greatest pleasure in announcing a scientific discovery of inestimable
value to the entire world. I refer to nothing less than a positive
technique for liquidating rats as a species.

This technique involves treatment of male rats with certain types of
hard radiations, which not only renders them reproductively sterile
but leaves the rodents so treated in full possession of all other
sexual functions and impulses. Furthermore, this condition of
sterility is venereally contagious, so that one male rat so treated
will sterilize all female rats with which it comes in contact, and
these, in turn, will sterilize all male rats coming in contact with
them. Our mathematicians estimate that under even moderately favorable
circumstances, the entire rat population of the world could be
sterilized from one male rat in approximately two hundred years.

Rats so treated have already been liberated in the granaries at
Odessa; in three months, rat-trappings there have fallen by 26.4
percent, and grain-losses to rats by 32.09 percent.

We are shipping you six dozen sterilized male rats, which you can use
for sterilization stock, and, by so augmenting their numbers, may
duplicate our own successes.

Curiously enough, this effect of venereally contagious sterility was
discovered quite accidentally, in connection with the use of hard
radiations for human sterilization (criminals, mental defectives,
etc.). Knowing the disastrous possible effects of an epidemic of
contagious human sterility, all persons so sterilized were liquidated
as soon as the contagious nature of their sterility had been
discovered, with the exception of a dozen or so convicts, who had been