Mission to Horatius

by Mack Reynolds

  When officers and crew climbed from their suits, all over the vessel, they looked sheepishly at each other. It had been a long fight, and they had won, but somehow they weren't proud of the victory. They knew that somewhere, in his remote hiding place, Mickey was dead, but they found little satisfaction in the fact. It was as though a respected adversary had been conquered, and conquered by superior weight of numbers, by trickery, by double-dealing, not by honest warfare.

  A toast was drunk to Mickey's passing in the captain's quarters, and similar ones through the junior officers', noncommissioned officers', and enlisted men's messes. All listened respectfully when Lieutenant Uhura sang over the intercom the last stanza of "The Saga of Mickey the Space Rat"

  Which should be the end of the story of Mickey- but isn't.

  With the passing of Operation Mickey, the ship drifted back into its routine and, in a week's time, except for the occasional nostalgic conversations about Mickey, the little rodent was forgotten. Lethargy was again the word, and the monotony of space travel once again flung its drab coat over the Enterprise.

  Between watches Captain James Kirk drifted one day into the sick bay. His eyes went about the three-room complex, noting unhappily that all the beds in the sick bay proper were occupied.

  Dr. McCoy straightened up from the electronic microscope over which he had been bent.

  Kirk motioned with his head at the men in the beds. "Stasis again?"

  The doctor nodded wordlessly.

  "As many as before?"

  "There soon will be."

  Kirk said, "We're only a month out. You'd think that the prospect of the mission finally being over would hold them."

  "It's been too long, Jim. Much too long."

  "You think we'll make it?"

  "I don't know. One bad case to start it rolling and we'll have had it, Jim."

  There was a roar from the corridor beyond. Both Kirk and the doctor spun, eyes wide in dismay. Was this the all-out case of cafard they had been dreading?

  "What's that?" the captain rasped, heading for the door.

  The shouting continued, and now they could begin to make out the words.

  "Mickey! Mickey!"

  At the door Kirk exclaimed, "They've gone off their rockers!"

  The doctor was immediately behind him.

  Yeoman Janice Rand came hurrying up, her face flushed with excitement "Captain! It's Mickey. They saw Mickey again, down in the ship's chapel. He's alive! Mickey's still alive!"

  "Don't be ridiculous!"

  But she was gone, darting down the corridor toward the sounds of excitement

  The captain looked at Dr. McCoy, his mouth slightly open.

  "But he couldn't be alive."

  It was all-out warfare now. Before, the campaign against Mickey had been pursued coldly, carefully, and without passion. The rat had been a potential danger, a threat to the whole ship, and was to be destroyed ruthlessly. Even so, there had been considerable sympathy for the little rodent

  Now it was different. An emotional crisis seemed to seize upon every man and woman aboard. The time and interest of everyone, from ship's officers to messmen, were devoted to the finding and destruction of Mickey. Groups, pairs, and solitary hunters roamed the ship at all hours, haggard and red-eyed, but armed to the teeth and seeking the elusive diseased rat.

  The situation was a deadly serious one now. They were nearing their destination and they needed desperately to land, to escape the confinement of the starship. They needed to see their families, their wives, their sweethearts. They longed to see blue sky above them, to sprawl on beaches, swim in the sea, hike the countryside, ride, climb, run free of all limitations on space. The very thought of being confined indefinitely under quarantine against bubonic plague drove them to frenzy.

  Mickey was flushed thrice in the first week. He escaped desperately each time, the roars of the hunters behind him.

  In the second week of the wild hunt for him he was knocked down by half a dozen phasers on stun effect when he ventured into an ambush in storage compartment eight. He was quickly rushed to the ship's waste matter converter. The men who had approached and handled him were rushed to the sick bay for immediate decontamination.

  Somehow it didn't seem real. It didn't seem possible that Mickey could be dead. Like the lives of his legendary foe, the cat, Mickey the Rat's lives had seemed all but endless.

  That night Lieutenant Uhura was compelled by celebrating shipmates to write a final stanza to her saga, but when she took up her guitar to sing it, one of the two strings remaining went ping.

  She made a woeful face in disgust

  "One string left," she said. "Well...." She stood up, folded her arms, and began doing a takeoff on the shuffling walk of a Chinese woman playing a single-stringed instrument

  Lieutenant Chang, laughing, said, "This is too much. We've got to get back now, if only to buy new strings for Uhura's guitar."

  AFTERMATH

  They were within hours of star base touchdown.

  Captain James Kirk sauntered along the ship's corridors, his face thoughtful. He reached the quarters of his first officer and knocked. When Spock's voice answered, he pushed his way in, still meditative.

  Dr. McCoy was seated there. Obviously he and Spock had been in deep conversation.

  The Vulcan came to his feet. "Ah, Captain. Are we soon to go into orbit?"

  "A couple of hours or so, Mr. Spock." The captain looked at Dr. McCoy. "I figured out where Mickey was hiding," he said.

  Mr. Spock's eyebrows went up. But Dr. McCoy said, "Oh? I thought you might. How?"

  "Several little items that didn't quite jibe. For instance, supposedly plague has been unknown on Federation worlds for centuries, but it was on a Federation planet that Sulu acquired Mickey. Then, too, if the animal had the disease, how did he live aboard for so many months? Why didn't he die of it? And the way Mickey kept turning up just at the crucial time, when you needed something to get the crew's minds off their frustrations."

  Kirk turned his eyes to Spock. "It never occurred to me to doubt your word when you said there was nothing in the ship's library computer banks on the cure for bubonic plague. Of course there was. Those banks contain all the information compiled by man down through the ages, including how to cure diseases now forgotten. But, of course, if Bones was to pull off his scheme and keep the crew's mind off cafard, he had to have your cooperation."

  Spock said mildly, "A very interesting predicament, this danger of space cafard. I was happy to work with the doctor."

  Kirk looked back at Dr. McCoy. "Where did you have him hidden? In the sick bay?"

  "Most of the time." The doctor nodded. "When the ship was being gassed, I had him in an oxygen tent. While Sulu was searching the sick bay compartments, I had him tucked inside my tunic."

  "You must have had a bit of trouble teaching him how to dance."

  "A bit. Something to occupy my off-hours." McCoy twisted his face wryly. "Even a doctor is subject to cafard if he gets bored enough."

  Captain James Kirk looked at the two of them wryly. "I suppose I should have something to say about discipline, and about a starship captain being hoodwinked by his first officer and ship's surgeon. However, I can't think of anything." He turned to go.

  Dr. McCoy said, "One thing, Captain."

  Kirk half-turned. "Yes?"

  "Jim, please don't allow us to get into this spot again. I don't know how I'd ever keep cafard from hitting the ship next time."