Already Among Us Read online

  Other books by Fred Patten

  Best in Show: Fifteen Years of Outstanding Furry Fiction (2003)

  Reprinted as: Furry!; The World’s Best Anthropomorphic Fiction! (2006)

  Watching Anime, Reading Manga: 25 Years of Essays and Reviews (2004)

  The Ursa Major Awards Anthology; A Tenth Anniversary Celebration (2012)

  Already Among Us

  An Anthropomorphic Anthology

  Edited by Fred Patten

  “The Star Mouse" by Fredric Brown. Copyright © 1942 by Popular Publications, Copyright © 1970, by Fredric Brown. Reprinted by permission of the Estate. First published in Planet Stories, Spring 1942.

  "Number Nine" by Cleve Cartmill. Copyright © 1950 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc. Copyright © 2012 by the heir to the author's estate, Matt Cartmill. First published in Astounding Science Fiction, February 1950.

  "Socrates" by John Christopher. Printed by permission of the author's agent Scovil Galen Ghosh Literary Agency, Inc. First published in Galaxy Science Fiction, March 1951.

  "The Model of a Judge" by William Morrison. Copyright © 1953 by Galaxy Publishing Corp.; copyright expired and not renewed. Reprinted with thanks to the author's estate. First published in Galaxy Science Fiction, October 1953.

  “Yo Ho Hoka!” by Poul Anderson and Gordon R. Dickson. Copyright © 1955 by Fantasy House, Inc. Copyright © 1983 by Gordon R. Dickson and Poul Anderson. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, March 1955. Reprinted by permission of the Estates of Poul Anderson and Gordon R. Dickson.

  "Dr. Birdmouse" by Reginald Bretnor. Used with permission of the Reginald Bretnor Literary Estate, Fred Flaxman, owner. First published in Fantastic Stories of Imagination, April 1962.

  "Dog's Life" by Martha Soukup. Copyright © 1990 by TSR, Inc. First published in Amazing Stories, March 1991.

  "River Man" by Michael H. Payne. Copyright © 1993 by Michael H. Payne. First published in Asimov's Science Fiction, August 1993.

  "Schurman's Trek" by Roland J. Green. Copyright © 1994 by Roland J. Green. First published in Animal Brigade 3000, edited by Martin Harry Greenberg & Charles Waugh (Ace Books, February 1994)

  "McGregor" by Paul Di Filippo. Copyright © 1994 by Paul Di Filippo. First published in Universe 3, edited by Robert Silverberg & Karen Haber (Bantam Spectra, April 1994).

  "Doggy Love" by Scott Bradfield. Copyright © 2003 by Spilogale, Inc. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, August 2003.

  “The Fate of Mice” by Susan Palwick. Copyright © 2005 by Susan Palwick. First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, January 2005.

  “All the Pigs’ Houses” by Mickey Zucker Reichert. First published in Magic Tails, edited by Martin H. Greenberg & Janet Pack (DAW Books, September 2005).

  "Killer Kitty" by Harding Young. Copyright © 2006 by Harding Young. First published in Twisted Cat Tales, edited by Esther Schrader (Coscom Entertainment, February 2006).

  "Introduction" and "About the Authors", and the introductions to the individual stories, by Fred Patten. Copyright © 2012 by Frederick Walter Patten. First published in Already Among Us; An Anthropomorphic Anthology, edited by Fred Patten (Legion Publishing, June 2012).

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reprinted in whole or in part without written consent of the copyright holders. People, places, events, or organizations contained within these works are products of the author(s) imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real.

  ISBN 978-0-9829866-4-6

  First Edition, June 2012

  Cover Art by Roz Gibson

  Dedicated to:

  Sherrill

  My sister

  For years of encouragement; and without whose help this book would not exist.

  Thanks to:

  Christopher Williams of Legion Printing, for agreeing to publish this book, and for his editorial guidance.

  Dr. Jerry E. Pournelle, and Bud Webster of SFWA, for their advice & support, especially in helping to contact the authors or the authors’ estates to get reprint permissions.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Introduction, by Fred Patten

  The Star Mouse, by Fredric Brown

  Number Nine, by Cleve Cartmill

  Socrates, by John Christopher

  The Model of a Judge, by William Morrison

  Yo Ho Hoka!, by Poul Anderson and

  Gordon R. Dickson

  Dr. Birdmouse, by Reginald Bretnor

  Dog's Life, by Martha Soukup

  River Man, by Michael H. Payne

  Schurman's Trek, by Roland J. Green

  McGregor, by Paul Di Filippo

  Doggy Love, by Scott Bradfield

  The Fate of Mice, by Susan Palwick

  All the Pigs’ Houses, by Mickey Zucker

  Reichert

  Killer Kitty, by Harding Young

  About the Authors

  INTRODUCTION

  Are humans alone in the universe? From time immemorial, humans have been the only intelligent life known. The search for other intelligent species goes back to prehistoric times, when men believed that nonhuman peoples – maybe centaurs, maybe bear-men, maybe intelligent dragons – lived just beyond the hills of the most-distant-known human villages. Explorers searched for not only new lands, but also new, non-human peoples. Some 15th and 16th century slavers argued that it was only domesticating wild animals, not enslaving people, to take non-white Africans or native Americans as prisoners; it took a Papal bull, Pope Paul III’s 1537 Sublimus deus, to establish that (at least spiritually) all humans are, well, human.

  Pre-1950 science fiction often featured the intelligent non-humans of Venus or Mars; then, when astronomers revealed during the 1950s that these worlds could not support life, some s-f authors postulated that the humans of Earth were the only intelligent life in the galaxy. The discovery during the last twenty years of extra-solar planets (over 750 so far) has reawakened speculation of intelligent non-humans – somewhere.

  One of the oldest themes in science fiction is how humans would react to other, equal but different peoples. Would they be smarter than us, and try to conquer or exterminate us? H. G. Wells’ 1898 The War of the Worlds. Would they try to live in peace with us, only to be enslaved and exploited by human arrogance? Karel Čapek’s 1936 Válka s mloky (War With the Newts). Would humans accept obvious non-humans as social equals? There are many s-f examples; Edgar Rice Burroughs’ 1917 A Princess of Mars, for an early one, Anne McCaffrey’s 1969 Decision at Doona, for a more recent one.

  But maybe the “others” are already among us! People have tried over the centuries to prove that some animals are equal in intelligence with humans. There have been numerous attempts to teach human languages to dogs, cats, horses, or apes, from scientific to entertainment purposes; or, fictionally, to learn the languages of these animals. See Jon Bondeson’s Amazing Dogs: A Cabinet of Canine Curiosities (Cornell University Press, May 2011) for a recent survey of 18th- through 20th-century attempts to prove that dogs and horses could understand (and, in some cases, speak!) human languages.

  Whether dolphins or whales have languages is still open to question. And, thanks to recent biological advances, if no animals are our natural equals, maybe we can make some. H. G. Wells’ 1896 The Island of Dr. Moreau was never more than an anti-vivisection polemic, but with recent developments in DNA and nanotechnology research, who knows what the next twenty or two hundred years will bring?

  Examples of non-human intelligence already abound. On January 17, 2012, someone in Russia uploaded a video onto YouTube shot at long distance, showing a crow sledding down a snow-covered rooftop on what appears to be a jar lid. The crow clearly flies to the rooftop with the lid in its beak, puts the lid down and s
tands on it, then slides down to the bottom of the roof, flapping its wings to stay upright. It then picks up the lid, flies back to the rooftop, and sleds down again -- twice more, before picking up the lid and flying off. This was not a controlled experiment; the crow is obviously acting spontaneously. Even if, arguably, the crow might have been taught this by humans previously instead of figuring it out on its own, it is clearly playing consciously and for its own entertainment on this occasion.

  Already Among Us presents fourteen stories in which humans are confronted by animals of obvious equal intelligence. Some are “uplifted” by aliens or humans, some are radiation-spawned mutants, some are from other worlds, some are creatures of pure fantasy, and some exist without any explanation – they just are. If you have a pet more advanced than a goldfish or hamster, reading these stories may encourage you to try briefly to communicate with it.

  Fred Patten

  The Star Mouse

  Fredric Brown

  The World War II origin of “The Star Mouse” is clearly evident in the character of Herr Professor Oberburger. In 1942 refugee Austrian and German scientists were a familiar stereotype in American fiction. Professor Oberburger’s thick Teutonic accent was responsible for the naming of Mitkey, thus avoiding any danger of a copyright complaint from the “Dissney” lawyers. Mitkey’s proposal to raise the intelligence of all mice, resettle them in Australia (to be renamed Moustralia), sign a non-aggression pact with humans, and to help the humans to exterminate rats sounds idealistically benevolent. But the Professor (as would the 1942 reader) who is overly familiar with the record of Nazi ideals and practices of Lebensraum, the Master Race, non-aggression pacts, and exterminating undesirables, is understandably uneasy.

  The novelettes “The Star Mouse” and “Arena” (Astounding Science Fiction, June 1944, adapted into the 1964 “Fun and Games” episode of TV’s The Outer Limits, the 1967 Star Trek episode of the same title, and the December 1985 20th Century Fox theatrical feature Enemy Mine starring Dennis Quaid and Lou Gosset, Jr,) share honors as Brown’s most prestigious short fiction. “The Star Mouse” is certainly his most beloved. Aside from being reprinted in over a dozen anthologies and collections including Isaac Asimov Presents the Great Science Fiction Stories, Vol. 4, 1942 (DAW Books, October 1980), it was included in Brown’s first short fiction collection Space On My Hands (Shasta, July 1951) and in The Best of Fredric Brown (Ballantine/del Rey, May 1977), which featured a heroic statue of Mitkey on its cover by H. R. Van Dongen. Fan demand for a sequel forced Brown to write “Mitkey Rides Again” (Planet Stories, November 1950); the two were reprinted together in The Best Short Stories of Fredric Brown (New English Library, September 1982). Just before his death, Brown authorized the use of the text of “The Star Mouse” for the children’s picture book Mitkey Astromouse, with full-page “futuristic” paintings by the Peter Max-influenced German artist Heinz Edelmann, best-known as the surrealistic designer of the Beatles’ animated feature Yellow Submarine (Harlan Quist, January 1971, 30 pages).

  Mitkey, the mouse, wasn't Mitkey then.

  He was just another mouse, who lived behind the floorboards and plaster of the house of the great Herr Professor Oberburger, formerly of Vienna and Heidelberg, then a refugee from the excessive admiration of the more powerful of his fellow-countrymen. The excessive admiration had concerned, not Herr Oberburger himself, but a certain gas which had been a by-product of an unsuccessful rocket fuel—which might have been a highly successful something else.

  If, of course, the Professor had given them the correct formula. Which he–Well, anyway, the Professor had made good his escape and now lived in a house in Connecticut. And so did Mitkey.

  A small gray mouse, and a small gray man. Nothing unusual about either of them. Particularly there was nothing unusual about Mitkey; he had a family and he liked cheese and if there were Rotarians among mice, he would have been a Rotarian.

  The Herr Professor, of course, had his mild eccentricities. A confirmed bachelor, he had no one to talk to except himself, but he considered himself an excellent conversationalist and held constant verbal communion with himself while he worked. That fact, it turned out later, was important, because Mitkey had excellent ears and heard those night-long soliloquies. He didn't understand them, of course. If he thought about them at all, he merely thought of the professor as a large and noisy super-mouse who squeaked overmuch.

  “Und now,” he would say to himself, “ve vill see vether this eggshaust tube vas broberly machined. It should fidt vithin vun vun-hundredth thousandth uf an indtch. Ahh, it is berfect. Und now–”

  Night after night, day after day, month after month. The gleaming thing grew, and the gleam in Herr Oberburger's eyes grew apace.

  It was about three and a half feet long, with weirdly shaped vanes, and it rested on a temporary framework on a table in the center of the room that served the Herr Professor for all purposes. The house in which he and Mitkey lived was a four-room structure, but the Professor hadn't yet found it out, seemingly. Originally, he had planned to use the big room as a laboratory only, but he found it more convenient to sleep on a cot in one corner of it, when he slept at all, and to do the little cooking he did over the same gas burner over which he melted down golden grains of TNT into a dangerous soup which he salted and peppered with strange condiments, but did not eat.

  “Und now I shall bour it into tubes, and see vether vun tube adjacent to another eggsploders der second tube vhen der virst tube iss–”

  That was the night Mitkey almost decided to move himself and his family to a more stable abode, one that did not rock and sway and try to turn handsprings on its foundations. But Mitkey didn't move after all, because there was compensations. New mouseholes all over, and—joy of joy!–a big crack in the back of the refrigerator where the Professor kept, among other things, food.

  Of course the tubes had been not larger than capillary size, or the house would not have remained around the mouseholes. And of course Mitkey could not guess what was coming or understand the Herr Professor's brand of English (nor any other brand of English, for that matter) or he would not have let even a crack of the refrigerator tempt him.

  The Professor was jubilant that morning.

  “Der fuel, it vorks! Der second tube, it did not eggsplode. Und der virst, in seggtions, as I had eggspectedt! Und it is more bowerful; there will be blenty of room for der combartment–”

  Ah, yes, the compartment. That was where Mitkey came in, even though the professor didn't know it yet. In fact, the Professor didn't even know that Mitkey existed.

  “Und now,” he was saying to his favorite listener, “it is but a matter of combining der fuel tubes so they work in obbosite bair. Und then–”

  That was the moment when the Herr Professor's eye first fell on Mitkey. Rather, they fell upon a pair of gray whiskers and a black, shiny little nose protruding from a hole in the baseboard.

  “Vell!” he said, “vot haff ve here! Mitkey Mouse himself! Mitkey, how would you like to go for a ride, negst veek? Ve shall see.”

  That is how it came about that the next time the Professor sent into town for supplies, his order included a mousetrap—not one of the vicious kind that kills but one of the wire-cage kind. And it had not been set, with cheese, for more than ten minutes before Mitkey's sharp little nose had smelled out that cheese and he had followed his nose into captivity.

  Not, however, an unpleasant captivity. Mitkey was an honored guest. The cage reposed now on the table at which the Professor did most of his work, and cheese in indigestion-giving abundance was pushed through the bars, and the Professor didn't talk to himself any more.

  “You see, Mitkey, I vas going to send to der laboratory in Hartford for a vhite mouse, budt vhy should I, mit you here? I am sure you are more sound und healthy und able to vithstand a long chourney than those laboratory mices. No? Ah you viggle your viskers und that means yes, no? Und being used to living in dark holes, you should suffer less than they from glaustrophobia, no?�
��

  And Mitkey grew fat and happy and forgot all about trying to get out of the cage. I fear that he even forgot about the family he had abandoned, but he knew, if he knew anything, that he need not worry about them in the slightest. At least not until and unless the Professor discovered and repaired the hole in the refrigerator. And the Professor's mind was most emphatically not on refrigeration.

  “Und so, Mitkey, ve shall place this vane so—it iss only of assistance in der landing, in an atmosphere. It und these vill bring you down safely und slowly enough that der shock-absorbers in der movable combartment vill keep you from bumping your head too hard, I think.” Of course, Mitkey missed the ominous note to that “I think” qualification because he missed the rest of it. He did not, as has been explained, speak English. Not then.

  But Herr Oberburger talked to him just the same. He showed him a picture. “Did you effer see der Mouse you vas named after, Mitkey? Vhat? No? Loogk, this is dere origional Mitkey Mouse, by Valt Dissney. But I think you are cuter, Mitkey.”

  Probably the Professor was a bit crazy to talk that way to a little gray mouse. In fact, he must have been crazy to make a rocket that worked. For the odd thing was that the Herr Professor was not really an inventor. There was, as he carefully explained to Mitkey, not one single thing about that rocket that was new. The Herr Professor was a technician; he could take other people's ideas and make them work. His only real invention—the rocket fuel that wasn't one—had been turned over to the United States Government and had proved to be something already known and discarded because it was too expensive for practical use.

  As he explained very carefully to Mitkey, “it iss burely a matter of absolute accuracy and mathematical correctness, Mitkey. Idt iss all here—ve merely combine—und ve achieff vhat, Mitkey?