The Star Mouse By FREDRIC BROWN Robinson Crusoe ... Gulliver ... Paul Bunyan; the story of their adventures is nothing compared to the Saga of Mitkey. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] 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 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 over-much. "Und now," he would say to himself, "ve vill see vether this eggshaust tube vas broperly machined. It should fidt vithin vun vun-hundredth thousandth uf an indtch. Ahhh, it iss 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.