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Four-Legged Hotfoot

Fantastic Story – Winter 1952

(1952)*

Mack Reynolds

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Arthur was a pal (r-a-t) to the human race!

 

-

 

              LIEUTENANT JOHNNY NORSEN threw down his cards in disgust. "That does it," he snapped, his angular face peevish. "From now on canasta is out as far as I'm concerned. Dick here sits next to me and draws six wild cards to my one. What good is a game that's nine-tenths luck?"

 

              Dick Roland tossed his own cards to the tiny wardroom table and stifled a yawn. "It's pretty early in the cruise to begin swearing off games, Johnny."

 

              Ensign Mart Bakr said listlessly, "Well, we might as well give up canasta. The skipper has already sworn off playing it, and Doc Thorndon wouldn't start in the first place. How about going back to poker?"

 

              Johnny Norsen grunted, "Poker's no good without stakes, and the regulations are strict against gambling in space."

 

              "Craziest regulation in the books," Bakr snorted. "Hand me the game book off that shelf, Dick. Maybe we can find something new."

 

              Dick Roland reached up above him and secured the copy of "1000 and 1 Popular Games Down Through the Ages" and tossed it to the spacruiser's third officer.

 

              Bakr thumbed through it lackadaisically. "Pingpong," he said. "What's pingpong?"

 

              Johnny Norsen said, "That's the one where you've got to have a table to bat a little ball back and forth. We don't have the room."

 

              "Oh, yeah," Bakr mumbled. "Let's see, somebody marked gin rummy here. When did we play that?"

 

              "Cruiser before last. Got fed up with it; irritated the skipper so bad he nearly came down with cafard."

 

              "Ummmmm. High-Low-Jack-and the Game."

 

              "That's another one where if you don't have stakes it's not interesting."

 

              Mart Bakr kept thumbing through the pages. "They've got some of the damnedest games here. Ever hear of hotfoot?"

 

              Nobody was interested enough to reply but he went on. "They played it back during the middle of the Twentieth. The guy who's playing finds somebody who's asleep or in some other manner unaware of what's going on. He puts a match in the side of the unsuspecting one's shoe and—"

 

              "What's a match?" Norsen asked disinterestedly.

 

              "An early form of cigarette lighter," Dick Roland told him. "They had a chemical preparation on the end of a small piece of wood. You rubbed the head against some hard object and it broke into flame."

 

              The first officer snorted. "Sounds awfully complicated. How many times would one work before it was used up?"

 

              "I don't know."

 

              "Listen to this," Mart Bakr commanded. "This is what they considered a game back in the Twentieth. The player puts the match in the other's shoe and sets fire to it. When it burns down to the foot, the victim jumps up howling and trying to get his shoe off to ease the pain. It says here: 'This afforded considerable amusement to all spectators.'"

 

              "Who in kert compiled that book?" Johnny Norsen asked. "Next thing they'll have a description of the Chinese Water Torture as a game."

 

              Dick Roland got to his feet and stretched hugely. "The author was really reaching when he included that one," he said. "Anyway, I'm tired. I think I'll go in and chew the rag with Doc Thorndon awhile."

 

              Mart Bakr tossed the book to the table. "Yeah, I'm on watch in half an hour anyway. Maybe I'll kill that much time reading."

 

              Johnny Norsen complained bitterly. "Reading what? We've all read everything on the New Taos three times over."

 

              Dick Roland grinned back at them over his shoulder as he worked his way through the tightly packed chairs in the wardroom and made his way to the door. "Why don't you go up to the skipper's quarters and give Mike Gurloff a hotfoot? That'd wake things up around here."

 

-

 

              DOC THORNDON was lying on the bottom bunk in the ship's hospital. The room was about the size of a bedroom of a Pullman of the Twentieth Century. It had two bunks, a tiny folding table, a medicine chest built into the titanium alloy wall, a lavatory. The hospital also doubled as the doctor's quarters; if he had two patients at once, he had to leave his place and bunk with the third officer—but that was seldom.

 

              He looked up from his book as the navigation officer entered. "Hello, Dick," he said easily. "Draw up a pillow and lie down." The doctor was a little, cheerful, roly-poly man, his cheeks still pink but his hair thinning and graying. He looked about forty-five—old for the Space Service.

 

              Dick Roland hoisted himself into the top bunk, sprawled on his back and tucked his hands under his head and stared up at the ceiling.

 

              "Game over?" the doctor asked casually.

 

              "Uh huh."

 

              "Who won?"

 

              "I don't know. Forgot."

 

              The doctor went back to his book but there was a trace of frown on his good-natured face.

 

              After some minutes of silence, Dick Roland said, "You know, Doc, we're the two most worthless members of this crew."

 

              Thorndon tucked a finger in the book to mark his place and considered that. "Oh, I don't know," he said. "Nobody does much on a spacruiser; not the way they did in the days of surface vessels back on Earth. You take the cook. Once they were mighty important—good cooks—but now what do they do? Ninety-nine per cent of their work is automatic. And take the signalmen. We have two aboard; but here we are on a patrol that will last a year, and there's hardly a possibility that we'll use any of our various methods of signaling until we get back to the solar system and the trip's practically over. The same thing applies to everyone else. Even Commander Gurloff hasn't enough to keep him busy an average of more than a half hour a day. Everything's automatic—everything."

 

              "Uhhhhh," Dick Roland said, "but if and when we need them we need them bad, any of them. Suppose something went wrong with the automatic chef? The cook would have to take over."

 

              Doc Thorndon shuddered.

 

              "No, seriously, Doc. You and I are the least necessary members of the crew. As long as I've been on the New Taos I've only had to do any navigating once, and—nothing personal, of course—actually, what in the world good is a ship's doctor any more? What do you do except maybe give one of the men a peni-aspirin shot ever so often to keep him from having headaches for the next six months?"

 

              "Each one of us has a use," the doctor protested, "and when we're needed, we're needed bad. Take, for instance the time the Kadauto-pilot was knocked out in that fight with the Kraden cruiser and you had to figure out a course back to the solar system."

 

              "Yeah," Dick Roland snorted, "once in fifty years something like that might happen. What is it you do once every fifty years, Doc?"

 

              Doc Thorndon scratched the end of his nose reflectively. "Oh, I don't know. It's pretty important to keep space cafard from hitting a ship, and the way boredom's growing, it looks as though it might become a problem. We should never have been ordered out on this patrol so soon after the last. The men didn't have time to rest."

 

              It was Dick Roland's time to shudder.

 

-

 

              AN ENLISTED man stuck his head in the door. "Doc," he asked, "you haven't seen the skipper around have you?"

 

              "Not for more than an hour. Isn't he on the bridge?"

 

              "No, sir. You didn't see him, did you Lieutenant?"

 

              Dick Roland shook his head. "Not recently, what did you want him for, Spillane?"

 

              "Wanted to report a funny looking animal aboard, Lieutenant. Saw him up forward a little while ago."

 

              Both the doctor and the navigator came to their elbows. "A what?" Thorndon asked.

 

              The messman demonstrated. "A little brown animal, about this long and maybe this high, Doc. Half a dozen of us spotted him up in the crew's galley. Nobody'd ever seen one before, not even in a zoo."

 

              Dick Roland swung around in the bunk and let his knees hang over the side. "What'd it look like, Spillane? Earth-type, Martian, Venusian—"

 

              "It looked like an Earth animal, sir. Four legs, a head, eyes, nose, mouth. Yeah, it was an Earth-type all right. Kind of blinked at us when it saw us watching, and scampered off real quick."

 

              Doctor Thorndon was scowling. He came to his feet. "Come along with me, Spillane. We'll see if we can locate it in the encyclopedia." He started for the corridor.

 

              "Hey, wait for me, Doc," Roland called. "Imagine an animal being on board!"

 

              On the way they passed a burly non-com gunner who was listlessly touching up a spotless space-rifle. "Hey, mess-man," he called, "what's this about some of you guys in the galley seeing an animal?"

 

              "That's right," Spillane said, proud of the attention he was drawing, "we're going to check up on it now."

 

              The noncom chuckled. "Animals he's seeing. Brother, let me tell you, you're coming down with the cafard, but bad."

 

              Spillane looked anxiously at the doctor after they'd passed out of earshot of the gunner. "You don't think that's it, do you, Doc?"

 

              Thorndon shook his head kindly. "Not if several of you saw it. "Don't let it worry you. Hallucinations don't appear in space cafard until the final stages. You haven't shown the early symptoms as yet."

 

              They made their way into the wardroom, Spillane remaining near the door, uncomfortable at being in officers' country.

 

-

 

              JOHNNY NORSEN looked up from the chess problem he was trying halfheartedly to solve. "What's up?" he asked, little interest in his voice.

 

              Dick Roland motioned with his head at the enlisted man. "Spillane, here, and two or three others claim to have seen some small animal in the ship's galley."

 

              "No kidding?"

 

              "I'll be a makron," Mart Bakr put in. "What kind of animal?"

 

              Doctor Thorndon had taken one volume from a long shelf that held similar ones. "None of them could identify it," he said, thumbing through the pages. "Ah, here." He took the book over to Spillane.

 

              "Is this what you saw?" He indicated an illustration.

 

              "Yeah, yeah," Spillane said happily. "That's it. What is it, Doc?"

 

              Doctor Thorndon rubbed his nose with a forefinger and scowled. "It's a rat," he said. "You can go now, Spillane. Uh ... just a moment. Tell the crew that I offer fifty credits reward for anyone who'll bring it to me alive."

 

              "Fifty credits?" The messman was impressed. He scurried out of the room breathlessly.

 

              "A rat?" Johnny Norsen muttered. "What in the world's a rat and what would it be doing on a ship?"

 

              "Here it is," the doctor said. He read: " 'Rat. Original habitat Earth. A large rodent belonging to the genus Mus. Commonly brown or black, sometimes with a grayish tinge, they vary in length from about seven to ten inches. Very prolific mammals, they produce from twenty to fifty young a year'—well, that isn't important in this case, unless they're two or more of them. Let's see—'Supposedly originating in China, they spread through Europe in the Middle Ages and still later to America by way of ship. Highly destructive of grains, foods, and soiled clothing, they are occasionally vicious enough to attack human beings. Their greatest menace is as disease carriers, the bubonic plague of the tropics being spread by them.'

 

              "Well, that was in the old days," Thorndon mused. "Let's see, here we are: 'Now extinct except for a few laboratory specimens, on Earth, a small number still exists in the wild state on Venus where it is believed they were taken inadvertently in the early space freighters.' "

 

              "Hey, that's probably where we picked it up," Mart Bakr said. "Just before we took off from there."

 

              "This is interesting, Doc," Johnny Norsen said, "but why'd you tell Spillane you'd give fifty credits for him?"

 

              Doc Thorndon closed his book and looked up at the first officer. "He's worth it," he said. "The things are priceless back on Earth. In the early Twenty-second Century, in their zeal for exterminating the pest, people practically eliminated the species, which was unfortunate in a way because they're invaluable as laboratory animals. They're exceedingly like man, you know."

 

              "Are you kidding?" Norsen asked. "What's like a man," a new voice growled.

 

              They looked up at the entrance of burly Commander Mike Gurloff. "And what's this I hear about a rat being on the ship, and what's a rat anyway?"

 

              Doc Thorndon went over the matter briefly for the skipper.

 

              "I'll lay you two to one, we picked him up on Venus, all right," Gurloff growled. "Doesn't make any difference, give the men something to do. What was this about it being like a man? I thought you said it was only ten inches long."

...