Dobbel Has a Theory (All of Them Wrong)

By the end of the shift there were nine mice on the counter and all of them were protected.

They came up from Vent Nine in ones and twos, walking on their heels, each with a folded flimsy under the collar, each paper printed the same and signed by nobody. Kappa laid the papers out in a row. Nine empty boxes where a name should be. It looked like a row of small open mouths.

Dobbel had theories. Dobbel always had theories, and the official position of the Mäusewerk was to let him finish, because he was wrong in a useful direction.

Theory one: a prank. “Apprentices on day shift. Making us look stupid.”

“Dobbel, look at the felt lining.”

“What about it?”

“It’s cut to the millimetre. Nine pairs. Eighteen bands. Somebody spent a week on that.

Nobody spends a week on a prank.”

(Dobbel privately thought somebody might, and was not entirely wrong about people, but was wrong about this.)

Theory two: the mice did it themselves. “Climbing gear. Vents are slippery.”

Kappa asked Tilk.

Tilk said: “If I wanted climbing hooks, I would ask for climbing hooks, and I would put them on the front.”

Theory three: the ghost mice. “The Nebelmäuse are stealing them. They come through the gates at night and they fit them on as a sort of — marking. Like a farmer.”

This one Kappa did not dismiss, because of two things.

The first was that the Nebelmäuse existed. Everyone on the station knew it and nobody could prove it. For forty years, mice in the lower decks had reported other mice: grey, thin, silent, who came along the pipes near the old gates and did not answer and did not smell of anything. The station’s instruments showed nothing. The station’s official position was stress and bad air. The mice’s official position was we are not stupid, come and stand in Vent Nine at four in the morning.

The second was that Dobbel, being Dobbel, had also said the one thing worth writing down.

“Why are the mice the ones who get protected?” he said. “If the ghost mice are dangerous, why isn’t anybody protecting us? I’m the one with the big ankles.”

Kappa stopped with the pen in the air.

It was a fair question and it had a nasty shape. Twelve thousand people on the station and not one of them had ever woken up with steel on their feet and a paper under their chin.

Only mice. Only mice in the lower vents. Only mice near the old gates.

Which meant one of two things. Either the danger was something that only ever hurt mice — — or the mice were not the ones being protected.

Kappa wrote: 05:10. Nine issued. Protection fitted only to mice. Ask: protected from what, or protecting whom?

Then the day shift came on, and Kappa did the thing apprentices are supposed to do and that almost nobody does, which is to go to someone senior while still tired and say out loud that something is wrong.

The day supervisor read the flimsy. He turned it over. He looked at the nine mice and the row of empty boxes, and his face did something Kappa had never seen on him before, which was to go carefully blank.

“Schutzprogramm K,” he said. “That’s not ours.”

“Whose is it?”

“I don’t know. And that’s the part I don’t like.” He put the paper down the way you put down something that might be sharp. “I’m calling the Negotiator.”

“For nine mice?”

“For nine mice,” said the supervisor, “wearing something with no name on it. Go home, Kappa. Sleep. She’ll want you awake.”