Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH (11 page)

That cage was my home for a long time. It was not uncomfortable; it had a floor of some kind of plastic, medium soft and warm to the touch; with wire walls and ceiling, it was airy enough. Yet just the fact that it was a cage made it horrible. I, who had always run where I wanted, could go three hops forward, three hops back again, and that was all. But worse was the dreadful feeling - I know we all had it - that we were completely at the mercy of someone we knew not at all, for some purpose we could not guess. What were their plans for us?

As it turned out, the uncertainty itself was the worst suffering we had to undergo. We were treated well enough, except for some very small, very quick flashes of pain, which were part of our training. And we were always well fed, though the food, scientifically compiled pellets, was not what you'd call delicious.

But of course we didn't know that when we arrived, and I doubt that any of us got much sleep that first night. I know I didn't. So, in a way, it was a relief when early the next morning the lights snapped on and Dr Schultz entered. There were two other people with him, a young man and a young woman. Like him, they were dressed in white laboratory coats. He was talking to them as they entered the room and walked towards our cages.

'… three groups. Twenty for training on injection series A, twenty on series B. That will leave twenty-three for the control group. They get no injections at all - except, to keep the test exactly even, we will prick them with a plain needle. Let's call the groups A, B, and C for control; tag them and number them A-i to A-20, B-i to B-20, and so on. Number the cages the same way, and keep each rat in the same cage throughout. Diet will be the same for all.'

'When do we start the injections?'

'As soon as we're through with the tagging. We'll do that now. George, you number the tags and the cages. Julie, you tie them on. I'll hold.'

So the young woman's name was Julie; the young man was George. They all put gloves on, long, tough plastic ones that came to their elbows. One by one we were taken from our cages, held gently but firmly by Dr Schultz while Julie fastened around each of our necks a narrow ribbon of yellow plastic bearing a number. I learned eventually that mine was number A-10.

They were kind, especially Julie. I remember that when one rat was being tagged, she looked at it and said, 'Poor little thing, he's frightened. Look how he's trembling.'

'What kind of biologist are you?' said Dr Schultz. 'The "poor little thing" is a she, not a he.'

When my turn came, the door of my cage slid open just enough for Dr Schultz to put his gloved hand through. I cowered to the back of the cage, which was just what he expected me to do; one hand pressed me flat against the wire wall; then his fingers gripped my shoulders. The other hand held my head just behind the ears, and I was powerless. I was lifted from the cage and felt the plastic collar clipped around my neck. I was back inside with the door closed in less than a minute. The collar was not tight, but by no amount of tugging, twisting or shaking was I ever able to get it off.

I watched through the wire front of my cage as the others were caught and tagged. About six cages down from me, on the same shelf, I saw them put a collar on Jenner; but once he was back in his cage, I could see him no longer.

A little later in the morning they came around again, this time pushing a table on wheels. It was loaded with a bottle of some clear liquid, a long rack of sharp needles, and a plunger. Once more I was lifted from the cage. This time George did the holding while Dr Schultz fastened one of the needles to the plunger. I felt a sharp pain in my hip; then it was over. We all got used to that, for from then on we got injections at least twice a week. What they were injecting and why, I did not know. Yet for twenty of us those injections were to change our whole lives.

During the days that followed, our lives fell into a pattern, and the reason for our captivity gradually became clear. Dr Schultz was a neurologist - that is, an expert on brains, nerves, intelligence, and how people learn things. He hoped, by experimenting on us, to find out whether certain injections could help us to learn more and faster. The two younger people working with him, George and Julie, were graduate workers in biology.

'Watch always,' he told them, 'for signs of improvement, faster learning, quicker reaction in group A as compared to group B, and both as compared to the control group.'

My own training began on the day after the first injections. It was George who did it; I suppose Julie and Dr Schultz were doing the same test on other rats. He took my cage from the shelf and carried it to another room, similar to the first one but with more equipment in it, and no shelves of cages. He placed the cage in a slot against a wall, slid open the end, opened a matching door in the wall - and I was free.

Or so I thought. The small doorway in the wall led into a short corridor, which opened, or seemed to, directly on to a green lawn. I could see it clearly, and behind it some bushes, and behind them a street - all outdoors, and nothing but air between me and them. Furthermore, I could smell the fresh outdoor breeze blowing in. Were they letting me go?

I made a dash towards the open end of the corridor -and then jumped back, I could not go on. About two feet from my cage (still open behind me) there was something dreadfully wrong with the floor. When my feet touched it, a terrible, prickling feeling came over my skin, my muscles cramped, my eyes blurred and I got instantly dizzy. I never got used to that feeling - no one ever does - but I did experience it many times, and eventually learned what it was: electric shock. It is not exactly a pain, but it is unbearable.

Yet I was in a frenzy to reach that open lawn, to run for the bushes, to get away from the cage. I tried again - and jumped back again. No use. Then I saw, leading off to the left, another corridor. I had not noticed it at first because I had been looking so eagerly at the open

end of the one I was in. The second one seemed to stop about five feet away in a blank wall. Yet there was light there: it must turn a corner. I ran down it, cautiously, not trusting the floor. At the end it turned right - and there was the lawn again, another opening. I got closer that time; then just as I thought I was going to make it - another shock. I pulled back and saw that there was still another corridor, leading off to the right. Again I ran, again I saw the open escape hole, and again I was stopped by shock. This was repeated over and over; yet each time I seemed to get a little closer to freedom.

But when finally I reached it and the grass was only a step away, a wire wall snapped down in front of me, another behind me; the ceiling opened above me and a gloved hand reached in and picked me up.

A voice said: 'Four minutes, thirty-seven seconds.'

It was George.

I had, after all my running through the corridors, emerged into a trap only a few feet from where I had started, and, through a concealed opening up above, George had been watching everything I did.

I had been in what is called a maze, a device to test intelligence and memory. I was put in it many times again, and so were the others. The second time I got through it a little faster, because I remembered - to some extent - which corridors had electric floors and which did not. The third time I was still faster; and after each trial George (or sometimes Julie, sometimes Dr Schultz) would write down how long it took. You might ask: Why would I bother to run through it at all, if I knew it was only a trick? The answer is I couldn't help it. When you've lived in a cage, you can't bear
not
to run, even if what you're running towards is an illusion.

There were more injections, and other kinds of tests, and some of these were more important than the maze, because the maze was designed only to find out how quickly we could learn, while some of the others actually taught us things - or at least led up to the actual teaching.

One was what Dr Schultz called 'shape recognition'. We would be put into a small room with three doors leading out - one round, one square, and one triangular. These doors were on hinges, with springs that held them shut, but they were easy to push open, and each door led into another room with three more doors like the first one. But the trick was this: If you went through the wrong door, the room you entered had an electric floor, and you got a shock. So you had to learn: In the first room, you used the round door; second room, triangle, and so on.

All of these activities helped to pass the time, and the weeks went by quickly, but they did not lessen our longing to get away. I wished for my old home in the storm sewer; I wished I could see my mother and father, and run with my brother to the marketplace I know all the others felt the same way; yet it seemed a hopeless thing. Still there was one rat who decided to try it anyway.

He was a young rat, probably the youngest of all that had been caught, and by chance he was in the cage next to mine; I might mention that like Jenner and me, he was in the group Dr Schultz called A. His name was Justin.

It was late one night that I heard him calling to me, speaking softly, around the wooden partition between our cages. Those partitions generally kept all of us from getting to know each other as well as we might have done, and discouraged us from talking much to one another; it was quite hard to hear around them, and of course you could never see the one you were talking to. I think Dr Schultz had purposely had them made of some soundproof material. But you
could
hear, if you and your neighbour got in the corners of the cages nearest each other and spoke out through the wire front.

'Nicodemus?'

'Yes?' I went over to the corner.

'How long have we been here?'

'You mean since the beginning? Since we were caught?'

'Yes.'

'I don't know. Several months - I think, but I have no way to keep track.'

'I know. I don't either. Do you suppose it's winter outside now?'

'Probably. Or late autumn.'

'It will be cold.'

'But not in here.'

'No. But I'm going to try to get out.'

'Get out? But how? Your cage is shut.'

'Tomorrow we get injections, so they'll open it. When they do, I'm going to run.'

'Run where?'

'I don't know. At least I'll get a look around. There might be some way out. What can I lose?'

'You might get hurt.'

'I don't think so. Anyway
they
won't hurt me.'

By they he meant Dr Schultz and the other two. He added confidently:

'All those injections, all the time they've spent - we're too valuable to them now. They'll be careful.'

That idea had not occurred to me before, but when I thought about it, I decided he was right. Dr Schultz, Julie and George had spent most of their working hours with us for months; they could not afford to let any harm come to us. On the other hand, neither could they afford to allow any of us to escape.

Justin made his attempt the next morning. And it did cause a certain amount of excitement, but not at all what we expected. It was Julie who opened Justin's cage with a hypodermic in her hand. Justin was out with a mighty leap, hit the floor (about four feet down) with a thump, shook himself and ran, disappearing from my view heading towards the other end of the room.

Julie seemed not at all alarmed. She calmly placed the needle on a shelf, then walked to the door of the laboratory and pushed a button on the wall near it. A red light came on over the door. She picked up a notebook and pencil from a desk near the door and folio wed Justin out of my sight.

A few minutes later Dr Schultz and George entered. They opened the door cautiously and closed it behind them. 'The outer door is shut, too,' said Dr Schultz. 'Where is it?'

'Down here,' said Julie, inspecting the air ducts.

'Really? Which one is it?'

'It's one of the A group, just as you expected. Number nine. I'm keeping notes on it.'

Obviously the red light was some kind of a warning signal, both outside the door and in - 'laboratory animal at large.' And not only had Dr Schultz known one of us was out, but he had expected it to happen.

'… a few days sooner than I thought,' he was saying, 'but so much the better. Do you realize…'

'Look,' said Julie. 'He's doing the whole baseboard -but he's studying the windows, too. See how he steps back to look up?'

'Of course,' said Dr Schultz. 'And at the same time he's watching us, too. Can't you see?'

'He's pretty cool about it,' said George.

'Can you imagine one of the lab rats doing that? Or even one of the controls? We've got to try to grasp what we have on our hands. The A group is now three hundred per cent ahead of the control group in learning, and getting smarter all the time. B group is only twenty per cent ahead. It's the new DNA that's doing it. We have a real breakthrough, and since it is DNA, we may very well have a true mutation, a brand new species of rat. But we've got to be careful with it. I think we should go ahead now with the next injection series.'

'The steroids?'

(Whatever that meant.)