most of them would undoubtedly burn up and all of them be considerably reduced before they struck another planet as meteorites, some of them at least might still be sufficiently large to be analyzed chemically? And suppose that where they struck there existed beings capable of analyzing them?"

---

This was getting a little deep for anybody not a Thinker to take in. Several Council members raised their hands plaintively and so indicated.

"All right, I'll try to make it plainer," Myrwan said. "Let us pretend that instead of the little fragments of space debris that fall harmlessly in the annual meteor showers here, we were pelted with enormous chunks of matter, perhaps causing major damage to property and life. Wouldn't We immediately undertake an intensive study to determine whence they came, and of what, precisely, they consisted?

"And if We found that these residual meteorites contained material indicating their origin in an inhabited world—still worse, in a world sufficiently evolved to entail the possibility or probability that its highest life-forms might be intelligent or even civilized—wouldn't we take steps at once to investigate? Moreover, wouldn't we be outraged to the point where our primary object would be to avenge ourselves?

"Of course we would. And so of course would any beings on other planets, under similar circumstances."

"You mean," Marnag asked, "that if beings came here from space they would attack us?"

"That too. But even if that were not their reaction, curiosity alone could be enough to spur them on to exploration."

"But—but what can we do?" quavered old Gantes. He is really growing too senile to be on the Council much longer.

"We can discourage them. And we can mislead them."

"How?"

"We can make certain that nothing reaches them in the future which gives them the least sign that any but the lowest forms of life, if even those, exist in our world.

"I studied this whole question systematically, as We always do. I came to the conclusion that only the phph pebbles could possibly betray us. I attended a phph game to see for myself if a pebble actually could be thrown with sufficient force to become, as it were, an artificial meteor. I found that it could. Indeed, I saw Gral make such a throw."

Gral looked stricken. He fell flat on his face, groveling before the Thinkers.

"Oh, Your Reverences," he cried, "I never dreamt—I never—"

"Get up, Gral," Myrwan ordered. "Nobody's blaming you. Nobody expects anyone but a Thinker to Think."

"We'll make it a rule from now on to hold our shots. We'll bar anyone from the game forever who lobs a pebble too hard," Hodnuth promised fervently.

"Far from it," said Myrwan. "On the contrary, in the future you must concentrate on supra-gravity shots. Give extra points to anyone who performs one."

"Why?" several of us murmured, completely bewildered.

"Because I have already analyzed three pebbles I brought back with me from the game. With the ones you have brought, I shall be able to make further tests. If they confirm my previous findings, I Think We shall be able to mislead any potential attackers.

"Every phph pebble henceforth will be doctored. To use any unauthorized pebble will become a felony. What has happened in the past we can't change, but there may still be time to save ourselves. From this time forth there are going to be more 'meteors' shot off our atmosphere than ever before—and every one of them is going to tell a completely false story about conditions in their place of origin.

"Of course We may be entirely wrong. These new waves may be due to purely physical causes. Other planets may all be as devoid of intelligent life as We have always assumed. But if there is the faintest possibility—and I feel there is—that we are in danger, it would be fatal not to take such measures as we can to avert it."

"What's in the pebbles now that could tell anything about us?" Gral asked. "And if something is, how could you alter it?"

---

Myrwan froze up a little. The Thinkers don't like to have us ask detailed questions. But he realized that Gral was still upset, and answered kindly.

"It wouldn't mean a lot to you if I told you. But you can understand this much—chemical analysis of the pebbles I've looked at so far shows fragments of embedded fossils."

"Of plants, you mean?"

Myrwan smiled.

"Plants don't become fossilized," he said. "In one pebble there was a microscopic piece of a metal knife. In another there was half of a fossilized tooth. Ground Dweller relics, true, but human. You must remember that all the hills around here from which you gather the pebbles are really million-ganath-old burial places of the Ground Dwellers. We haven't bothered to dig up most of them because we're so rich in prehistoric remains, with our immensely old civilization, that we have all the fossils and ancient artifacts we need.

"But let's imagine an alien civilization a great deal younger than ours. Let's imagine that in even one of those pebbles—which would be meteorites to them—even a minute trace of that kind of thing should be left. What would they Think?—for they would have to have Thinkers too, to be civilized at all.

"I'll tell you what they'd Think. They'd decide that somewhere out in space there is a rich, undiscovered planet full of valuable knowledge and, even better, valuable artifacts. Probably a world with a culture much more advanced than their own. And they'd try hard to trace the direction from which those meteorites came, and to calculate the distance. Then suppose they had some means of transportation in space.

"That may well be what these new radio waves mean. They may be attempts at communication—if we were foolish enough to respond to them. We don't dare to take any chances.

"So from now on there are going to be swarms and swarms of those meteoroids—and every one of them is going to be a real artifact on its own—a manufactured one, made according to Our specifications, carrying an unmistakable message. A false one!

"They will be cunningly constructed from forms of matter injurious to any conceivable variety of life. We'll cover them all. And they'll be barren of even the most primitive bacteria. They will carry in themselves a silent warning: 'Approach the planet from which these come at peril of your instant death ... not matter what kind of being you are!' That should save us forever."

I'd been wondering why Sephar had kept his big mouth shut all this time. To my way of feeling, he should never have been with us at all. He would never have been a Council member if he hadn't been a multibilibaire. But I'd won a fair fight with him, and officially we had to be friends, so I hadn't protested when I found he was included in the summons.

But now the big blowhard had to put his two grocs' worth.

"Your Reverence—Your Honor—" he spluttered. "May I ask a question?"

"Certainly, brother."

"Since players have been lobbing pebbles out into space for thousands and thousands of ganaths, and as Your Honor says, some of them must long ago have landed somewhere, who knows what dead give-aways may have been in any of them?"

"Is that your question?"

"No, I have two. First, why haven't these intelligent beings whose existence you're presupposing—" I saw Myrwan's face set, and I knew he'd noted that rude and insulting word, but I managed to conceal my smile—"why haven't they come here before this? And since they haven't come, if they're smart enough to figure out our whereabouts why aren't they also smart enough to realize the difference between the old pebbles and these new ones, and to know that we're putting something over on them?"

We sometimes say that though the Thinkers are of course overwhelmingly our superiors mentally, they lack the emotional control which is the great characteristic of the rest of us Real People. I wish those scandalmongers could have seen Myrwan then. His face was as white as his beard and his wings quivered, but he let Sephar have his say out and he answered him very quietly.

"As to your first question, brother," (and if anybody ever called me "brother" in that tone I'd know it was a case of fight or run) "the only logical reason is that it must be only recently that such beings have reached a state of culture where they are able to analyze the pebbles and draw the right conclusions from them.

"And the answer to your second question is that we can only hope. Hope that all of the pebbles already in their possession are free of—shall we say, incriminating evidence? All we can guarantee is that all they find in the future will be. Does that answer you satisfactorily?"

"It will have to," muttered Sephar sullenly. I moved away from him and was glad to notice that I was not the only one.

"What I have said to you," continued the Thinker calmly, "you may communicate to any of the Real People you wish. You will naturally keep it from the Ground Dwellers; there is no reason to agitate them at present. Time enough for that if we should ever need them as soldiers—which I devoutly hope we never shall."

"But who will make the artificial pebbles if the Ground Dwellers aren't to know about them?" asked Marnag. "What about our slogan—'Thought from the Thinkers, government and administration from the Real People, technical skill and heavy labor from the Ground Dwellers'?"

"We shall handle that. When you go home, tell Earnig I want to see him at once. Brief him first. He and his Bureau will see that the job is done, and the Ground Dwellers needn't be told just what they are making. They'll be delighted to hear that We are planning a new kind of phph pebble to increase the interest of the game—they love it whenever one is batted clear away."

---

Well, all this was last ganath. The new pebbles are in use. So far nothing has happened—unless you count the fact that, according to Myrwan, those peculiar radio waves have ceased. Let us hope that if his whole theory is correct—and Thinkers don't talk about their Thoughts till they're pretty sure of them—those alien beings have given up, decided either that they were mistaken and there is no intelligence here able to communicate, or that they themselves haven't the ability to interpret our answers.

Sephar? Oh, he isn't around any more. One of the Thinkers is doing some experiments in Psychological Adjustment. Hledo asked the Council's recommendation of somebody they could commandeer as a test subject, according to the Agreement on Thinkers' Privileges, and I got them to suggest Sephar. He was very nasty about it, but I ignored his underbred invective. I felt it my duty also respectfully to remind Hledo of Sephar's past indiscretions, in case they'd forgotten.

Usually when the Thinkers have finished with a subject he's no longer of much use and they put him in a rest home for the remainder of his life. So since I've done pretty well for myself lately, I was able to buy Sephar's home, with its nagh-plated roof-opening, and move into it.

He had a very attractive wife, who of course couldn't go with him to the Far Colony. It just goes to show that virtue (as one of the Thinkers once remarked wittily) is its own reward.

Oh, Rats! by Miriam Allen DeFord

---

OH, RATS!

By MIRIAM ALLEN DEFORD

Illustrated by WOOD

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Galaxy Magazine December 1961.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

---

---

Orthedrin, maxiton and glutamic
acid—they were the prescription
that made him king of his world!

---

SK540, the 27th son of two very ordinary white laboratory rats, surveyed his world.

He was no more able than any other rat to possess articulate speech, or to use his paws as hands. All he had was a brain which, relative to its size, was superior to any rat's that had hitherto appeared on Earth. It was enough.

In the first week of gestation his embryo had been removed to a more suitable receptacle than the maternal womb, and his brain had been stimulated with orthedrin, maxiton and glutamic acid. It had been continuously irrigated with blood. One hemisphere had been activated far in excess of the other, since previous experiments had shown that increased lack of symmetry between the hemispheres produced superior mentality. The end-result was an enormous increase in brain-cells in both hemispheres. His brain showed also a marked increase in cholinesterase over that of other rats.

SK540, in other words, was a super-rat.

The same processes had been applied to all his brothers and sisters. Most of them had died. The few who did not, failed to show the desired results, or showed them in so lopsided and partial a manner that it was necessary to destroy them.

All of this, of course had been mere preparation and experimentation with a view to later developments in human subjects. What SK540's gods had not anticipated was that they would produce a creature mentally the superior, not only of his fellow-rats, but also, in some respects, of themselves.

He was a super-rat: but he was still a rat. His world of dreams and aspirations was not human, but murine.

What would you do if you were a brilliant, moody young super-rat, caged in a laboratory?

SK540 did it.

What human beings desired was health, freedom, wealth, love, and power. So did SK540. But to him health was taken for granted; freedom was freedom from cages, traps, cats, and dogs; wealth meant shelter from cold and rain and plenty to eat; love meant a constant supply of available females.

But power! It was in his longing for power that he most revealingly displayed his status as super-rat.

Therefore, once he had learned how to open his cage, he was carefully selective of the companions—actually, the followers—whom he would release to join his midnight hegira from the laboratory. Only the meekest and most subservient of the males—intelligent but not too intelligent—and the most desirable and amiable of the females were invited.

Once free of the cages, SK540 had no difficulty in leading his troop out of the building. The door of the laboratory was locked, but a window was slightly open from the top. Rats can climb up or down.

Like a silver ribbon they flowed along the dark street, SK540, looking exactly like all the rest, at their head. Only one person in the deserted streets seems to have noticed them, and he did not understand the nature of the phenomenon.

---

Young Mr. and Mrs. Philip Vinson started housekeeping in what had once been a mansion. It was now a rundown eyesore.

It had belonged to Norah Vinson's great-aunt Martha, who had left it to her in her will. The estate was in litigation, but the executor had permitted the Vinsons to settle down in the house, though they weren't allowed yet to sell it. It had no modern conveniences, and was full of rooms they couldn't use and heavy old-fashioned furniture; but it was solidly built and near the laboratory where he worked as a technician, and they could live rent-free until they could sell the house and use the money to buy a real home.

"Something funny happened in the lab last night," Philip reported, watching Norah struggle with dinner on the massive coal-stove. "Somebody broke in and stole about half our experimental animals. And they got our pride and joy."

"The famous SK540?" Norah asked.

"The same. Actually, it wasn't a break-in. It must have been an inside job. The cages were open but there were no signs of breaking and entering. We're all under suspicion till they find out who-dunit."

Norah looked alarmed.

"You too? What on earth would anybody want with a lot of laboratory rats? They aren't worth anything, are they—financially, I mean?"

"Not a cent. That's why I'm sure one of the clean-up kids must have done it. Probably wanted them for pets. They're all tame, of course, not like wild rats—though they can bite like wild rats if they want to. Some of the ones missing are treated, and some are controls. It would just be a nuisance if they hadn't taken SK540. Now they've got to find him, or do about five years' work over again, without any assurance of as great a success. To say nothing of letting our super-rat loose on the world."

"What on earth could even a super-rat do that would matter—to human beings, I mean?"

"Nobody knows. Maybe that's what we're going to find out."

---

That night Norah woke suddenly with a loud scream. Philip got the gas lighted—there was no electricity in the old house—and held her shaking body in his arms. She found her breath at last long enough to sob: "It was a rat! A rat ran right over my face!"

"You're dreaming, darling. It's because I told you about the theft at the lab. There couldn't be rats in this place. It's too solidly built, from the basement up."

He finally got her to sleep again, but he lay awake for a long time, listening. Nothing happened.

Rats can't talk, but they can communicate. About the time Norah Vinson dropped off after her frightened wakening, SK540 was confronting a culprit. The culprit was one of the liberated males. His beady eyes tried to gaze into the implacable ones of SK540, but his tail twitched nervously and if he bared his teeth it was more in terror than in fight. They all knew that strict orders had been given not to disturb the humans in the house until SK540 had all his preparations made.

A little more of that silent communication, and the rat who had run over Norah's face knew he had only two choices—have his throat slit or get out. He got.

"What do you know?" Philip said that evening. "One of our rats came back."

"By itself?"

"Yeah. I never heard of such a thing. It was one of the experimental ones, so it was smarter than most, though not such an awful lot. I never heard of a rat with homing instinct before. But when we opened up this morning, there he was, sitting in his cage, ready for breakfast."

"Speaking of breakfast, I thought I asked you to buy a big box of oatmeal on your way home yesterday. It's about the only thing in the way of cereal I can manage on that old stove."

"I did buy it. Don't you remember? I left it in the kitchen."

"Well, it wasn't there this morning. All I know is that you're going to have nothing but toast and coffee tomorrow. We seem to be out of eggs, too. And bacon. And I thought we had half a pound left of that cheese, but that's gone too."

"Good Lord, Norah, if you've got that much marketing to do, can't you do it yourself?"

"Sure, if you leave the car. I'm not going to walk all that way and back."

So of course Philip did do the shopping the next day. Besides, Norah had just remembered she had a date at the hairdresser's.

---

When he got home her hair was still uncurled and she was in hysterics. One of the many amenities great-aunt Martha's house lacked was a telephone; anyway, Norah couldn't have been coherent over one. She cast herself, shuddering and crying, into Philip's arms, and it was a long time before he got her soothed enough for her to gasp: "Philip! They wouldn't let me out!"

"They? Who? What do you mean?"

"The—the rats! The white rats. They made a ring around me at the front door so I couldn't open it. I ran to the back and they beat me there and did the same thing. I even tried the windows but it was no use. And their teeth—they all—I guess I went to pieces. I started throwing things at them and they just dodged. I yelled for help but there's nobody near enough to hear. Then I gave up and ran in our bedroom and slammed the door on them, but they left guards outside. I heard them squeaking till you drove up, then I heard them run away."

---

---

Philip stared at her, scared to death. His wife had lost her mind.

"Now, now, sweetheart," he said soothingly, "let's get this straight. They fired a lab boy today. They found four of our rats in his home. He told some idiotic story of having 'found' them, with the others missing, running loose on the street that night, but of course he stole them. He must have sold the rest of them to other kids; they're working on that now."

Norah blew her nose and wiped her eyes. She had regained her usual calm.

"Philip Vinson," she said coldly, "are you accusing me of lying, or just of being crazy? I'm neither. I saw and heard those rats. They're here now. What's more, I guess I know where that oatmeal went, and the eggs and bacon too, and the cheese. I'm—I'm a hostage!

"I don't suppose," she added sarcastically, "that your SK540 was one of the ones they found in the boy's home?"

"No, it wasn't," he acknowledged uneasily. A nasty little icy trickle stole down his spine. "All right, Norah, I give in. You take the poker and I'll take the hammer, and we'll search this house from cellar to attic."

"You won't find them," said Norah bitterly. "SK540's too smart. They'll stay inside the walls and keep quiet."

"Then we'll find the holes they went through and rout them out."

They didn't, of course. There wasn't a sign of a rathole, or of a rat.

They got through dinner and the evening somehow. Norah put all the food not in cans inside the old-fashioned icebox which took the place of a refrigerator. Philip thought he was too disturbed to be able to sleep, but he did, and Norah, exhausted, was asleep as soon as her head touched the pillow.

His last doubt of his wife's sanity vanished when, the next morning, they found the icebox door open and half the food gone.

---

"That settles it!" Philip announced. "Come on, Norah, put your coat on. You're coming with me to the lab and we'll report what's happened. They'll find those creatures if they have to tear the house apart to do it. That boy must have been telling the truth."

"You couldn't keep me away," Norah responded. "I'll never spend another minute alone in this house while those dreadful things are in it."

But of course when they got to the front door, there they were, circling them, their teeth bared. The same with the back door and all the first floor windows.

"That's SK540 all right, leading them," Philip whispered through clenched jaws. He could smash them all, he supposed, in time, with what weapons he had. But he worked in the laboratory. He knew their value to science, especially SK540's.

Rats couldn't talk, he knew, and they couldn't understand human speech. Nevertheless, some kind of communication might establish itself. SK540's eyes were too intelligent not to believe that he was getting the gist of talk directed to him.

"This is utterly ridiculous," Philip grated. "If you won't let us out, how can we keep bringing food into the house for you? We'll all starve, you and we together."

He could have sworn SK540 was considering. But he guessed the implicit answer. Let either one of them out, now they knew the rats were there, and men from the laboratory would come quickly and overwhelm and carry off the besiegers. It was a true impasse.

"Philip," Norah reminded him, "if you don't go to work, they know we haven't a phone, and somebody will be here pretty soon to find out if anything's wrong."

But that wouldn't help, Philip reflected gloomily; they'd let anyone in, and keep him there.

And he thought to himself, and was careful not to say it aloud: rats are rats. Even if they are 25th generation laboratory-born. When the other food was gone there would be human meat.

He did not want to look at them any more. He took Norah's arm and turned away into their bedroom.

They stayed there all day, too upset to think of eating, talking and talking to no conclusion. As dusk came on they did not light the gas. Exhausted, they lay down on the bed without undressing.

After a while there was a quiet scratching at the door.

"Don't let them in!" Norah whispered. Her teeth were chattering.

"I must, dear," he whispered back. "It isn't 'them,' I'm sure of it—it's just SK540 himself. I've been expecting him. We've got to reach some kind of understanding."

"With a rat?"

"With a super-rat. We have no choice."

Philip was right. SK540 alone stood there and sidled in as the door closed solidly again behind him.

How could one communicate with a rat? Philip could think of no way except to pick him up, place him where they were face to face, and talk.

"Are your—followers outside?" he asked.

A rodent's face can have no expression, but Philip caught a glance of contempt in the beady eyes. The slaves were doubtless bedded down in their hideaway, with strict orders to stay there and keep quiet.

"You know," Philip Vinson went on, "I could kill you, very easily." The words would mean nothing to SK540; the tone might. He watched the beady eyes; there was nothing in them but intelligent attention, no flicker of fear.

"Or I could tie you up and take you to the laboratory and let them decide whether to keep you or kill you. We are all much bigger and stronger than you. Without your army you can't intimidate us."

There was, of course, no answer. But SK540 did a startling and touching thing. He reached out one front paw, as if in appeal.

Norah caught her breath in astonishment.

---

"He—he just wants to be free," she said in a choked whisper.

"You mean you're not afraid of him any more?"

"You said yourself he couldn't intimidate us without his army."

Philip thought a minute. Then he said slowly:

"I wonder if we had the right to do this to him in the first place. He would have been an ordinary laboratory rat, mindless and contented; we've made him into a neurotic alien in his world."

"You're not responsible, darling; you're a technician, not a biochemist."

"I share the responsibility. We all do."

"So what? The fact remains that it was done, and here he is—and here we are."

The doorbell rang.

Philip and Norah exchanged glances. SK540 watched them.

"It's probably Kelly, from the lab," Philip said, "trying to find out why I wasn't there today. It's just about quitting time, and he lives nearest us."

Norah astonished him. She picked up SK540 from the bed-side table where Philip had placed him, and hid him under her pillow.

"Get rid of whoever it is," she said defensively. Philip stared for an instant, then walked briskly downstairs. He was back in a few minutes.

"It was Kelly, all right," he told her. "I said you were sick and I couldn't leave you to phone. I said I'd be there tomorrow. Now what?"

SK540's white whiskers emerged from under the pillow, and he jumped over to the table again. Norah's cheeks were pink.

"When it came to the point, I just couldn't," she explained shamefacedly. "I suddenly realized that he's a person. I couldn't let him be taken back to prison."

"Aren't you frightened any more?"

"Not of him." She faced the super-rat squarely. "Look," she said, "if we take care of you, will you get rid of that gang of yours, so we can be free too?"

"That's nonsense, Norah," Philip objected. "He can't possibly understand you."

"Dogs and cats learn to understand enough, and he's smarter than any dog or cat that ever lived."

"But—"

The words froze on his lips. SK540 had jumped to the floor and run to the door. There he stood and looked back at them, his tail twitching.

"He wants us to follow him," Norah murmured.

There was no sign of a hole in the back wall of the disused pantry. But behind it they could hear squeaks and rustlings.

SK540 scratched delicately at almost invisible cracks. A section of the wall, two by four inches, fell out on the floor.

"So that's where some of the oatmeal went," Norah commented. "Made into paste."

"Sh!"

SK540 vanished through the hole. They waited, listening to incomprehensible sounds. Outside it had grown dark.

---

Then the leader emerged and stood to one side of the long line that pattered through the hole. The two humans stared, fascinated, as the line made straight for the back door and under it. SK540 stayed where he was.

"Will they go back to the lab?" Norah asked.

Philip shrugged.

"It doesn't matter. Some of them may ... I feel like a traitor."

"I don't. I feel like one of those people who hid escaped war prisoners in Europe."

When the rats were all gone, they turned to SK540. But without a glance at them he re-entered the hiding-place. In a minute he returned, herding two white rats before him. He stood still, obviously expectant.

Philip squatted on his heels. He picked up the two refugees and looked them over.

"Both females," he announced briefly. "And both pregnant."

"Is he the father?"

"Who else? He'd see to that."

"And will they inherit his—his—"

"His 'super-ratism'? That's the whole point. That's the object of the entire experiment. They were going to try it soon."

The three white rats had scarcely moved. The two mothers-to-be had apparently fallen asleep. Only SK540 stood quietly eying the humans. When they left him to find a place where they could talk in private he did not follow them.

"It comes down to this," Philip said at the end of half an hour's fruitless discussion. "We promised him, or as good as. He believed us and trusted us.

"But if we keep to our promise we're really traitors—to the human race."

"You mean, if the offspring should inherit his brain-power, they might overrun us all?"

"Not might. Would."

"So—"

"So it's an insoluble problem, on our terms. We have to think of this as a war, and of them as our enemies. What is our word of honor to a rat?"

"But to a super-rat—to SK540—"

As if called, SK540 appeared.

Had he been listening? Had he understood? Neither of them dared to voice the question aloud in his presence.

"Later," Philip murmured.

"We must eat," said Norah. "Let's see what's left in the way of food."

---

Everything tasted flat; they weren't very hungry after all. There was enough left over to feed the three rats. But they had evidently helped themselves earlier; they left the scraps untasted.

Neither of the humans guessed what else had vanished from the pantry shelves—what, when he had heard enough, SK540 had slipped away and sprinkled on the remaining contents of the icebox, wherever the white powder would not show.

They did not know until it was too late—until both of them lay writhing in their last spasms on their bedroom floor.

By the time the house was broken into and their bodies found, SK540 and his two wives were far away, and safe....

And this, children, is the true account, handed down by tradition from the days of our great Founder, of how the human race ceased to exist and we took over the world.