Time and the Riddle: Thirty-One Zen Stories (62 page)

The four space people stood around the mouse as it awakened and watched it. They were pleased, and since much in their nature, especially in their emotional responses, was childlike and direct, they could not help showing their pleasure and smiling at the mouse. Their thoughts were in the nature of a welcome, and all that the mind of the mouse could express was gratitude. The mouse came to its feet, stood on the floor where it had lain, faced each of them in turn, and then wept inwardly at the fact of its existence. Then the mouse was hungry and they gave it food. After that the mouse asked the basic, inevitable question:

“Why?”

“Because we need your help.”

“How can I help you when your own wisdom and power are apparently without measure?”

The first spaceman explained. They were explorers, cartographers, surveyors—and behind them, light-years away, was their home planet, a gigantic ball the size of our planet Jupiter. Thus their small size, their incredible density. Weighing on earth only a fraction of what they weighed at home, they nevertheless weighed more than any earth creature their size—so much more that they walked on earth in dire peril of sinking out of sight. It was quite true that they could go anywhere in their spacecraft, but to get all the information they required, they would have to leave it—they would have to venture forth on foot. Thus the mouse would be their eyes and their feet.

“And for this a mouse!” the mouse exclaimed. “Why? I am the smallest, the most defenseless of creatures.”

“Not any longer,” they assured him. “We ourselves carry no weapons, because we have our minds, and in that way your mind is like ours. You can enter the mind of any creature, a cat, a dog—even a man—stop the neuron paths to his hate and aggression centers, and you can do it with the speed of thought. You have the strongest of all weapons—the ability to make any living thing love you, and having that, you need nothing else.”

Thus the mouse became a part of the little group of space people who measured, charted, and examined the planet Earth. The mouse raced through the streets of a hundred cities, slipped in and out of hundreds of buildings, crouched in corners where he was privy to the discussions of people of power who ruled this part or that part of the planet Earth, and the space people listened with his ears, smelled with his sensitive nostrils, and saw with his soft brown eyes. The mouse journeyed thousands of miles, across the seas and continents whose existence he had never even dreamed about. He listened to professors lecturing to auditoriums of college students, and he listened to the great symphony orchestras, the fine violinists and pianists. He watched mothers give birth to children and he listened to wars being planned and murders plotted. He saw weeping mourners watch the dead interred in the earth, and he trembled to the crashing sounds of huge assembly lines in monstrous factories. He hugged the earth as bullets whistled overhead, and he saw men slaughter each other for reasons so obscure that in their own minds there was only hate and fear.

As much as the space people, he was a stranger to the curious ways of mankind, and he listened to them speculate on the mindless, haphazard mixture of joy and horror that was mankind's civilization on the planet Earth.

Then, when their mission was almost completed, the mouse chose to ask them about their own place. He was able to weigh facts now and to measure possibilities and to grapple with uncertainties and to create his own abstractions; and so he thought, on one of those evenings when the warmth of the five little creatures filled the spaceship, when they sat and mingled thoughts and reactions in an interlocking of body and mind of which the mouse was a part, about the place where they had been born.

“Is it very beautiful?” the mouse asked.

“It's a good place. Beautiful—and filled with music.”

“You have no wars?”

“No.”

“And no one kills for the pleasure of killing?”

“No.”

“And your animals—things like myself?”

“They exist in their own ecology. We don't disturb it, and we don't kill them. We grow and we make the food we eat.”

“And are there crimes like here—murder and assault and robbery?”

“Almost never.”

And so it went, question and answer, while the mouse lay there in front of them, his strangely shaped head between his paws, his eyes fixed on the two men and the two women with worship and love; and then it came as he asked them:

“Will I be allowed to live with you—with the four of you? Perhaps to go on other missions with you? Your people are never cruel. You won't place me with the animals. You'll let me be with the people, won't you?”

They didn't answer. The mouse tried to reach into their minds, but he was still like a little child when it came to the game of telepathy, and their minds were shielded.

“Why?”

Still no response.

“Why?” he pleaded.

Then, from one of the women, “We were going to tell you. Not tonight, but soon. Now we must tell you. You can't come with us.”

“Why?”

“For the plainest reasons, dear friend. We are going home.”

“Then let me go home with you. It's my home too—the beginning of all my thoughts and dreams and hope.”

“We can't.”

“Why?” the mouse pleaded. “Why?”

“Don't you understand? Our planet is the size of your planet Jupiter here in the solar system. That is why we were so small in earth terms—because our very atomic structure is different from yours. By the measure of weight they use here on earth, I weigh almost a hundred kilograms, and you weigh less than an eighth of a kilogram, and yet we are almost the same size. If we were to bring you to our planet, you would die the moment we reached its gravitational pull. You would be crushed so completely that all semblance of form in you would disappear. You can't ask us to destroy you.”

“But you're so wise,” the mouse protested. “You can do almost anything. Change me. Make me like yourselves.”

“By your standards we're wise—” The space people were full of sadness. It permeated the room, and the mouse felt its desolation. “By our own standards we have precious little wisdom. We can't make you like us. That is beyond any power we might dream of. We can't even undo what we have done, and now we realize what we have done.”

“And what will you do with me?”

“The only thing we can do. Leave you here.”

“Oh, no.” The thought was a cry of agony.

“What else can we do?”

“Don't leave me here,” the mouse begged them. “Anything—but don't leave me here. Let me make the journey with you, and then if I have to die I will die.”

“There is no journey as you see it,” they explained. “Space is not an area for us. We can't make it comprehensible to you, only to tell you that it is an illusion. When we rise out of the earth's atmosphere, we slip into a fold of space and emerge in our own planetary system. So it would not be a journey that you would make with us—only a step to your death.”

“Then let me die with you,” the mouse pleaded.

“No—you ask us to kill you. We can't.”

“Yet you made me.”

“We changed you. We made you grow in a certain way.”

“Did I ask you to? Did you ask me whether I wanted to be like this?”

“God help us, we didn't.”

“Then what am I to do?”

“Live. That's all we can say. You must live.”

“How? How can I live? A mouse hides in the grass and knows only two things—fear and hunger. It doesn't even know that it is, and of the vast lunatic world that surrounds it, it knows nothing. But you gave me the knowledge—”

“And we also gave you the means to defend yourself, so that you can live without fear.”

“Why? Why should I live? Don't you understand that?”

“Because life is good and beautiful—and in itself the answer to all things.”

“For me?” The mouse looked at them and begged them to look at him. “What do you see? I am a mouse. In all this world there is no other creature like myself. Shall I go back to the mice?”

“Perhaps.”

“And discuss philosophy with them? And open my mind to them? Or should I have intercourse with those poor, damned mindless creatures? What am I to do? You are wise. Tell me. Shall I be the stallion of the mouse world? Shall I store up riches in roots and bulbs? Tell me, tell me,” he pleaded.

“We will talk about it again,” the space people said. “Be with yourself for a while, and don't be afraid.”

Then the mouse lay with his head between his paws and he thought about the way things were. And when the space people asked him where he wanted to be, he told them:

“Where you found me.”

So once again the saucer settled by night into the back yard of the suburban split-level house. Once again the air lock opened, and this time a mouse emerged. The mouse stood there, and the saucer rose out of the swirling dead leaves and spun away, a fleck of gold losing itself in the night. And the mouse stood there, facing its own eternity.

A cat, awakened by the movement among the leaves, came toward the mouse and then halted a few inches away when the tiny animal did not flee. The cat reached out a paw, and then the paw stopped. The cat struggled for control of its own body and then it fled, and still the mouse stood motionless. Then the mouse smelled the air, oriented himself, and moved to the mouth of an old mole tunnel. From down below, from deep in the tunnel, came the warm musky odor of mice. The mouse went down through the tunnel to the nest, where a male and female mouse crouched, and the mouse probed into their minds and found fear and hunger.

The mouse ran from the tunnel up to the open air and stood there, sobbing and panting. He turned his head up to the sky and reached out with his mind—but what he tried to reach was already a hundred light-years away.

“Why? Why?” the mouse sobbed to himself. “They are so good, so wise—why did they do it to me?”

He then moved toward the house. He had become adept at entering houses, and only a steel vault would have defied him. He found his point of entry and slipped into the cellar of the house. His night vision was good, and this combined with his keen sense of smell enabled him to move swiftly and at will.

Moving through the shifting web of strong odors that marked any habitation of people, he isolated the sharp smell of old cheese, and he moved across the floor and under the staircase to where a mousetrap had been set. It was a primitive thing, a stirrup of hard wire bent back against the tension of a coil spring and held with a tiny latch. The bit of cheese was on the latch, and the lightest touch on the cheese would spring the trap.

Filled with pity for his own kind, their gentleness, their helplessness, their mindless hunger that led them into a trap so simple and unconcealed, the mouse felt a sudden sense of triumph, of ultimate knowledge. He knew now what the space people had known from the very beginning, that they had given him the ultimate gift of the universe—consciousness of his own being—and that all things were encompassed in consciousness. He saw the wholeness of the world and of all the worlds that were or would be, and he was without fear or loneliness.

In the morning, the man of the split-level suburban house went down into his cellar and let out a whoop of delight.

“Got it,” he yelled up to his family. “I got the little bastard now.”

But the man never really looked at anything, not at his wife, not at his kids, not at the world; and while he knew that the trap contained a dead mouse, he never even noticed that this mouse was somewhat different from other mice. Instead, he went out to the back yard, swung the dead mouse by his tail, and sent it flying into his neighbor's back yard.

“That'll give him something to think about,” the man said, grinning.

30
The Large Ant

T
here have been all kinds of notions and guesses as to how it would end. One held that sooner or later there would be too many people; another that we would do each other in, and the atom bomb made that a very good likelihood. All sorts of notions, except the simple fact that we were what we were. We could find a way to feed any number of people and perhaps even a way to avoid wiping each other out with the bomb; those things we are very good at, but we have never been any good at changing ourselves or the way we behave.

I know. I am not a bad man or a cruel man; quite to the contrary, I am an ordinary, humane person, and I love my wife and my children and I get along with my neighbors. I am like a great many other men, and I do the things they would do and just as thoughtlessly. There it is in a nutshell.

I am also a writer, and I told Lieberman, the curator, and Fitzgerald, the government man, that I would like to write down the story. They shrugged their shoulders. “Go ahead,” they said, “because it won't make one bit of difference.”

“You don't think it would alarm people?”

“How can it alarm anyone when nobody will believe it?”

“If I could have a photograph or two.”

“Oh, no,” they said then. “No photographs.”

“What kind of sense does that make?” I asked them. “You are willing to let me write the story—why not the photographs so that people could believe me?”

“They still won't believe you. They will just say you faked the photographs, but no one will believe you. It will make for more confusion, and if we have a chance of getting out of this, confusion won't help.”

“What will help?”

They weren't ready to say that, because they didn't know. So here is what happened to me, in a very straightforward and ordinary manner.

Every summer, sometime in August, four good friends of mine and I go for a week's fishing on the St. Regis chain of lakes in the Adirondacks. We rent the same shack each summer; we drift around in canoes, and sometimes we catch a few bass. The fishing isn't very good, but we play cards well together, and we cook out and generally relax. This summer past, I had some things to do that couldn't be put off. I arrived three days late, and the weather was so warm and even and beguiling that I decided to stay on by myself for a day or two after the others left. There was a small flat lawn in front of the shack, and I made up my mind to spend at least three or four hours at short putts. That was how I happened to have the putting iron next to my bed.