We drove to Boulogne without incident, arriving there in the early evening.
Ginette couldn’t drive a car, which explained her need for a companion. I’d been wondering — you trust people most when their motives are clear to you and for the moment, at least, similar to your own; and it hadn’t been at all clear to me why Ginette should want me to take her to England. The fact that she couldn’t drive explained everything.
Traveling on foot in pagget-infested country is risky if you’re a man, big, strong, and well armed. When you’re a girl weighing not much more than a hundred pounds it’s very near to being crazy.
One padog, that’s all it needs. Fifty pounds of concentrated ferocity — quite enough to knock you over, slash through your guard, and tear out your throat.
Ginette’s only safe method of reaching the channel ports was by car, and it would have been worth much more trouble to achieve her end than merely letting a man out of jail.
I never asked her how she got to Sambères, what her plans had been when she providentially witnessed my arrest, how she had so easily got me out of jail, and how she had been sure that the car she selected was ready for us to drive away. With Ginette I soon came to take such things for granted. Not that she was always right and always efficient — she wasn’t. But if she took the trouble to plan a thing, she generally took the trouble also to make sure that no tiny, stupid little detail was going to spoil the whole plan.
The car she had chosen was big, black, dirty, and old, and it was touch and go that I got it out of the back yard where it was parked before anyone could stop me — but the ignition key was in the switch and the motor started at the first touch on the button. From the time when we were five miles from the village we knew there would be no pursuit. There weren’t so many cars left in working order, anywhere, that there was much chance of pursuit. It gave me another twinge of conscience to reflect that the owner of the big black car, whoever he might be, had done a good job in keeping it safe from pagget sabotage, only to lose it to human predators against whom he had probably never thought to guard it, being a trusting soul.
“I guess it’s now established beyond doubt,” I said reflectively, as we bowled along a narrow, not too well surfaced road, “that I murdered my wife to be free to run away with you and that we’re both dangerous criminals.”
“Probably,” Ginette agreed indifferently. “I don’t think we’d better go back to Sambères, either of us, ever.”
I half turned to her in surprise, not because there was anything unexpected in what she said but because her tone was so normal, casual, almost friendly for once. However, when she saw my gesture she froze again.
I sighed. “Must you be prickly, Ginette?” I inquired.
“What do you mean, prickly?”
“Well, how about waiting till I make a pass at you before you slap me down for it?”
“I don’t think,” she said coldly, “that this discussion is leading us anywhere.”
“Knowing you,” I sighed, “I’m sure of it.”
She looked at me venomously but said nothing.
So nothing else happened until we reached Boulogne. I found there to my surprise and delight that not only would there be no difficulty about a passage to Dover the next day, but we could also take the car.
I’d have been even more delighted if I’d known that we’d procured a car for ourselves the only way that it remained possible to do so, and only just before that way became impracticable. Never afterward did I see any car in running order as easy to steal. True, we might have had our pick of hundreds of abandoned cars, and I might have been able to get one of them rolling, but generally cars weren’t abandoned when it was so easy to put them back into commission.
Boulogne was carrying on much as usual. It was a dull, dingy, uninteresting place, with none of the sparkle of the fashionable seaport towns. It smelled of seaweed and salt. The country round it, too, was flat and uninteresting, except for the hill down into the town. Admittedly I hadn’t seen France in the best possible circumstances.
The customs buildings, on the other hand, were almost aggressively modern, more like an airport terminal than the rest of Boulogne had led me to expect. And when I hesitantly investigated the possibility of getting to England I found that for once my poor French was no difficulty, and that the people I saw were rather surprised at my surprise that the ferries were still running. Why on earth shouldn’t they be? Pourquoi non?
It was natural enough, when one thought of it, that seaport towns should be less disorganized by the new circumstances than any other kind of town. There was plenty of fish; if trade stopped with one place, it could very quickly start with another. The Boulogne-Dover service was operating almost casually, as if world-wide communication was as easy and complete as ever. But for a few small differences, Boulogne belonged to the pre-pagget world.
Ginette found one of the differences, probably not for the first time. While I was finding out about transport to England, she had been trying to buy a raincoat — or at least she set out with that intention. But when I met her as arranged, she wasn’t the smart Parisienne I had left. Though she was alone, she obviously hadn’t been for long, or she would have made more progress in her work of restoration, and she would have had time to get her breath back, stop cursing savagely under her breath, and put away the little gun she had in her hand.
Her hair was over one eye, her dress was torn to the waist, where her belt had saved it from tearing further, her arms were scratched and bruised, one shoe was half a dozen yards away and there was a cut on her cheek. It wasn’t necessary for me to ask what had happened.
She pulled her dress together fiercely when she saw me, angry, defensive but clearly unhurt. “I can take care of myself!” she declared passionately, as if I’d been arguing with her.
“So I see,” I said, grinning. “I take it you haven’t lost your honor?”
“Don’t be a fool. I’d have shot them first.”
“Them? How many of them were there?”
“Two — sailors, I think.”
“Why didn’t you shoot them, anyway?”
“They ran away. Get this clear — I don’t ask for help.”
“All right,” I said, “be independent. Sure you wouldn’t like a pin?”
I produced two from my lapel and held them between my finger and thumb. She snatched them violently and effected temporary repairs. I must admit I rather enjoyed the situation. It was the first time since I had known her that Ginette had been at a disadvantage.
Still, it was a good thing she’d had that gun. I hadn’t known about it, certainly not that she’d been carrying it ready for instant use. The sailors couldn’t have known about it either. I watched with curiosity to see where she was going to put it. There had been no sign of it when I left her — her dress didn’t even have a pocket.
She caught my eye on her and turned away furiously. “Look away!” she said fiercely.
“No — I want to see where it lives,” I retorted, looking at the gun, which was still in her hand.
She brought it up and pointed it at me. “Turn round,” she said coldly.
I couldn’t let her get away with that. Even though I realized there was a distinct chance that she’d fire, I had to stand up to her or she’d become insufferable.
“No,” I said, and grinned at her. “Where does it live, Ginette?”
She capitulated with bad grace, thrusting the little gun down inside her slip. She must have sewn a pocket for it there.
“Utilitarian but uncomfortable,” I said. “Of course I never tried it myself — I couldn’t, could I? — but I should think it would be — ”
“Shut up,” she said rudely.
I didn’t, but I dropped the subject. I told her about the passage to England. “I think,” I added, “we should sleep in the car tonight, clear of the town.”
Her fury faded a little. “All right,” she said. “But when I agree to that, I’m not agreeing to — ”
“I know,” I said, sighing. “Pity you didn’t know my wife, Ginette.”
She looked at me suspiciously. “Why?”
“Oh, it just occurred to me that if you had known Gloria, you might not assume quite so quickly that I’m desperate to sleep with you.”
For a moment she looked like she would explode. Then a sense of humor which I hadn’t known she possessed asserted itself and she remarked, tartly as usual but with underlying appreciation of the point: “One to you, Page-Turner. Was she beautiful?”
I hesitated. My feelings almost got the better of me, but I managed to say briefly: “People used to think so. Come on, let’s get clear of this place.”
She looked at me curiously, and for a moment I thought she was going to say something out of character. Rather than do that, however, she said nothing.
We drove a few miles back the way we had come, then a little way off the main road. I chose the spot pretty carefully. We were spending the night outside Boulogne because of what people might do — there didn’t seem to be much law and we had rather a lot of money between us. However, by choosing that course, we were giving the paggets of France another, final, chance at us before crossing the channel and making the acquaintance of the English variety. Not that there was likely to be much difference. Paggets are international, differing only in experience.
I parked on a slight hill, a mere bump of land, on which we could see any paggets which approached or tried to get away from the car. I thought that would ensure peace for us. There should be a full moon, and any pagget approaching the car would run the risk of not being able to get away again.
“You can have the back,” I said.
“Thanks,” said Ginette without warmth.
She must have been tired. I had slept well the night before; Ginette quite possibly hadn’t had a good sleep for some time. At any rate, she fell asleep at once, probably before she really meant to, for she didn’t take time to wrap herself up much and the night was clearly going to be chilly. It was the time of year when the days were becoming quite warm, very warm sometimes, while the nights remained cold.
When I returned from a visit to some bushes at the bottom of the little incline, Ginette was curled up on the back seat, dead to the world, still in her torn dress. She couldn’t have much in the way of clothing with her, not in the small valise she carried. She had no coat.
I found a traveling rug in the boot, but only one. Opening the door at Ginette’s feet quietly, I looked down at her for some seconds. My thoughts weren’t very original, and I take no particular credit for them. I even tried to justify myself in advance, telling myself that if I did what I wanted to do, our alliance would be cemented, we’d be bound together more strongly, and all the rest of it.
It’s even possible that I was right. There were times later when I was sure of it.
Anyway, I wrapped her up gently — she didn’t stir — and tried to make myself comfortable in the front seat. It wasn’t very easy.
Suddenly what I had staved off all day hit me with all the force of something that waits, treacherously, for the best opportunity. I realized with more and more crushing certainty that Gloria was dead, that I would never see her again, that the children I’d always hoped we’d have, despite Gloria’s fear of childbirth, would now certainly never be born, and that if it was anybody’s fault that Gloria had died as she did, it was mine.
I found myself, to my horror and disgust, crying silently, a little for Gloria but more for myself. If there had been someone around, if Ginette had stayed awake, I’d have kept control of myself, but alone as I was there seemed nothing in the world but misery.
If I ever cried myself to sleep as a child I’ve forgotten it. I’m almost sure I never did. The first time it happened to me was there in that big old car, crouched uncomfortably in the front seats, with a girl I hardly knew sleeping in the back.
• • •
I wakened with a start, knowing something was happening but not sure what. It was a second or two before I even heard the hiss and felt the car settling. I sat up with a shout.
It was quite dark. The moon was hidden behind heavy clouds. I pulled my revolver from my pocket and jumped out of the car.
There was nothing to be seen, except the car settling on a completely flat front offside tire. No cats, no dogs, and if there were rats or mice they could have been watching from ten yards away and still I wouldn’t have seen them.
Ginette poked her head out of the window. “What’s the matter?” she asked, and the fact that she spoke in English indicated that she was more wide-awake than her voice sounded. By this time I’d heard her French, and it sounded nearly as good as her English.
“Maybe just a blowout,” I said grimly. “More probably paggets.”
We hadn’t a flashlight, and none of the car lights was positioned to let me see the tire. Ginette climbed out of the back of the car, shivering, the rug over her shoulders. I could hear her teeth chattering. The night wasn’t unduly cold, but far too cold for a single thick blanket to keep it out.
She held a hand mirror in front of one of the head lamps to show me the tire. The marks on the tire showed clearly enough that parats or pamice had bitten through it.
I swore, rather weakly. I knew swearing didn’t do any good, and I wouldn’t in normal circumstances have sworn as I did in front of Ginette. But even when they weren’t actually dangerous, the paggets could be utterly infuriating. They meant to be. They realized that even when they couldn’t harm us they could do our morale a lot of damage by simply making a nuisance of themselves, any way they could think of.
I think that as I stood in the dark and cursed, Ginette was for the first time afraid of me, or disgusted with me. She moved away, and there was caution as well as distaste in her movement. She had a temper herself, but she never simply stood and swore when things went wrong. Perhaps she was thinking that if I could lose control of myself so easily I was a much less desirable companion, in the circumstances, than she had thought.
I got control of myself at last. I said something which I knew would pass on some of my own annoyance to Ginette. “We’ll have to take the wheels inside with us.”
Ginette started indignantly. I’d noticed already how she hated dirt of any kind. “Inside?” she asked. “Those great, dirty — ”
“Otherwise,” I said with a certain satisfaction, “there’s nothing to stop the paggets ruining all the tires.”
I looked in the boot and found that as well as the spare which was there already, I’d be able to get two more wheels there. However, before I actually started to take off any of the wheels, I realized that that was no good. If there were going to be paggets around they could just as easily bite through the wiring, the gasoline feed, the radiator hoses, perhaps even the bottom of the gasoline tank, as they had through that tire.
One of us would have to stay awake.
I was already beginning to regret my weak, futile outburst in front of Ginette. Letting the paggets get me down like that was merely hurting myself for no reason.
You don’t swear at lions and tigers. They’re too big, too strong, too obviously dangerous. You expect lions and tigers to be a nuisance, or worse, and you don’t swear. You swear at little things, things that damage your self-esteem. I had sworn partly because I should have known parats would do that and should have stopped them doing it. And partly because for twenty-five years I had known of rats and mice as unimportant, no-account creatures who might make women scream but meant nothing to me.
I went back to Ginette. “Sorry, Ginette,” I said.
“For what?” she asked indifferently.
“You know exactly what I mean.”
“Do I? If you say so, I suppose you must be right.” She yawned.
I was tired too. “One of us will have to stay on guard,” I said bluntly.
Ginette accepted the verdict calmly, though it was even clearer now than it had been earlier that she was dead tired.
“I’ll take the first spell,” I said.
She hesitated. Her militant independence clearly made her reluctant to take advantage of the offer. She would have liked to throw it back in my teeth. But perhaps a realization that she wouldn’t be able to stay awake anyway made her acquiesce meekly.
For three hours I stamped round the car, trying to stay warm. I went back to cursing the paggets, knowing it wasn’t doing any good. But it passed the time.
• • •
The paggets at first had pretended to be harmless to human beings — they all individually saw for themselves, no doubt, that while there were only a few of them it would be suicidal to take the smallest overt action against men. It was only later, when there must have been little communities of them all over America — and in the case of the rats and mice at least, in Europe and Asia as well — that the battle began.
As soon as there were enough of them — and the gestation period of a rat is only about twenty-eight days, and even that of a bitch only sixty-two — there had been an immediate change of front. Human beings, after all, are the natural enemies of any other intelligent life form on this planet. We brook no competition. The paggets, without conferring with each other or with us, must have known that.
As soon as there were enough of them to accomplish anything, they began their offensive. Four offensives, in fact. Five for a very short time, but the pagget horses’ numbers had been too low, their gestation period too long, and their own bodies too big to hide, for them to remain in the field long. All, or nearly all, of the pagget horses had been killed. Those who were left, and there probably were a few in America, were no real menace. Unlike the smaller paggets, they were too easily hunted down and destroyed.
Of course the paggets fought each other too. That goes without saying. The dogs and cats remained hereditary enemies, and both waned viciously on the rodents, as I’ve said. Why I don’t put much emphasis on that is because human beings seldom saw any sign of it. For paggets of all kinds realized quite plainly that their main, their most dangerous enemy was man.
I never actually saw it happen, but it would be quite possible for a padog and two pacats, fighting savagely, to break off in order to knock down a human being and tear him to pieces, and then, having done so, resume their own battle to the death.
At first it had been a comparatively rare event for paggets to manage to kill people. True, we didn’t look on it that way at the time — we thought fifty or so deaths a week in the United States a pretty serious business. It was only later, when everyone knew somebody who had been killed by paggets, that we realized the actual killings by the paggets were probably less important, in the long run, than the more indirect damage they were doing.
The paggets learned things too. They began to understand the value of our communications to us, how dependent we were on our civilized way of life. And they acted on what they learned.
Almost overnight, the telephone became useless to us as a means of communication. Paggets all over every country had discovered how important wires were to us, and cut them. Hundreds of them bit through the wrong wires and were electrocuted, but that didn’t help us much. At first we tried to repair cables and telephone wires, but soon we realized that the job was too big for us and that the paggets had won that round, hands down. If we tried to restore telephone communication between, say, New York and Los Angeles, we would find that the line was severed in several thousand places between the two points. And by the time we had repaired every cut, there would be thousands more in the lines behind us.
There were some futile attempts to make wires the paggets couldn’t bite through, to impregnate them with poison, to bury them, but all these efforts were not merely useless but stupid. The paggets had quite enough intelligence to discover in every case what we had done, and how to counter it. And the lengths to which we were prepared to go showed plainly how serious we considered the damage.
The paggets’ anti-telephone campaign was only one thing — yet what a far-reaching thing it was. We could still use radio communication, but only for important messages. There weren’t nearly enough transmitters to take over even a significant fraction of telephone communication. And there were soon fewer, for the paggets, learning by experience, started an all-out offensive against all wires. They found ways of cutting power lines with no danger to themselves, ways we couldn’t beat. They even discovered how to short power lines, and that done, they could tear the harmless cables to pieces.
Think how important wires were to us. Most of our machines, our power, our communications depended on wires. It did no good to substitute anything else for wires — what was substituted was generally just as vulnerable to the paggets.
I needn’t detail all the ways in which paggets had made a nuisance of themselves, up to that time. Just think of intelligent cats, dogs, rats, and mice, millions of them, certainly not working together but with the same general aims, working to topple humanity’s huge, clumsy civilization. They probably didn’t know that was what they were doing, but that didn’t make things any easier for us.
There was a lesson in how they handled the birds. That didn’t concern us directly, but they handled it in the same forthright, efficient way. Some species of birds were deadly enemies of rats and mice. So they found the nests and destroyed the eggs. Without managing to wipe out birds altogether, the parats and pamice reduced their numbers till they represented practically no menace to them. Birds might have become extinct altogether if they hadn’t been able to nest on some small islands which parats and pamice hadn’t been able to get to. Apart from these islands, the birds could find few places for their nests which rats or mice couldn’t reach.
What happened to the birds should have been due warning to us. The paggets didn’t have to be organized. They did well enough without organization.
I tired myself out stamping about, thinking about the paggets and cursing them. Though I’d have liked to let Ginette sleep, my chivalry wasn’t equal to it. After three hours I wakened her, refusing to notice how tired and stiff she was, and curled up in the back of the car.
It was delightfully warm. And perhaps it was the faint, feminine smell she left behind her that made me half dream, half imagine that Gloria was beside me as I slept.