"Be that as it may, at the end of my treatment, the good old professor started getting a bit fruity, and all his accomplices left him. When he finally went round the bend, I spoke with him."
"You spoke with him? But that's sacrilege! We're not supposed to talk with humans. The untouchable may not exchange a single word with the impure, even if they're in danger of dying."
"Imagine that! A believer among us! Even if this injures your religious feelings, Francis, unfortunately I'm going to have to say it: I hate God! He who created the world, He who created this human race, He who created Preterius and predicaments like the one I was in: I hate Him. If there is a God, then He is a huge, disgusting spider in a great darkness. We cannot, yes, we do not want to acknowledge this darkness and the face of the spider and the vast spider web that lies hidden behind life's illusion of happiness and goodness!"
"And how did you speak with him?"
"How? Well, I realized that my days were slowly but surely coming to an end, and therefore I left nothing untried. So I exerted myself and moved my jaws like a human and made sounds like a human, imitating the human language. What came croaking out of my throat must have sounded rather strange, but the crazy old coot understood it. He opened the cage door to confront me in a duel. The whole time he laughed insanely as if he had a cramp and just couldn't stop laughing anymore. As soon as the door was open, I summoned up all my remaining strength, sprang up into his gaping mouth, and bit deeply into his throat with my fangs. He fell down and tried desperately to pull me out of his bleeding mouth. But it was too late. In next to no time I had eaten through to his bowels, and then, at last, he only twitched a few times before becoming quite still.
"I was exhausted and thought I would collapse dead at any moment. But before I sailed on to the next world, I wanted at least to free the others to prevent them from being tortured further by this sadist's successors. I opened the cages and liberated all the sisters and brothers. Nearly all those left were children anyway. Then I sank into a deep, leaden sleep in which I actually did hear myself already knocking at the gates of the next world.
When I finally woke up, Ziebold was standing over me. He had always liked me and all during this time he had increasingly refused to carry out Preterius's insane orders. He quit in the end because he could no longer bear to witness the suffering of the laboratory animals. He had come by the laboratory that day because he had heard troubling things from Rosalie, the professor's wife, about her husband's state of mind, and wanted to see whether everything was okay. I bet when he saw me lying like that on the floor next to the corpse that he knew exactly what had happened. Yet he only gave me a roguish smile, took me in his arms, and, whistling, walked out of that sickening tunnel of horrors with me. It was just a coincidence that he happened to live right near the laboratory."
It was more or less the way I had also imagined the tragic events. But it had only started the ball rolling, the mere prologue to even greater horrors. What about the rest?
"What happened then, Claudandus?"
"Please don't call me that. That name brings back nasty memories, you know."
He wiped the tears from his face with a paw and then shuddered violently.
"Ziebold had me patched together, at least to the extent that that was possible, by one of the best animal surgeons he could find, and after a painful recovery period of four months I felt more or less fit again. But I was no longer my old self. I no longer could take any kind of pleasure in life. I had no appetite, and was afraid of ruining my life through my fits of depression. In my memory and my dreams, again and again and again I experienced the hell I had gone through; my suffering repeated itself day after day seemingly without end—and then, gradually, I learned to appreciate the merits of Ziebold's library. I read all those thick tomes humans had written to learn more about their way of thinking. Most of the authors I read wrote about how wonderful and clever humans were, the great number of things they had invented, how passionately they could love, how magnificent their God was, and what distant stars they would one day depart for to bless them with their unique genius. This lousy library was just one mammoth commercial for Homo sapiens, and I kept reading exactly the same thing in book after book: humans were and would always remain the masters of the world. And the reason was that, without any shame or scruple, they had enslaved or, even better, had killed every other species. It was their sick pride that had given them the will and power to do this. They simply imagined themselves to be the greatest, and believed for this reason that they could commit every conceivable injustice against other living creatures. And the shocking thing was that they actually were the greatest just because of this arrogant attitude.
"After I realized that, I began to think about how I could turn back the course of history. I knew that however the downfall of their tyrannical rule might look, it would have to be achieved inconspicuously. Strict organization and clever strategy were necessary so that the master race would not notice anything. It was Mendel's genetic theory that showed me the way. His book was a revelation to me. Suddenly I knew what my task, what my
