Chapter 57

Harold was sitting in his lab. In front of him there were several cages. Inside the cage he was about to open there was a rat. Well it looked like a rat. It had whiskers and a little nose that wiggled, and a long tail with ratchet-like notches on it just like the rat tail file you can buy in a hardware store. It had fur, cute little ears, and four legs, but it was green: not dirty, not dusky, not moldy, but rather, bright green. Harold opened the top of the cage and grabbed the little fellow by the scruff of the neck. He took a syringe and stuck it into the peritoneal cavity of the rat and injected methohexital. A minute later the rat looked a bit drunk. Two minutes later, he was tilting to one side and three minutes later he tipped over and fell asleep. Harold then took a blood sample from the rat's tail artery. He dropped a drop of blood on a little strip of paper, and touched the start button on the glucometer. Sixty seconds later, the glucometer made a little beep. Harold wiped off the drop of blood and inserted the strip in a slot in the side of the glucometer. Sixty seconds after the first beep, the meter made a second beep and the liquid crystal display changed from seconds to the number 107. The rat's glucose was normal. Harold tossed him back in the cage and turned on an ultraviolet light. He then open the next cage and anesthetized that rat. He was on his fourth rat when George walked into the lab.

"Nice rat." George was looking at the green rat in Harold's hand. "Did you do that or did you get him like that out of the sewer?"

"I created him George. Not in the biblical sense. But I added chloroplasts to his oocyte and now he is half plant, half rat." Harold looked quite pleased with himself.

"You did what?" George half understood, half couldn't believe it.

"Well, you know how a choloroplast, the photosynthetic part of plants, have their own DNA. They are self replicating. I took chloroplasts from algae and implanted them in rat oocytes. I then fertilized the rat's oocytes with rat sperm and implanted them into another rat's uterus. When the rats are born they are green. Every cell in their bodies contain chloroplasts. The rats photosynthetize in sun light." Harold took the first rat out of his cage and drew another blood sample from his tail. He repeated the glucose test and got 136. "You put them in UV light and they make their own glucose."

"Harold. Why do you want a rat to photosynthesize? They have fur. They never use sun screen. And most live in dark, crummy, little dives called rat holes. Besides, we spend a lot of effort getting rid of them." George was looking at the green rat with disgust.

"George. On Venus, there is lots of sun light. There isn't a lot of plant matter. If this rat runs out of food, he can survive just by being in the sun light. During the dark half of the Venusian year he is on his own, but in the light half of the year he is golden. Well, he is in the green."

"Harold, what are you going to do if this little guy escapes on earth. He will be the pest from hell. He will not need to eat anything. He will just reproduce with abandon. By the way, when they reproduce, are they all green?"

"If the mother is green, the offspring are as well. The cloroplasts are excluded from sperm, like mitochondrion are excluded in spermatogenesis. All of the chloroplast come from the mother. I am going to make a number of animals that are suited to the Venusian climate to take along. We are also taking along a gene splicer set up to improve critters once we see what is required on the surface." Harold really was proud of his efforts.

"You just don't get it. You really don't understand. You think you can create anything. Change anything. You haven't learned one thing from the experiences of the last year. People are going to go crazy. They have driven you off this world and you haven't gotten the message. They may not wait for the rocket to be ready."

"Yes, but I will be more than 50 million kilometers away when they find out. What do you think of my chicken?" Harold produced a green chicken which began pecking at some grain on the table.

"You will never learn will you." George shook his head in amazement as the green chicken walked around eating grain.

Chapter 58

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