chronometer. Carune put it down in front of Portal One and pushed it through with a pencil.
He ran across and grabbed it up. When he put it through, the watch had said 11:31:07. It now said 11:31:49. Very good. Right on the money, only he should have had an assistant over there to peg the fact that there had been no time gain once and forever. Well, no matter. Soon enough the government would have him wading hip-deep in assistants.
He tried the calculator. Two and two still made four, eight divided by four was still two; the square root of eleven was still 3.3166247 ... and so on.
That was when he decided it was mouse-time.
“What happened with the mice, Dad?” Ricky asked.
Mark hesitated briefly. There would have to be some caution here, if he didn’t want to scare his children (not to mention his wife) into hysteria minutes away from their first Jaunt. The major thing was to leave them with the knowledge that everything was all right now, that the problem had been licked.
“As I said, there was a slight problem ...”
Yes. Horror, lunacy, and death. How’s that for a slight problem, kids?
Carune set the box which read I CAME FROM STACKPOLE’S HOUSE OF PETS down on the shelf and glanced at his watch. Damned if he hadn’t put the thing on upside down. He turned it around and saw that it was a quarter of two. He had only an hour and a quarter of computer time left: How the time flies when you’re having fun, he thought, and giggled wildly.
He opened the box, reached in, and pulled out a squeaking white mouse by the tail. He put it down in front of Portal One and said, “Go on, mouse.” The mouse promptly ran down the side of the orange crate on which the portal stood and scuttered across the floor.
Cursing, Carune chased it, and managed to actually get one hand on it before it squirmed through a crack between two boards and was gone.
“SHIT!” Carune screamed, and ran back to the box of mice. He was just in time to knock two potential escapees back into the box. He got a second mouse, holding this one around the body (he was by trade a physicist, and the ways of white mice were foreign to him), and slammed the lid of the box back down.
This one he gave the old heave-ho. It clutched at Carune’s palm, but to no avail; it went head over ratty little paws through Portal One. Carune heard it immediately land on the crates across the barn.
This time he sprinted, remembering how easily the first mouse had eluded him. He need not have worried. The white mouse merely crouched on the crate, its eyes dull, its sides aspirating weakly. Carune slowed down and approached it carefully; he was not a man used to fooling with mice, but you didn’t have to be a forty-year veteran to see something was terribly wrong here.
(“The mouse didn’t feel so good after it went through,” Mark Oates told his children with a wide smile that was only noticeably false to his wife.)
Carune touched the mouse. It was like touching something inert—packed straw or sawdust, perhaps-except for the aspirating sides. The mouse did not look around at Carune; it stared straight ahead. He had thrown in a squirming, very frisky and alive little animal; here was something that seemed to be a living waxwork likeness of a mouse.
Then Carune snapped his fingers in front of the mouse’s small pink eyes. It blinked ... and fell dead on its side.
“So Carune decided to try another mouse,” Mark said.
“What happened to the first mouse?” Ricky asked.
Mark produced that wide smile again. “It was retired with full honors,” he said.
Carune found a paper bag and put the mouse into it. He would take it to Mosconi, the vet, that evening. Mosconi could dissect it and tell him if its inner works had been rearranged. The government would disapprove his bringing a private citizen into a project which would be classified triple top secret as soon as they knew about it. Tough titty, as the kitty was reputed to have said to the babes who complained about the warmth of the milk. Carune was determined that the Great White Father in Washington would know about this as late in the game as possible. For all the scant help the Great White Father had given him, he could wait. Tough titty.