1Nell Haugen, the wire-man's daughter, married a man who climbed poles for the telephone company, and took his name, which was Brandt. They made their home in the iron hills of New Jersey, not far from the house of learning where she had worked her sums. She bore two children: a boy, Tom, and three years after him a girl, Lucy.
2The small brass lamp from her father's station burned by her bed. The children knew it as they knew the moon. When they were small and woke in the night, they would look for the orange coal of it through the open door, and know that someone was listening.
3Now Nell had a story she told them at bedtime, and it was a true one. It was the story of the mouse.
4"When I worked in the hills," she would say, "there was a quiet man there who rode a wheel in the hall. You know about him. He was the one who weighed the message. Well, he married one of the girls from our room, a clever one named Betty, and the two of them built a mouse."
5"A real mouse?" Lucy would ask, though she knew.
6"A mouse of wood, as long as my finger, with whiskers of copper wire. They called him Theseus, after the man in the old Greek tale who went into the dark house of many turnings to find the monster, and came out again by a thread."
7"And they built him a house of turnings. It was a table top, five squares one way and five the other, with little walls of metal that you could lift out and set down wherever you pleased. So it was never the same house twice. And in one square they put the cheese. It was not real cheese. It was a brass post that rang a bell when his whiskers touched it."
8"The first time they set him down, he knew nothing. He went forward and struck a wall. He backed, and turned a quarter turn, and tried again. He struck another wall. He turned again. He bumbled into every corner of that house. It took him a long while, and you would have laughed to watch him."
9"But he had one rule, and he never broke it. In each square, he tried the ways in order, always turning the same way round. And when he found the way that let him through, the square remembered it."
10"The square? Not the mouse?" Tom would say.
11"That was the secret. There was nothing in the mouse but a bar of iron. Under the table was a great nest of switches, row on row, and a magnet that drew him along from below. The remembering was in the floor. Each square kept one small note: from here, go this way. That was all it kept."
12"Then they lifted him out, and set him down again at the start. And he ran straight to the cheese. He did not strike one wall or make one wrong turn. Everything he had learned by blundering, he now knew. And if they moved a wall, he would strike it once, and be puzzled, and try his ways in order until he found the new road. Then he knew that one too."
13"He never tried the same wall twice," Lucy would say, for that was how the story ended.
14"He never tried the same wall twice," said Nell. "Now sleep."
15In the summer when Tom was twelve and Lucy was nine, the children were sent to stay a week with their father's sister, who lived higher in the hills. Those hills are full of old iron mines. Men dug them out in the time of the first engines and left them when the ore ran thin. The mouths are mostly fallen in or fenced. But children find what is fenced.
16Tom found one behind the ridge, in a cut full of ferns, on the third day. It was a square black hole in the hillside with a rusted rail running into it. He had a hand torch that he had bought with his own money. And he had a boy named Russ from the next farm to be brave in front of.
17Russ would not go in. He stood at the mouth and said his father would skin him. So Tom, who had meant only to go a little way, now had to go a long way. Lucy went after him. She would not be left with Russ, and she was not afraid of anything her brother was not afraid of, and she had told him so many times.
18It was cold inside, as cold as a cellar, and it smelled of wet stone. The rail ran straight for a while. Then the tunnel forked, and Tom took the wider way. Then it forked again. There were rooms where the roof went up out of the torch's reach, and low places where they bent double. There were side ways going off like the roots of a tree. Tom said he was keeping count, and for a while he was.
19They had been walking some time when he stopped to shine the torch into a side way, and stepped back to see better, and the floor was not there.
20It was not a deep fall. It was a slope of loose stone going down into a lower working, and he went down it on his back with a great rattling, and the torch went with him. Lucy stood alone in the dark and heard him cry out at the bottom, and then heard nothing.
21"Tom!"
22"I'm all right." His voice was thin. "I've done something to my foot. Lu, don't come down. Don't move at all. There's water here. I nearly went in it."
23He found the torch. It still burned. By its light she saw him ten feet below her, grey with dust, and beside him a square pit full of black water, as still as glass, with no bottom to it that the light could find. He had stopped an arm's length short of it.
24It took him a long time to climb the slope with one foot. She lay on her belly and held his wrist for the last of it. When he stood, he could not put the foot down. He leaned on the wall and on her, and they turned to go back the way they had come.
25And there were three ways they might have come.
26Tom shone the torch into each. "That one," he said. They went down it, slowly, his arm on her shoulders. It ended in a wall of fallen rock. They came back. "Then that one." It ran on and forked, and forked again, and nothing in it was known to them. Tom's count was gone. He had lost it on the slope. And the torch, which had been white when they came in, was now the yellow of butter.
27Tom sat down against the wall. He was twelve, and he had brought his sister into this place, and he began to shake. "I don't know," he said. "Lu, I don't know the way. I thought I did."
28Lucy did not know either. She was nine. She wanted her mother, and the lamp by the bed. And when she thought of the lamp she thought of the story, as she always did.
29"He never tried the same wall twice," she said.
30"What?"
31"The mouse. He didn't know the way either. He didn't know anything. He had a rule." She put her hand in the pocket of her dress, and there was the lump of chalk she used for marking squares on her aunt's path. "Tom, we have to be the floor. The floor remembered. We'll make the stone remember."
32She made him listen, for he was older and it was his torch. This was her rule. At every place where the ways met, they would take the ways in order, starting from the left hand, always. Before they went down a way, she would chalk a stroke at its mouth. If it came to an end, they would come back, and she would cross the stroke, and that door was shut for good. And they would never, never go down a crossed way again, however right it looked.
33"That could take all night," said Tom.
34"The mouse took a long while too," said Lucy. "But he got there."
35There was one thing more, and Tom thought of it, and it was the best thing he did that day. "The torch," he said. "We burn it only at the meeting places. To see the ways and make the mark. Between, we go in the dark with a hand on the wall. Otherwise it's dead in an hour."
36So they began. A stroke of chalk, and the light put out. Then the dark, which was like no dark she had known. It pressed on her eyes. Her left hand slid along wet rock. Her brother's weight was on her right shoulder, and his breath caught each time the hurt foot touched ground. She counted steps aloud so that he would have something to hear.
37The first way ended. They came back, and she crossed the stroke. The second way went on, and forked, and she marked the left fork, and it ended, and she crossed it. Each time the torch came on it was a little more brown. Each time she looked at it less, and looked harder at what it showed.
38There was a way that looked right. It was wide and had the rail in it, and Tom said, "That's it, I remember the rail." But there was a white cross at its mouth in her own hand. They had been down it an hour ago, from the other side, and it led only round to the black water.
39"It's the rail, Lu."
40"It's crossed."
41He looked at the cross. All of him wanted to go that way. She could feel him lean toward it. He was sure of it, and he had been sure all afternoon. Then he let out his breath. "It's crossed," he said. They took the next way round, which was low and mean and looked like nothing.
42She did not know how long it was after that. The chalk wore down to a nub. The torch, when Tom pressed the switch, gave a dull red glow like the end of a stick pulled from a fire, and you had to hold it against the rock to see the mark. Then one time he pressed it and it gave nothing at all.
43They stood in the dark. Neither spoke.
44"We're in a marked way," said Lucy at last. Her voice was very small. "I marked it. It isn't crossed. So it's still open. We just keep the wall."
45They kept the wall. She counted. At two hundred and six steps she stopped counting, because she had felt something on her face. The air was moving. It was warmer than the mine, and it smelled of ferns.
46They came out into a night full of stars. It was not the mouth they had gone in by, but another, lower on the hill, half choked with brambles that tore their arms and that they did not feel. Across the valley there were lights moving, lanterns and torches, a line of them along the ridge, and men's voices calling two names.
47Russ had run home at dusk and told. Half the valley had been on the hill since then, and the father and mother had driven up from the low country in the dark. The men had gone into the mine by the fern cut with ropes, and found the slope and the black pit and a child's shoe beside the water, which was Tom's. They had stood around that pit for some time.
48So when two children came limping down through the pasture, calling out, there was a silence on the ridge first. Then all the lanterns began to run.
49Tom's ankle was broken. He walked with a stick till the leaves fell. He was whipped for the mine, and then held so hard by his father that he could not breathe. In all the years after, he never once told the story so as to make himself the one who found the way.
50Nell sat on Lucy's bed that night, late, when the house was at last quiet. The aunt had no brass lamp, so she had left a candle burning in a saucer, and they watched it together.
51"You remembered the mouse," said Nell.
52"I remembered the floor." Lucy was nearly asleep, but there was a thing she had to ask first, for it had come to her in the dark, somewhere after the torch died, and she had held on to it. "Mama. The mouse wanted the cheese."
53"Yes."
54"But only because the man put the cheese there. And made the bell ring. If nobody put a cheese in the house, what would the mouse want?"
55Nell thought about it honestly, for she had been a computer and did not like a loose answer. "Nothing," she said. "He would stand in his square. He doesn't want. He was given a thing to find, and a rule for finding it, and a floor to remember with. The wanting was all the man's."
56"Nobody put a cheese in the mine," said Lucy.
57"No."
58"I didn't want any one place. I didn't know where the door was. I only wanted to not be shut in. I wanted there to be more ways, and not fewer." She yawned so that her whole face closed. "Who put that in me?"
59Nell opened her mouth and found that she had no answer. She had worked for the wisest men in the country, and none of them had an answer either. They had built a mouse that could learn any house you set it in. They could not have said what it would mean for a mouse to want out.
60"I don't know," she said. "Nobody knows that yet. Ask it again when you're grown."
61But the child was asleep.
62Listen. In those same years the wise men gathered and gave their craft a name, and promised great things of it. They built machines that could prove a sum, and machines that could win at the game of draughts against the men who made them. Each was a wonder, and each was a mouse. It was set down in a house of someone else's making, with a cheese of someone else's choosing, and it ran to the bell.
63That was no small thing, and do not despise it. To try the ways in order, and to mark the wall that failed, and never to try it twice: half of all wisdom is in that. It saved two children in the iron hills.
64But the other half was the thing a girl of nine had asked for in the dark. It would be fifty years before anyone wrote it in numbers.
65Nell took the candle with her when she went. In the morning she drove home with her children, and that night she lit the brass lamp again.