"Behind the Sandrat Hoax" is a 1968 satirical science fiction short story by Christopher Anvil. Sam Matthews claims to have survived for two months without water by eating a creature called a sandrat. The story (told in the form of letters and newspaper articles) follows the pig-headed scientific community attempting to deny this discovery, even in the face of additional proof that eating a sandrat prevents dehydration.
Tropes:
- The Alcatraz: The Dry Hole Correctional Training Institute has no outer walls because its desert surroundings ensure that any escapee will die of thirst. Once words gets out that eating sandrats prevents dehydration, sixteen prisoners escape within a month.
- Colonized Solar System: While their exact location in the galaxy is unclear, the story takes place on two planets called New Earth and New Venus, indicating a great degree of interstellar travel.
- Confirmation Bias: Dr. Bancroff firmly refuses to believe that sandrats survive without water or that eating one can prevent dehydration. While conducting tests which support this claim, he deprives captive sandrats of their regular food, which, combined with their digestive system, lets the sandrats go without water. He spends the next four years citing this test while denying that people are surviving in the desert because of sandrats despite their stories offering no other explanation for how they survived. Dr. Cathcart publishes an article that derides Bancroff as an administrator with no scientific imagination and writes that "[[I]]n science, theories are based on facts, not vice-versa." Bancroff replies by firing Cathcart.
- Crusading Lawyer: R.J. Rocklash and J. Harrington Savage sue Bancroff for pettily trying to prevent Cathcart from receiving an award after it's proven that eating sandrats prevents dehydration. They also file a class-action suit on behalf of the families of 162 people who died of thirst in various deserts after Bancroff's media campaign falsely claims that eating sandrats increases the chances of dying of thirst.
- Mutual Kill: Two FDA agents sent to enforce the ban on selling Sandrats shoot each other dead, apparently due to a debate about the morality of what they're doing.
- "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Cathcart makes quite a few biting, critical, and spot-on speeches criticizing Baumgartner and Bancroff.Cathcart: By these measures, the governing bodies of the so-called Interscience Federation reveal themselves as composed largely of sycophants, obsequious to an administrator who, as I have demonstrated, does not know what science is. These people may, of course, take their stand with whoever they wish. I will stand with Galileo.
- Reasonable Authority Figure:
- Chief of Medical Research Quincy Cathcart is introduced responding to Dr. Baumgartner's complaint that Robert Howland is harassing him over irrelevant data about how Sam Matthews survived in the desert. Catchart tells Baumgartner that this data is of great relevance and should be shared, and that Cathcart's Howland's equal and not his superior. Cathcart then follows up on the relevant information and supports conducting scientific tests to prove it and inform the public. When his findings are criticized by the stiff-necked scientific community, he refutes the allegations that his data was flawed in an angry, but logical and thorough, manner. Years later, when he's publicly vindicated and offered a lucrative research grant, he offers it to Howland, who did the actual initial testing under his direction.
- Colonel Presley J.J. Conrobert and Presley Mark, a pair of New Earth officials, discover Catchart's research while looking into a project about how to keep their men safe from dehydration. They quickly determine that Cathcart was right, easily prove how his superiors came to the wrong conclusion, and ensure that Catchart's research and reputation are vindicated.
- Reassigned to Antarctica: Dr. Baumgartner stubbornly insists Sam is delusional and refuses to share any information about what Matthews said about how he survived in the desert for two months. Baumgartner's superior, Quincy Catchart, wants that information badly and sends him a message threatening to reassign him to a one-man research station plagued by earthquakes and the hottest temperatures on the planet unless he changes his tune, noting that "this outpost has been untenanted for some time, as I have been unable to find anyone with the unique qualities desirable in the occupant of this station." Baumgartner continues being an Obstructive Bureaucrat, and is indeed transferred to that outpost, becoming dependent upon the survival tips that he mocked as delusions.
- Resigned in Disgrace: Bancroff quickly resigns due to "health reasons" after it's proven that his arrogance has kept him from acknowledging a life-saving discovery for years.
- Rules Lawyer: When storekeeper Hank J. Percival is forbidden from selling sandrats as an emergency supply to eat in the absence of water, he starts selling them as pets.
- Thirsty Desert: The Kalahell Desert is devoid of water. Being lost in it is considered a death sentence before the discovery that eating sandrats wards off dehydration.
- We Used to Be Friends: Robert Howland (Sam Matthews' boss) and Dr. Baumgartner are initially friendly in their correspondence, with Baumgartner calling Howland Bob. After Baumgartner refuses to release any information to help understand how Matthews survived in the desert (which could be used to save countless lives), their messages get terser. Howland makes a snippy comment about their "former friendship" and keeps shutting off the power to nonessential areas of Baumgartner's hospital to put pressure on him.
