Zion's Fiction: A Treasury of Israeli Speculative Literature

The Stern-Gerlach Mice ^{Mordechai Sasson}

I kept on falling even though I had regained consciousness, falling way, way down. I screamed like crazy and opened my eyes to find myself in a hospital bed. But the sensation of falling persisted. Worse than that, I could hear thoughts. Hear, not read—I perceived people’s thoughts through my sense of hearing. For half a day I kept pleading with doctors and visitors to stop the yammering inside their heads. People sitting beside me kept emitting an incessant, enervating babble of noises. I had to shout when I wanted to talk to them; otherwise I couldn’t hear myself. To make things worse still, my visitors shouted back at me, assuming that I was suffering from a loss of hearing.

I finally realized that this mind-hearing thing had a lot to do with distance—inverse-square, or some other exponent. The further the persons who did the thinking were from me, the quieter their thoughts became. My pleadings finally made people sit as far away from me as possible, and then we really had to shout at each other. So all this talk about reading minds and broadcasting thoughts is bullshit. Old wives’ tales.

Old wives? What about my Nana? Yes, they assured me. She’s alright.

The police officer who came to question me asked if I had been injured by the mice. I told him that a sophisticated mouse-made weapon had been used against me. The policeman wanted to know how I could tell it was mouse-made. I said that the weapon was totally mousy, was designed to be operated by a mouse. The disgusting rodent had used its tongue to manipulate it.

“Lucky for you, the Tin Beggar saved you,” said the policeman.

The officer’s thundering thoughts told me how upset he was. First there was all this imbecilic biogenesis thing in the Judean Desert, with an outbreak of evolution so wild it ought to be called a revolution; then there was this American lady who came from outer space down to Jerusalem, after the Thirteenth Shock that had left her lethally disturbed. And now the mice were making their appearance on the troubled and troublesome stage of homeland security.

I could hear how disgusted he was with the forthcoming war. He didn’t think it’s such a glorious deal, fighting mice. His thinking became too noisy, and I had to shout at him to stop it, just stop thinking and let his mind rest, let me rest as well.

The sensation of falling lasted the whole day, even though I was awake, and because of this I was afraid even to move a finger. I lay stretched out like a wounded rubber sheet, pale as death itself, nausea churning inside me. My tongue lolling, I held tight both bedsides so as not to tumble in my nonexistent plummet.

It took the entire day before I calmed down, ceased feeling that I was falling, and stopped hearing thoughts. The side effects of my injury slowly ebbed away. Now I could turn my mind to the war.

The mice had taken over Nana’s street. Preserved in its old style as a Jerusalem heritage site, this street bordered on the religious neighborhoods. I didn’t think it was such a big deal, taking over that street. It had been taken over by roaches a long, long time ago. And the mice held it for just a short while. The Tin Beggar, willing to sacrifice its metallic soul, bravely defended all those unconscious people and, specifically, saved me. The Tin Beggar also evacuated people from the street, for which it won an official citation from City Hall. Lucky beggar!

Then came the police, and later on the military. The military overcame the resistance offered by the mice and drove them away, devastating half the buildings in the street as collateral damage. The way I heard it, not a single house remained entirely intact. The Stern-Gerlach mice suffered seven casualties during the military’s assault, that’s all (I myself killed more than that), because of this ability of theirs to shift to microscopic size and evade direct hits. The military, on the other hand, filled a whole hospital ward with soldiers who kept begging those around them, as I did, to think quietly.

The Stern-Gerlach mice!

How did we get ourselves in such a mess?

All thanks are due to science’s indefatigable efforts to uncover The Truth. Some smartass biophysicist had tried to measure the Stern-Gerlach effect produced by an electron beam (beta radiation) passing through living tissue. Except that the beta radiation was immediately absorbed by the tissue. So what did our clever fellow do? He drilled a hole in a cat’s skull, attached an array of powerful magnets to the sides of its head, and beta-radiated directly into the cat’s brain. The electrons were absorbed, of course, but an electromagnetic wave kept propagating as a pulse from the point of impact. Passing between the magnets, the pulse split, then split again when it passed between the next pair of magnets, and so on.

The biophysicist rubbed his hands in pleasure when the cat lost consciousness in a series of bizarre convulsions. The cat remained unconscious and slowly perished because its immune system could no longer recognize it and started attacking it.

Various animals were then beta-radiated directly into their brains, all of them responding with various ways of expiring, stranger and stranger yet. The form death took depended on the brain area radiated, and the length of time it took them to die proved to be species-dependent. And so, in this relentless pursuit of The Truth, the lab turned into an enormous slaughterhouse. All this bloody spectacle just to show that something happens when an exposed area of the brain is beta-radiated inside a magnetic field. Cleverness will get you anywhere!

The experiment would have been halted in short order were it not for this curious fact: mice that were beta-radiated into the right temporal lobes of their cortices insisted on staying alive. Furthermore, lo and behold, the electric activity in their brains was enhanced. These mice became smarter than their control group counterparts. They learned faster which were the right buttons to push. Their ability to find the relationships between cause and effect across a time interval improved—meaning, their time perception became more extended. They turned out to be the uncontested champions in running through mazes in search of bits of cheese.

This was all the biophysicist could discover. He wanted to try it on humans but was immediately told to shut up. However, one group of irradiated mice escaped the lab, multiplied, as mice do, and became Jerusalem’s scourge. The media gave them their name: the Stern-Gerlach mice. It was nearly impossible to get rid of them. You try to trap or poison a smart mouse with a good memory. In addition, the mice started massacring the cat population, making the alley cat the first urban animal officially designated a protected species.

Despite all this, the Stern-Gerlach mice had never built tools, never shifted their size… until they took over Nana’s street.

Three days after I had been injured, having recovered from all those side effects, I was released from hospital and immediately went to see Nana. Because this was how it all began….

It all began when I came to see Nana at lunchtime the day before Tish’a b’Av, kicking crumbling pieces of pavement as I went along. A stubborn growth of Bermuda grass burst through the tough surface. I reached the heavily shaded corner, under Hasson’s pear tree, that led into the alley. The sun made me sweat profusely, but it also made the pears on this tree plumper. At the end of the alley, in front of her open door, Nana sat talking with the rest of the neighborhood’s old ladies. The biddies were chatting, occasionally bursting into laughter or stabbing their synthetic wool with knitting needles for emphasis, performing fancy fencing moves.

Among the yentas sat Orit, Yaffa’s fat, unmarried daughter, making her best efforts to fit in with their Little Old Ladies world. The viciousness of her gossip, the poison in her words, and her habit of gloating were yet to be softened by age.

Coming closer, I allowed myself a tiny smirk at their gossipfest and then called out to my Nana. Her eyes lit up when she saw me. I bent over and kissed her cheek. I love Nana even when she dabbles in the sea of gossip, and my love renders this murky sea pure and clear. Nana is proud of me—her eldest grandson, the university student.

“My legs ache,” she said to me, “so why don’t you go in and warm some food for yourself? Think you can manage?”

“Sure, Nana.”

I went in, ate some, then dragged out a stool and sat there facing the old ladies, smoking a cigarette as they amped up their vicious gossip, brazenly besmirching those not present, shamelessly fawning on those who were. Every once in a while Orit would aggressively stop her needlework and ask me a question, just to be nice, to keep in touch with hers, the younger generation. I answered indifferently because she was so damned ugly.

A sound of metallic crackling and rattling came from the mouth of the alley. Hearing it the old ladies stopped their chatter, exchanging glances critical of the world-at-large. It was all I could do not to laugh at their reaction.

“The Meshuga, a curse upon its soul, is back again,” said Yaffa.

“Poor thing, if one more bit falls off it, it’ll come apart,” Nana said in its defense.

“But it’s such a bore,” commented Orit in what she must have thought was a mature manner, and squinted at me.

Avrum’s mother, who looked like an Egyptian mummy and was probably as old, held up a fragile finger and cackled, “When I was young, there were no such things around.”

“It says in the papers that they kidnap children,” said Orit.

“No, come on, it’s not kidnapping children,” replied Nana. “Poor thing, this Meshuga, it’s been in the neighborhood for years, and no child got kidnapped, ever.”

“How true,” lowed Odelia’s toothless mouth. “It’s all stories made up by the Bank. Damn the Bank, where does it get off harassing them?”

“Tomatoes!” Avrum’s mother burst out nostalgically. “When I was little we used to buy tomatoes at a store, from a person who was actually selling them. A real person. Not like today: you stick the bank card in a wall, and out comes a kilo of tomatoes.”

“Bank, schmank,” said Nana dismissively. “There’s the Meshuga. All painters have a few screws loose.”

The rattling noise grew louder, and then the Tin Beggar made its entrance. It limped in a tight, precisely controlled, clockwork way. Its left shoulder was bent, the result of an old sledgehammer blow, its face covered with a blackened patina. One eye was missing, and from the empty socket colored wires dangled down its cheek. One knee crackled, two of its fingers were broken, and a few holes in its head suggested it was missing some nuts. Just a regular neighborhood tin beggar, whom the crones gave a disdainful name to tell it apart from others of its ilk, even though tin beggars have no real names.

“Here comes Chambalooloo!” said Orit, frowning. She poked a knitting needle in the air and prophesized: “Some day all this will end, and not in a good way! The papers say they’re dangerous, I’m telling you!”

“The papers all belong to the Bank,” I interjected to silence her.

She huffed but threw me a flirtatious glance.

“Ah!” snorted Flora, “Now it’ll want to paint us for a handout. Who needs to be painted, who? Tell it that the Rebbetzin said we shouldn’t accept paintings from tin beggars.”

“But the Rebbetzin also said we must treat them nice!” replied Nana fiercely.

“Nothing good will come out of this one,” claimed Orit, disappointed. “This is no real man, this one.”

Her mother looked at her, sad and hurt. The old ladies’ lips trembled in an attempt to hide their smirks. As for me, I turned my face up diplomatically to see whether there were any clouds in the sky.

The robot stopped in front of us and asked, “Madam, can you spare a gift of metal?”

Nana smiled, signaled for it to come closer, searched in her housecoat’s pockets, and took out a large nail, rusty and bent. Smiling happily, she handed it to the Tin Beggar: “There you are, Chambalooloo.”

“Another nail?” Holding it, the Tin Beggar looked utterly disappointed.

A long time ago Nana poked around in her shed and found a bucket full of large, rusty, bent, totally useless nails. Generously, she would give one to Chambalooloo every day, except on Shabbat. As I said, Nana lives near a religious neighborhood. The tin beggars learned to watch their steps on the holy day, since the time some metallic unfortunate started cleaning a street in Me’a She’arim as a gesture of good will. It was Shabbat, and the worshippers emerged from their synagogue to tear it to pieces, leaving behind only tiny bits of metal.

“Would you like me to paint your portrait, Madam?” the Tin Beggar asked Nana.

Amazingly, the chief occupation of tin beggars is art. They paint, they play music, they tell beautiful stories, all for metal handouts. But resolutions angrily adopted by the Writers and Poets Union, the Painters and Sculptors Union, and the Musicians Union declared that any painting, poem, story, or tune produced by a tin beggar is not to be considered a work of art (and for good reason, too: few humans can meet the impossibly high standards set by the tin beggars). Thus, the tin beggars were doomed to remain the makers of ephemeral, perishable art, since there was no one willing to preserve it.

“There’s a rule against painting in this neighborhood,” said Nana. “But my leg hurts. Can you just do us a favor and throw out the garbage?”

Hearing Nana’s request, I could no longer keep a straight face and burst out laughing. How like Nana! For a rusty nail a day, she’d made the Tin Beggar her slave.

The robot’s shoulders sank. It went into her home and came out again, carrying the garbage can in one huge hand. I got up and stepped into the kitchen to make myself some coffee. Returning to sunlight, I sat myself back on the stool, facing the old ladies. The Tin Beggar returned Nana’s trashcan to the kitchen. Upon emerging, it started rocking to and fro on its heels to draw Nana’s attention while she was arguing with the ladies about the exact time of the Tish’a b’Av fast onset.

I smiled again. It was waiting to ask whether Nana wanted anything else. Knowing her, she would definitely ask it to do some more, like clean the windows, then sweep the floor, and if there was any laundry to wash, do that as well. Nana was not one to let such an opportunity slip by.

Finally, Nana addressed the Tin Beggar. “Did you throw out the garbage, Chambalooloo, apple of my eye?”

“Garbage disposed of,” it intoned. “Will there be anything else, Madam?”

“Chambalooloo darling,” Nana said charmingly, “my leg hurts terribly. There are a few dishes in the kitchen sink. Could you please wash them? If it’s not too difficult?”

My grin grew wider as I observed how obsequiously this gigantic hunk of metal was bent to Nana’s iron will.

“No, it’s not too difficult,” groaned the robot.

The metal giant took a step toward the kitchen, then froze.

“Madam,” it said quietly to Nana, “there is a giant mouse in your kitchen.”

“You didn’t even enter the kitchen, so how can you tell?” Nana wondered.

“I can hear it.”

Nana pursed her lips in annoyance and waved a finger at the Tin Beggar. “It’s not so nice, shirking work like this. What did I ask for, anyway? Some help for five minutes, that’s all.”

“I am not shirking work. You have a giant mouse in your kitchen.”

Now Nana became mad. “There are no mice in my kitchen! You tell me, am I treating you wrong, the way you treat me now? Don’t I give you a nail every day?”

“You are treating me kindly, and you do give me a nail every day, and I’ll do the dishes. But right now there is a giant mouse in your kitchen.”

I covered my mouth to hide my grin, squinting at the crones. They looked like they were ready to rise and stab the Tin Beggar to death with their knitting needles.

“That’s what I told you,” Orit said sanctimoniously to Nana. “Nothing good will come out of this one.”

“No, you’re wrong,” said Nana vehemently to Orit (as a show of good will indirectly intended for the Tin Beggar), “it is alright. Perhaps it got tired today. But for years I’ve been asking it to help me, and it’s come through every time. Maybe it’s just not feeling well today.”

The Tin Beggar said miserably, “I am telling the truth!”

The professionals claim that robots have no feelings. But we Jerusalemites know full well they’re sensitive, and they do have feelings.

“What truth?” said Nana angrily.

“There is a giant mouse in your kitchen.”

Nana decided to check this out, and, being the shrewd person she was, immediately put the burden on someone else. “Ethan,” she said to me, “you go see what’s in the kitchen.”

I got up from my stool, taking the empty coffee cup with me, and flashed a friendly smile at the ladies. Odelia returned my smile with her zipperlike mouth. Avrum’s mother’s smile reminded me of the Angel of Death. Orit’s fat cheeks hid her beady eyes as she attempted another coy smile. Only Nana gave me a direct glare.

I went into the hallway with the Tin Beggar trailing me in its meticulous limp. The rooms were lined up along the hallway, the third door leading into the kitchen. There was indeed some noise in there, the sound of something heavy being dragged on the floor. I opened the door and looked in.

Astonishment nearly knocked me off my feet. By the sink, near the cabinets, there stood a mouse as big as a small donkey, a bit taller than the height of my hips, all gray, its whiskers thick as ropes. The mouse, aiming its snout at the shelves, was sniffing the condiment jars one by one. Its weight was too much for its skinny legs, so it leaned on its backside against the floor. Its breathing was a running gurgle indicating a superhuman, I mean a supermousy, effort. I stared stupidly at the long pipe that was its tail.

“It might be dangerous,” said Chambalooloo behind me.

Hearing its voice, the mouse turned heavily toward us, and what it did then made me gasp in even greater surprise. It shrank to cat size. The transformation was fast, and obviously, the reduction in size gave it back its agility. It started skittering to and fro, squeaking angrily. Eventually it calmed down a little, squatted on its behind in front of me, drawing its body up like a hamster. I stared at it, my mouth agape. The mouse started squeaking again, waving its paws. Recovering from my surprise, I realized that there was some pattern to its tweeting, as if it was trying to communicate with me. Judging by the motions it made with its paws, it must have been an angry communication.

I screamed in disgust and threw the empty cup at it, following close behind with my foot up to give it a kick. As the cup was about to hit it, the mouse shrank itself further and vanished.

I looked the question at the Tin Beggar. “What was that all about?”

“A Stern-Gerlach mouse,” it said.

“Stern-Gerlach mice? I didn’t know they could size-shift.”

The Tin Beggar made no answer. Instead it proceeded, in its meticulous limp, to clean up the cup fragments. Then it did the dishes. I went out.

“What were you up to, breaking a glass? Marrying Chambalooloo?” Nana asked, whether in anger or in mirth I couldn’t tell.

“I tried to kill the mouse.”

“What mouse?” Nana was astonished.

“A mouse as big as a donkey,” I told her.

“You’re crazy!” Nana stated. “You’re like Chambalooloo. A mouse like a donkey?! And in my own kitchen yet? Come on, you crazy, you! Where do you get off, saying something like that?”

My face reddened, but I managed to check an angry response. Nana gets mad quickly, and she has a big mouth. Once she gets started, there’s no getting away from her.

After a few minutes Chambalooloo came out, its metallic hands wet. “I’m through, Madam, if you…”

“Thank you very much, Chambalooloo,” Nana interrupted. “Next time, feel free to tell me if you’re tired.”

Obviously, Nana didn’t believe the mouse story.

Suddenly I heard a belabored grunt behind me. I turned around, jumped up, and nearly fainted. In the doorway there stood a mouse as tall as a donkey and broad enough to look like a sickly lion. Around its head there was a metal band made of glowing, buzzing cubes.

The old ladies yelped in surprise; Orit even screamed. I felt like my chest and arms were being stabbed. I growled like an animal, grabbed the stool, threw it at the mouse, and dived after it. The mouse size-shifted, but the stool hit it halfway through the transformation, in the middle of its back. The impact knocked it aside, and I reached it and stomped my foot against its head, once, twice. I lifted my foot for a third stomp… and then all hell broke loose.

From the corner of my eye I saw a grey blur flying at me. I tried to fend it off, but the mouse sunk its teeth into my arm, hanging on to it. From the rooms and the corridor there came out a flood of angry, screaming mice. Mice were nipping at my legs. Then a gigantic mouse popped up behind me. Hearing its disgusting grunt I turned around, and the monster hurled its weight against me. I fell, and a flurry of furious mice scrambled over me, biting. The giant mouse made a move for my head, its gaping mouth revealing teeth as big as daggers, so help me God! I slammed it ferociously with the stool, and it yelped and started shrinking. I pounded it again and again until it nearly shrank from view. Overcoming my panic, I started whacking at the other mice, methodically now, not blindly as before. After killing twenty of them I realized I was bleeding from numerous puncture wounds. I hurled myself out and slammed the door.

Nana was white as a sheet. “Wow, Ethan! I thought you were lying when you said there was a mouse there. Forgive me. Actually, I must beg Chambalooloo’s forgiveness as well.”

The Tin Beggar hissed electronically from the corner of its speaker, “They are all over the street.”

Whole families were running out of their homes, shrieking in terror. (The official inquiry would later determine that the mice, some as big as donkeys, had suddenly appeared in all these houses at the same time, driving out their inhabitants. They must have been microscopic when they invaded, then expanded to their gigantic dimensions. The mice showed up when the men were at work. Only I, a student, could afford to lay about when everyone else was laboring.)

How long can you stay frozen in shock? I started swearing as mothers and daughters burst from their homes, carrying infants in their arms. Old men fled for their lives, waving their feeble fists, and old women scrambled after them, shrieking. The street turned into a cauldron of frenzied howls. A mouse emerged from one doorway, sat on its bottom huffing like a hippo, and started keening, exhorting its fellow combatants with frantic paw gestures. But it never got to the end of its speech. A furious woman slammed a sizable rock against its head. The mouse tumbled, dazed, and before it could issue another squeak, half the street swarmed it with planks and kicking feet. As big as it was, all that was left in the end was some mincemeat.

(A month later I was invited to Israel TV studios for an interview. A trio of reporters, who looked like a contingent of the Spanish Inquisition, insisted that the mice had just wanted to parley. But we, members of the uneducated classes that we were, just had to press the attack. They declared that as a person of some learning I should have sensed the rodents’ yearning for peaceful coexistence and stopped the mob. Knowing that I had single-handedly killed more mice than the military by attacking the mice directly, they branded me the aggressor. I got mad and asked them what should a man do when confronted by monsters that can tear his head off in one bite? He defends himself, inhumanely if necessary. And if he senses an opportunity—as when the speech-making mouse started distracting its comrades—he moves in as aggressively as possible to remove the threat. The TV people didn’t agree, so I stormed out of the studio midway through the ordeal.)

I suddenly remembered the mouse in the kitchen, how it counted jars with its snout, and cried in amazement, “Damn that bastard! It was taking inventory!”

Nana said resentfully, “And tomorrow being Tish’a b’Av!”

She got up heavily from her bench. “Let’s get in the house.”

“Your house is full of mice!”

“Then what should I do? Sleep outdoors?”

The crowd pulverizing the speaker mouse quickly dispersed. Seeing the torn carcass of their gigantic comrade, several mice began whistling excitedly at each other.

All of a sudden I could hear my heart pounding in my ears, its volume and pace growing unbearably. I covered my ears, trying to stop the infernal noise. All around me little old ladies, younger women, and children suddenly fell to their knees, their eyes glazed. By the time my heart reached a crescendo, the noise became indistinct. I lost my sense of balance, the world tilted, and the ground suddenly slapped me in the face. On my way down I caught sight of Chambalooloo sweeping Nana into its clanging arms and running to the end of the street. As I began regaining my senses, it came limping back. “I hope they won’t accuse me of taking part in this occupation and let the Bank repossess me.”

“I’ll testify in your favor,” I replied numbly.

“Wait here,” it said. “Women and children first.”

I cursed it, too, as it shambled away from me.

Chambalooloo picked up fat Orit, who screamed in horror, or perhaps delight, almost choking it. I turned on my back and saw a police hovercraft above the street.

Reaching the end of the street, Chambalooloo tried to shake fat Orit off it. Orit refused to let go. It gently undid her stranglehold with its broken metallic hands, and she let out angry screams at its receding back.

Then a new apparition towered over me, a mouse wearing a helmet fitted with various antennae, wires, flashing lights, sparkling bursts of energy, and whatnot. It was flicking its foul tongue over the control panel hanging in front of its face. A loud whistle pierced the air, nearly piercing me as well. My muscles spasmed and I started screaming. Darkness descended. I floated off.

I tried to reach out and grab at something in this awful darkness. “You are going to die,” I heard in the emptiness.

Then I started plummeting, an endless fall into a horrendous awful emptiness.

When I came back to visit Nana after my release from the hospital, the neighborhood was in shambles. Where Hasson’s pear tree had stood I saw just a stump.

I found out that Nana had quarreled with Orit, because Orit tried to seduce Chambalooloo. (True, as I live and breathe!) Nana had made the Tin Beggar her protégé, insisting that Orit would only make trouble for it.

The Tin Beggar, indeed, looked brand new. It told me that City Hall had awarded its efforts with a complete overhaul. It was scrubbed and polished, its nuts and bolts were tightened, and missing parts were replaced—the works. They had even given it a new eye.

Nana had gifted the newly refurbished Tin Beggar a new toaster. You should have seen its robotic delight. What a laugh!

And the mice? Your basic cold war: threats, raids, woe to the lone person who falls into the hands of the Stern-Gerlach mice. And woe to the mouse that falls into human hands. In other words, the usual. Recently, I’ve heard, in certain circles there’s talk of trying to parley with the mice.

Another thing. I’ve become a painter.

How, you ask?

Some arrangement I’ve worked out with the Tin Beggar, since I’ve had the leverage: I’d threaten to tell the authorities it had known in advance of the Stern-Gerlach mice offensive unless it gave me some of its work. Now it gives me paintings, which I sign. What a pleasure, being a painter without actually having to wield a brush. Chambalooloo gets a fair shake, too, because I award it with electronic appliances. Besides, it gets recognition by proxy as a distinguished artist. And I get paid handsomely.

And other than that?

Other than that, all is peaceful and quiet in the new Jerusalem.