The Rat and the Snake - A. E. Van Vogt, ebook, CALIBRE SFF 1970s, Temp 2
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1. The Rat and the Snake
2. Ersatz Eternal
3. The Cataaaa
4. Resurrection
5. The Barbarian
A.E. Van Vogt
THE RAT AND THE SNAKE
Mark Gray's main pleasure in life was feeding rats to his pet python.
He kept the python in a blocked-off room in the old house in which he
lived alone. Each mealtime, he would put the rat in a narrow tunnel he had
rigged, At the end of the tunel was an opening. The rat, going thiough the
narrow space into the bright room beyond, automatically spring-locked a
gate across the opening.
It would then find itself in the room with the python, with no way of
escape.
Mark liked to listen to its squeaks as it became aware of its danger,
and then he would hear its mad scurring to escape the irresistible enemy.
Sometimes he watched the exciting scene thiough a plate-glass window, but
he actually preferred the sound to the fight, conjuring his own delectable
mental pictues, always from the viewpoint of the python.
During World War Ill, the O.P.A. forgot to put a ceiling price on
rats. The catching of rats got no special priority. Rat catchers were
drafted into the armed forces as readily as the other people. The supply
of rats grew less. Mark was soon reduced to catching his own rats; but he
had to work for a living in the ever-leaner times of war, so that there
were periods of time when the python was fed infrequently.
Then one day Mark, ever searching, glimpsed some white rats through a
window of an old commercial-style building.
He peered in eagerly, and though the room was dimly lighted with
wartime regulation bulbs, he was able to make out that it was a large room
with hnndreds of cages in it and that each of the cages contained rais.
He made it to the front of the building at a dead run. In pausing to
catch his breath, he noticed the words on the doors CARRON LABORATORIES,
Research.
He found himself presently in a dim hallway of a business office.
Because everybody was clearly working twice as hard because of the war, it
took a little while to attract the attention of one of the women
employees; and there were other delays such as just sitting and waiting
while it seemed as if he was the forgotten man. But after all those
minutes he was finally led into the office of a small, tight-faced man,
who was introduced as Erie Plode and who listened to his request and the
reason for it.
When Mark described his poor, starvng python, the small man laughed a
sudden, explosive laughter, But his eyes remained cold. Moments later he
curtly rejected the request.
Whereupon he made a personal thing out of it. "And don't get any
ideas," he snarled. "Stay away from our rats. If we catch you filching
around here, we'll have the law on you."
Until those words were spoken, Mark hadn't really thought about
becoming a rat-stealing criminal. Except for his peculiar love for his
python, he was a law-abiding, tax-paying nobody.
 As Mark was leaving, Plode hastily sent a man to follow him. Then,
smiling grimly, he walked into an office that had printed on the door:
HENRY GARRON, Private.
"Well, Hank," he said gaily. "I think we've got our subject."
Carron said, "This had better be good since we can't even get
prisoners of war assigned us for the job."
The remark made Plode frown a little. He had a tendency toward ironic
thoughts, and he had often thought recently, "Good God they're going to
use the process on millions of the unsuspecting enemy after we get it
tested, but they won't give us a G.D. so-and-so to try it out on because
of some kind of prisoner of war convention."
Aloud, he said smugly, "I suppose by a stretch of the imagination you
could call him human.'
"That bad?"
Plode described Mark and his hobby, finished, "I suppose it'a a
matter of point of view, But I won't feel any guilt, particularly if he
sneaks over tonight and with criminal intent tries to steal some of our
rats." He grinned mirthlessly, "Can you think of anything lower than a rat
stealer?"
Henry Carron hesitated but only for moments. Millons of people were
dead and dying, and a test absolutely had to be made on a human being.
Because if something went wrong on the battlefield, the effect of surprise
might be lost with who knew what repercussions.
"One thing sure," he nodded "there'll be no evidence against us. So
go ahead."
It seemed to Mark, as he came stealthily back that night, that these
people with their thousands of rats would never miss the equivalent of one
rat a week or so, He was especially pleased when he discovered that the
window was unlocked and that the menagerie was unguarded. No doubt, he
thought good-humoredly, babysitters for rats were in scarce supply because
of the wartime worker shortage.
The next day he thrilled again to the familiar sound of a rat
squeaking in fear of the python. Toward evening his phone rang. It was
Erie Plode.
"I warned you," said the small man in a vicious tone. "Now you must
pay the penalty."
Plode felt better for having issued the warning. "Be it on his own
soul," he said sanctimoniously, "if he's there."
Mark hung up, contemptuous. Let them try to prove anything.
In his sleep that night he seemed to be suffocating. He woke up, and
he was not lying on his bed but instead was on a hard floor. He groped for
the light switch but could not find it. Them was a bright rectangle of
light about twenty feet away. He headed for it.
Crash! A gate slammed shut behind him as he emerged.
He was in a vast room, larger than anything he had ever seen. Yet it
was vaguely familiar. Except for its size it resembled the room in which
he kept his python.
On the floor in front of him, an object that he had noticed and
regarded as some sort of a leathery rug, thicker than he was tall, stirred
and moved toward him.
Realization came suddenly, horrendously.
He was the size of a rat. This was the python slithering across the
floor with distended jaws.
Mad squealing as Mark Gray experienced the ultimate thrill of the
strange method by which he had enjoyed life for so many years ...
Experienced it this one and only time from the viewpoint of the rat.
 A.E. Van Vogt
ERSATZ ETERNAL
Grayson removed the irons from the other's wrists and legs. "Hart!"
he said sharply.
The young man on the cot did not stir. Grayson hesitated and then
deliberately kicked the man. "Damn you, Hart, listen to me! I'm releasing
you - just in case I don't come back "
John Hart neither opened his eyes nor showed any awareness of the
blow he had received. He lay inert; and the only evidence of life in him
was that he was limp, not rigid. There was almost no color in his cheeks.
His black hair was damp and stringy.
Grayson said earnestly, "Hart, I'm going out to look for Malkins.
Remember, he left four days ago, intending only to be gone twenty-four
hours."
When there was no response, the older man started to turn away, but
he hesitated and said, "Hart, if I don't come back, you must realize where
we are, This is a new planet, understand. We've never been here before.
Our ship was wrecked, and the three of us came down in a lifeboat, and
what we need is fuel. That's what Malkins went out to look for, and now
I'm going out to look for Malkins."
The figure on the cot remained blank. And Grayson walked reluctantly
out the door and off toward the hills. He had no particular hope.
Three men were down on a planet God-only-knew-where - and one ofthose
man was violently insane.
As he walked along, he glanced around him in occasional puzzlement.
The scenery was very earthlike: trees, shrubs, grass, and distant
mountains misted by blue haze. It was still a littie odd that when they
had landed Malkins and he had had the distinct impression that they were
coming down onto a barren world without atmosphere and without life.
A soft breeze touched his cheeks. The scent of flowers was in the
air. He saw birds flitting among the trees, and once he heard a song that
was startingly like that of a meadow lark.
He walked all day and saw no sign of Malkins. Nor was there any
habitation to indicate that the planet had intelligent life. Just before
dusk he heard a woman calling his name.
Grayson turned with a start, and it was his mother, looking much
younger than he remembered her in her coffin eight years before. She came
up, and she said severely, "'Billie, don't forget your rubbers."
Grayson stared at her with eyes that kept twisting away in disbelief.
Then, deliberately, he walked over and touched her. She caught his hand,
and her fingers were warm and lifelike.
She said, "I want you to go tell your father that dinner is ready."
Grayson released himself and stepped back and looked tensely around
him. The two of them stood on an empty, grassy plain. Far in the distance
was the gleam of a silvershining river.
He turned away from her and strode on into the twilight. When he
looked back, there was no one in sight. But presently a boy was moving in
step beside him. Grayson paid no attention at first, but presently he
stole a glance at his companion.
It was himself at the age of fifteen.
Just before the gathering night blotted out any chance of
recognition, he saw that a second boy was now striding along beside the
 first. Himself, aged about eleven.
Three Bill Graysons, thought Grayson. He began to laugh wildly.
Then he began to run. When he looked back, he was alone. Sobbing
under his breath, he slowed to a walk, and almost immediately heard the
laughter of children in the soft darkness. Familiar sounds, yet the impact
of them was stunning.
Grayson babbled at them, "All me, at different ages. Get away! I know
you're only hallucinations."
When he had worn himself out, when there was nothing left to his
voice but a harsh whisper, he thought, Only hallucinations? Am I sure?
He felt unutterably depressed and exhausted. "Hart and me," he said
aloud wearily, " we belong in the same asylum."
Dawn came, cool; and his hope was that sunrise would bring an end to
the madness of the night. As the slow light lengthened over the land,
Grayson looked around him in bewilderment. He was on a hill, and below him
spread his home town of Calypso, Ohio.
He stared down at it with unbelieving eyes, and then, because it
looked as real as life, he started to run toward it.
It was Calypso, but as it had been when he was a boy. He headed for
his own house. And there he was; he'd know that boy of ten anywhere. He
called out to the youngster, who took one look at him, turned away, and
ran into the house.
Grayson lay down on the lawn, and covered his eyes. "Someone," he
told himself "something is taking pictures out of my mind and making me
see them."
It seemed to him that if he hoped to remain sane - and alive - he'd
have to hold that thought.
It was the sixth day after Grayson's departure. Aboard the lifeboat,
John Hart stirred and opened his eyes. "Hungry," he said aloud to no one
in particular. He waited he knew not for what and than wearily sat up,
slipped off the cot, and made his way to the galley. When he had eaten, he
walked to the lock-door, and stood for a long time staring out over the
earthlike scene that spread before him. It made him feel better, vaguely.
He jumped abruptly down to the ground and began to walk toward the
nearest hilltop. Darkness was falling rapidly but it did not occur to him
to turn back.
Soon the ship was lost in the night behind him.
A girlfriend of his youth was the first to talk to him. She came out
of the blackness. and they had a long conversation. In the end they
decided to marry
The ceremony was immediately completed by a minister who drove up in
a car and found both families assembled in a beautiful home in the suburbs
of Pittsburgh. The clergyman was an old man whom Hart had known in his
childhood.
The young couple went to New York City and to Niagara Falls for their
honeymoon, then headed by aere-taxi for California to make their home.
Suddenly there were three children, and they owned a hundred-thousand-acre
ranch with a million cattle on it, and there were cowboys who dressed like
movie stars,
For Grayson, the civilization that sprang into full-grown existence
around him on what had originally been a barren, airless planet had
nightmarish qualities. The people he met had a life expectancy of less
than seventy years. Children were born in nine months and ten days after
conception.
He buried six generations of one family that he had founded. And
then, one day as he was crossing Broadway - in New York City - the small
sturdiness, the walk, and the manner of a man coming from the opposite
direction made him stop short.
"Henry!" he shouted. "Henry Malkins!"
"Well, I'll be - Bill Grayson."
They shook hands, silent afler the first excited greeting. Malkins
spoke first. "There's a bar around the corner."
During the middle of the second drink John Hart's name came up.
 "A life force seeking form used his mind' said Grayson
matter-of-factly. "It apparently has no expression of its own. It tried to
use me -" He glanced at Malkins questioningly.
The other man nodded. "And me!" he said,
"I guess we resisted too hard."
Malkins wiped the perspiration from his forehead. "Bill," he said,
"it's all like a dream. I get married and divorced every forty years. I
marry what seems to be a twenty-year-old girl. In a few decades she looks
five hundred."
"Do you think it's all in our minds?"
"No no-nothing like that. I think all this civilization extsts -
whatever I mean by existence." Malkins groaned. "Let's not get into that.
When I read some of the philosophy explaining life, I feel as if I'm on
the edge of an abyss. If only we could get rid of Hart, somehow."
Grayson was smiling grimly. "So you haven't found out yet?"
"What do you mean?"
"Have you got a weapon on you?"
Silently, Malkius produced a needle-beam projector. Grayson took it,
pointed it at his own right temple, and pressad the curved firing pin - as
Malkins grabbed at him frantically but too late.
The thin, white beam seemed to penetrate Grayson's heed. It burned a
round, black, smoldering hole in the woodwork beyond. Coolly, the unhurt
Grayson pointed the triangular muzzle athis companion.
"Like me to try it on you?" he asked jovially.
The older man shuddered and grabbed at the weapon. "Give me that!" he
said.
He calmed presently and asked, "I've noticed that I'm no older. Bill,
what are we going to do?"
"I think we're being held in reserve," said Grayson.
He stood up and held out his hand. "Well, Henry, it's been good
seeing you. Suppose we meet here every year from now on and compare notes."
"But -"
Grayson smiled a little tautly. "Brace up, my friend. Don't you see?
This is the biggest thing in the universe. We're going to live forever.
We're possible substitutes if anything goes wrong."
"But what is it? What's doing it?"
"Ask me a million years from now. Maybe I'll have an answer."
He turned and walked out of the bar. He did not look back.
THE CATAAAA
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THE CATAAAA
By A. E. Van Vogt
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THE CATAAAA
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2
THE CATAAAA
by A. E. Van Vogt
A Little Classic By One Of The Most Brilliant Science-Fiction Writers of Our Day.
Several years ago this startling story appeared in a Los Angeles publication, FANTASY BOOK,
and it immediately created o furor among the local stf faithful. With the resumption of
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