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Mouse is a short story by Fredric Brown that originally appeared in Thrilling Wonder Stories in June 1949.

Snapshot

A biologist and his cat see a spaceship land in Central Park: its sole occupant is a dead mouse-like creature.

Summary

Spoiler Warning: Plot details and/or information about the ending follow. If you wish to enjoy the work first, stop reading here and return at another time.

Bill Wheeler, a research biologist, lives in a fifth-floor apartment at the corner of 83rd Street and Central Park West in New York City, with his siamese cat named Beautiful.

From this vantage point, Murray is able to see the arrival of a seven-foot long, two-foot wide alien spacecraft in Central Park. The military eventually arrives and seals off the craft. Murray is contacted to examine the sole occupant of the ship: a creature that seems very similar to a dead mouse. While clearly alien (instead of a centralized heart, it has a series of smaller pumping organs and yellow bones), the brain seems too simple to have been responsible for the design of the ship.

After awhile, the interest in the enigma of the ship dies down. The propulsion unit seemed to have vaporized itself, and the corpse of the occupant holds few answers.

Odd negative things begin to happen in the world. The President of the US and the Prime Minister of Great Britain are assasinated. A high Soviet official is shot. An "a-bomb dump" in Pennsylvania is detonated, and a few thousand people are killed.

Murray begins to speculate that these events are connected to the ship's arrival. He speculates that the mouse was a vessel for a non-corporeal alien intelligence. He thinks the being must be manipulating people to perform these anti-social acts. He guesses that the being left the "mouse" and jumped into another being, which accounts for the mouse's death.

He realizes that Beautiful has been behaving a bit oddly, like sleeping too much. He idly asks the cat if he is crazy. The cat tells him to forget it...and he literally does.

External Links

• Mouse at ISFDB.org

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