Taking a Bite Out of Danger

 “Not again!” I picked up the empty mousetrap. “This was supposed to catch that pesky mouse!” It was morning and I was going to be late for work. “Why won’t you catch these mice?” I demanded to my cat, Prouncer. He looked at me serenely. He was orange with stripes, and a little fat. I sighed. There were several mice running around my new apartment, and I had been using mousetraps for several weeks with little luck. Prouncer just disregarded them. I gave him a little piece of the banana I was eating to go with his breakfast. I always marveled at how he liked fruit. Then I told him goodbye and left my apartment in a bit of a hurry. I didn’t want to be late for a great experiment.

You see, I am a scientist. Today my team and I were going to try out teleportation. We were going to start out on a small scale. Our subjects for today were a piece of paper and an apple. My hopes were high, but I also had butterflies in my stomach. Plus, the mouse problem in my apartment was driving me crazy. I was a bit distracted as I came to the lab. I was greeted by the two members of my team, Ted and Ken. I could tell by the way their eyes shone that they were also excited about today’s experiment.

***

 “Are we ready?” I asked. Ken nodded. “Ted, are you ready?” he asked over the intercom. “Thumbs up!” responded Ted, who was in another room. “Let’s do this!” I pressed the button. Our first subject was a piece of paper that said, “Mr. Watson, come here; I want you!” echoing the first words of Alexander Graham Bell into the newly invented telephone as he called for his assistant, who was in another room. With a fizzing sound and a flash of blue light, the paper disappeared. We received an affirmative from Ted over the intercom a moment later, signaling that the paper had arrived in his room successfully. Then we readied the apple. Ken put the juicy, red apple on a stool in the middle of the room while I entered the location to which we were sending it into the controls at my station. Besides being a team member, Ken was a friend from whom I asked advice from time to time. “I still haven’t figured out how to get rid of those mice in my apartment,” I told him. “My cat is too lazy to catch them.”

“Why don’t you call an exterminator?” he asked.

“I guess it’s come to that. I’ll call one tomorrow.”

While we waited for Ted’s thumbs up that the apple had arrived in the room he was waiting in, Ken and I chatted about how to get rid of pests. Ken was telling me about ways he and his family would get rid of mice on the farm that he grew up on, when Ted came into the room.

“Uh, guys?” he said. “Did you launch the apple yet?” Ken and I looked at each other.

“We did. Several minutes ago.” I answered.

“It never came.” Ken and I looked at each other again. “That’s odd. Well, wherever it is, we had better send it back to this room,” I said, and pressed the button that would teleport it back to us. The apple reappeared on the stool we had originally set it on. But there was something strange about it.

 “What –" said Ken, squinting. “Are those bite marks?” I came close, and took a careful look at the red skin of the apple. “It looks like teeth marks from a small animal.” I thought of my cat but quickly discarded the idea. Nah. The apple was supposed to have gone to Ted in that other room in the lab. Surely, he wouldn’t have taken a bit out of the apple. Besides, the teeth marks were too small. But an odd feeling nagged at the back of my mind. “Ken, can you take a sample of the apple’s skin and have someone do a saliva test really quick?” He nodded and ran to do his task. I jogged over to my station, where the controls for the teleportation device were. I looked at the location for where the apple was supposed to have been sent. But something was very wrong. The screen spelled out the address of my apartment. So, it was just possible that the apple had been teleported to my apartment, where Prouncer, fruit lover that he was, had chewed on the apple. 

***

Later, I get a call from Ken. “The saliva tests came back. It was a cat.”

“A cat?” I ask.

“But there’s something else –"

“Oh, this is bad.” I moaned.

“What?”

“It’s just- there’s something I have to tell you. I messed up. I’m sorry. I accidently set the location for the apple to be teleported to my apartment when I was complaining to you about my mouse problem. I think my cat took that bite out of the apple.”

“Prouncer? Oh, no.”

 “What? what is it?” I asked, squeezing my phone a little tighter.

“I have to get back to your lab. I’ll tell you when I get there.” Ken hung up. I slowly lowered my phone. Something was wrong.

***

Minutes later Ken and Ted came running in. Their faces were grave. “Elizabeth, we just discovered something scary. That sample of the apple skin I tested? It just exploded,” said ken.

“What?”

 “The teleportation changed something within the apple. After a certain amount of time, it will explode,” interrupted Ted. I gasped. My stomach knotted itself.  “What about the piece that my cat chewed off?” “I’m afraid that will explode too,” said Ken.

I gulped. My cat. “We need to move.”

***

While Ted grabbed the apple to put it in a safe place to explode, Ken and I rushed over to my apartment to find Prouncer. Upon arrival, he wasn’t at the door to greet me like he usually was. “Oh, cat,” I thought. “Where would you hide?” We looked all over the apartment. Finally, I found him in a corner, looking woozy. Something was definitely not right with him. Ken sat down on the floor and stroked Prouncer while I called the vet. I didn’t tell the vet about our experiment with teleportation, but I explained that Prouncer had eaten something toxic. The vet told me that the best thing to do was to get Prouncer to throw up whatever he had eaten.

“Three percent hydrogen peroxide by mouth,” said the vet, “no more than three times. Poor Prouncer. If he doesn’t throw up, bring him over to me. Good luck.” I hung up and dug the hydrogen peroxide out from under the kitchen sink. I got a syringe ready to squirt it in Prouncer’s mouth. With Ken’s help, I wrapped Prouncer in a towel and carried him into the laundry room. Ken followed me in and shut the door.

It was a bit of an ordeal getting the syringe in Prouncer’s mouth, but eventually I got it in and gave it a quick squirt. We waited. Nothing happened. Prouncer was known to have a tough gut. We administered the hydrogen peroxide three times, but with no effect. The hydrogen peroxide foamed when it hit Prouncer’s mouth, anger and misery showed in his eyes, and he moaned and yowled. But we were doing what we had to do.

I realized we might have to say goodbye to Prouncer. Tears came into my eyes. I put my hand on Prouncer’s head. Ken put his hand on my shoulder. It seemed like we waited in silence for several minutes. “If Prouncer is going to- you know,” said Ken quietly, “We had better get him to a safe place.” I nodded. Suddenly, Prouncer began to convulse. Gag, gag, he went, until cough! A large hairball landed on the floor. In it were stuck tiny pieces of apple. I grinned and sniffed up my tears. Ken laughed. We snatched up the hairball, and because there was not enough time to take it back to the lab to explode safely, we put it inside the safest container we could find: a metal garbage bin with a lid. Bang!

***

The events of the day’s experiment worried me. We had a lot to learn before we could use teleportation safely. But I hoped we could find a way. I was glad we had found out about the exploding issue before using teleportation on a living thing. “We have a lot more research to do before we try that again,” I had told Ken before we parted ways for the day. He had nodded seriously. “For sure. Take care, Prouncer.” He patted my cat’s head.

***

That night I lay in my bed, mulling over the events of the day. I tossed and turned and tried to stop my mind from racing. My nerves were still raw from the explosions of the day. It took a long time to get to sleep. But finally, it came…

Pow! My eyes flashed open. Was that from my dreams, or was it real, from inside my apartment? Hopefully the neighbors hadn’t heard that. They had already accused me of setting off fireworks when the hairball exploded in the garbage can. I got up and slowly made my way around the apartment, listened carefully. The only sound I could hear was my breathing and the quiet hum of the refrigerator. When I came to the kitchen, I glanced down to the floor. There lay one of my mousetraps, holding a freshly caught mouse. I sighed with relief, my knees a little weak. I went to my bedroom and climbed back into bed. Prouncer jumped up next to me.