We found without surprise in the morning that the ignition leads were bitten through, despite our all-night watch. There were circumstances in which that could have been the last straw, but to me at least things looked so much better after a few hours’ sleep that I joined and taped the leads quite cheerfully, thinking it might have been worse.
I found that though I couldn’t exactly forget Gloria and the fact that I had lost her so recently, I could push the loss to the back of my mind, like something unpleasant which I should soon have to attend to, something I could ignore for the time being.
I was quite in charity with Ginette, too, for she had prepared quite a respectable breakfast from what she and I had had with us. I had had rabbit meat, she bread and sausages.
Despite all that had happened, she looked once more as if she had stepped straight from a Paris salon. She had changed into another dress, another outfit which was smart rather than suitable for the circumstances. Characteristically, she had slept in her torn dress to keep the other one fresh and neat.
“We’ll be in England in an hour or two,” I said.
She looked at me with that half-suspicious, half-sarcastic expression with which she greeted any unnecessary remark. “So I imagined,” she said dryly. “Why, have you only just decided to go to England?”
I took her a little into my confidence. “I was going to England even before I met you,” I said. “I have a sister in Rutland. What are you going to do, Ginette? Are you coming with me?”
She hesitated. I got the impression she’d have liked longer to consider the matter but didn’t want me to know it. “No,” she said quickly.
I shrugged. “Oh, well. That’s your affair. Let’s get on our way, then.”
We drove down the hill into Boulogne, which looked even dirtier and less prepossessing than it had the night before, and onto the boat. The space for cars was a horseshoe — you drove right round the boat and finished with your car pointing at the ramps you’d just come down. There was room for three cars abreast, but there weren’t enough cars to make more than one line.
I paid for our passage in U.S. money, bullied into doing so by Ginette. When she found that dollars would be accepted she kicked me, jogged my elbow, and generally forced me into paying dollars, without letting me say anything in front of the stolid, middle-aged woman who accepted the money.
“Are you crazy?” I demanded afterward. “When can I get dollars again? They’re the most stable currency — everybody wants them — ”
“Then get rid of them while you can, idiot,” said Ginette rudely, “before everybody gets some sense. There are still a few ships crossing the Atlantic — but when they stop, what good are dollars going to be? What good are they now, for that matter?”
After we’d discussed the matter a little longer, we went and changed all our remaining dollars and francs into English pounds on the boat. It looked to me as if it was a case of making up our minds where we were going to stay — for keeps. And England it would have to be, for me. Ginette carefully worked out her share and handed it over. She was the kind of person who would never borrow money.
She had brains, though. She was right about the dollars.
After all my caution, it was an anti-climax almost galling to find that nobody looked at my passport at all. The customs examination was a farce, too. Perhaps passports were still being examined, and we just happened to slip through. But if I’d thought that there was a chance of that happening before embarkation for America, I’d at least have considered going there instead of to England.
And after considering it, I’d still have gone to England. America would never be safe for me. After what it had done to me, I wasn’t sure I wanted to go back there anyway, ever.
The crossing was rough, but Ginette and I stayed on deck, leaning on the rail, partly because neither of us would go under cover while the other was prepared to stay out in the open.
As we leaned on the rail, the wind whipping our faces, Ginette said, apropos of nothing: “I wonder if we’re overestimating the paggets.”
I shook my head definitely.
“Surely what they can do is limited, after all,” she went on, talking to herself rather than to me. “We won’t let them disorganize us like this for long.”
“You tell me all they can do, then.”
“Kill an occasional individual, cut most power and telephone lines, weaken or destroy a bridge here and there, terrify people who’re prepared to be terrified — what else?”
“Eat all our food,” I said.
She nodded slowly. “I suppose so.”
“And that could be serious,” I remarked. “Starvation has been known to kill people.”
“Don’t be sarcastic,” she snapped — she could never stand anybody else being sarcastic. “But suppose we can safeguard our food supplies. We’ll have to do that somehow. If we can, what else can the paggets do?”
“Multiply until they can overcome us by very numbers.”
“We’ll just have to stop them doing that,” she said impatiently.
“How?”
“What do you mean, how?”
“Just what I say,” I retorted gently. “How can we possibly stop the paggets multiplying? There isn’t going to be any convenient disease like myxomatosis to kill off cats, dogs, rats, and mice and not humans. If there was only one species there might be a chance of that. Poison’s futile — they’ve got enough sense to test any suspect food supply. And it’s no good everybody vowing to kill a pagget a day. It wouldn’t work.”
“Why not?” Ginette demanded.
“Take France. Say it has a hundred million paggets, all kinds. That’s five hundred a square mile — ”
“There aren’t as many as that.”
“Sure? Anyway, if there aren’t, there soon will be. Rats can have a litter a month.”
She shuddered.
“Very soon,” I said inexorably, “there’ll be five thousand paggets in every square mile.”
She stared at me incredulously.
“Then fifty thousand,” I went on. “Then — ”
“But … we just can’t let that happen.”
I shrugged. Ginette was no mathematician, obviously. She couldn’t see how much more quickly the paggets could reproduce themselves than we could hope to destroy them. Only one thing had kept the pagget total as low as it still was — the fact that the four species were fighting each other as well as us.
“There’s another thing the paggets can do,” I said. “Something we haven’t mentioned.”
“What’s that?” she asked sharply, angry with me because I kept saying things she didn’t want to hear.
“Learn,” I said.
“Learn?”
“All we’ve mentioned so far concerns the paggets as they are now. We’ve made no allowance for their inexperience. True, as they are now they shouldn’t be beyond us. But I think they’ll develop. I’m sure they will.”
It was Ginette’s natural impulse to say things couldn’t be so because she didn’t want them to be so, but she had a certain fundamental honesty that wouldn’t let her. It was a new idea to her, apparently, and not a pleasant one either, that the pagget menace could quite easily increase in quality as well as quantity. She wanted to say it was nonsense, yet she couldn’t.
“Aren’t they supposed to be as clever now as they ever will be?” she asked, almost sulkily.
“Oh yes, just as a boy of sixteen has all the intelligence he’s ever going to have. He still has a lot to learn. Maturity and experience make a big difference to him, and the same things may make a big difference to the paggets.”
“But they don’t live as long as we do, any of them,” said Ginette angrily. “A lot of them must already have reached their full — ”
“I’m not talking about individuals. You know there was a time when mankind couldn’t, or didn’t, use fire. A time before the wheel had been discovered. Yet, once discovered — ”
“You think the paggets are going to learn the same way as human beings did?”
“Why on earth shouldn’t they?”
She paused for a moment, thinking. “Can they communicate — pass things on to each other?”
“Certainly — they don’t talk, but you don’t have to talk to pass information on. You can demonstrate. So can the paggets. I’ve seen them do it.”
There was a long pause. Then Ginette said, as offensively as she could: “You seem to know a hell of a lot about paggets.”
I grinned. “Let’s walk,” I suggested.
We walked round the ship, not saying a word. Ginette was blue with cold, but she refused to suggest going inside and I wouldn’t, either. Every moment you were with Ginette was a contest. I wondered again what had made her so prickly, so resentful, so aggressive. She was never on the defensive because she always attacked first.
Perhaps it was because she’d always had to look after herself. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-two or twenty-four at most, yet obviously she wasn’t in the habit of looking to anyone, male or female, young or old, for assistance. The world had rubbed her nose in the dirt, perhaps, with the result that she trusted nobody any more.
Her smartness wasn’t designed to attract, it stemmed from pride. It was obvious now why she had released me as she had done, under the terms she had laid down. She’d never ask anyone to do anything for her — she’d get in the superior position somehow, as chance had given her the opportunity to do with me, and tell people what she wanted done.
“Parents dead, Ginette?” I asked casually, as we came back to our starting point and leaned against the rail again.
She stiffened. She wanted to tell me to mind my business, but before she spoke even she realized that that was unnecessarily ungracious. “Yes,” she said laconically.
She expected me to say more, to ask more questions, so I didn’t.
“Come on,” I said with what was meant to be blunt good humor, “let’s pretend we’re friends, Ginette.” I put my arm round her shoulders and pulled her against me, taking care I did it as a brother might have done, not as a lover. I felt her resist for a moment, then decide once more that it would be unnecessarily unfriendly to object. I was big enough, and she was small and thin enough, for my protection against the elements to be not inconsiderable.
So we stood clasped together looking like lovers, at least.
“Why do you know so much about the paggets, Don?” Ginette asked with forced mildness.
It was a peace offering. She had been annoyed that I had known more than she did, and because I told her things she didn’t want to hear. Having decided that it was unreasonable to be angry with me on that account, she forced herself to make peace.
“I’m an American,” I began.
“I know that,” she interrupted, with a flash of her old sarcasm. “I didn’t imagine you were a Hindu.”
“I knew about the paggets from the start,” I said, ignoring the interruption, “long before they got out of hand.”
She looked up at me with new interest. “What was it like? What happened? When did they start?”
“Well, a man called Paget, a psychologist-biologist-radiologist, stumbled on the process — you know that. There was never any plan to produce intelligent animals — discoveries like this seldom happen that way. All Paget was doing was testing and classifying the effects of different vibrations and radiations on animal tissue and nerve cells. He wasn’t investigating the brain at all at the time of this discovery. In that kind of research you simply note down patiently everything which is exactly as you expected, follow up the one case in five thousand which isn’t quite as expected, and in one case in five hundred thousand you may discover something important which hasn’t been known before. Only when you do, probably you don’t realize you have anything except something rather surprising that doesn’t seem to have any obvious application, and ten years later somebody else, working on your published conclusions, as well as those of everybody in the same field, finds what you missed and gets all the credit.
“Well, the details of Paget’s process are either lost or suppressed, I don’t know which. But what he did was produce, once in two hundred throws, a cat, dog, rat, mouse, or horse which could remember — that was the way the discovery was regarded at first.”
Ginette frowned. “Someone once told me the original paggets were exactly like the ones we have all over the world now.”
“If they were, they certainly didn’t act that way at first. They acted like ordinary animals except that when you were training them they only had to be told or shown a thing once or twice instead of fifty to a hundred times. Paget put them in traps that they had to figure out, and they didn’t show up much better than ordinary specimens. But show them once how to do the thing, whatever it was, and they got the idea at once.
“Free paggets were breeding long before the nature of the beasts was known. They kept escaping, and Paget had to have new cages made. It was still memory rather than intelligence they had, or so everybody thought. The paggets remembered that someone did something at the side of their cages, and the front opened. So they scraped and fiddled round the corner of the cages until something happened. Or they’d remember something in the routine of feeding them that gave them a chance to escape. By ones and twos over weeks, months, they got away — mice, rats, cats, and dogs. I guess that even if Paget had given up then and killed all his specimens, we’d still have had this pagget trouble, only it would have taken longer.”
“I must say,” observed Ginette tartly, “these people seem to have been pretty careless about their specimens.”
I sighed. “It’s easy to be wise after the event, I suppose, but I guess you’re right. I don’t know the details — perhaps they were careless, but after all, no one would have thought then that it mattered much, a few rats, cats, and dogs getting out of a laboratory. Anyway, few of the important ones did. Most of the animals that got away were second-stage paggets — and nobody knew that their offspring were going to be the paggets we know today.”
Ginette merely grunted, unconvinced.
“Gradually,” I went on, “Paget and his helpers began to realize that there was more than memory in the paggets’ new abilities. And the rest of the world began to get interested. Paggets were sent all over the world for study. There began to be little paragraphs in the papers about them, mostly flippant and frivolous. ‘Talking mice next?’ the newspapers asked. ‘Your dog may be smarter than you!’ A pepper mint firm ran a series of pagget ads. Hollywood got hold of some paggets and rushed out some films — ”
“I saw one of those,” said Ginette. “I’ve always wondered since how they kept the paggets under control.”
“Paggets aren’t crazy. Anything but. If a pagget sees it has to behave, it’ll behave. It was only when they knew there were thousands of them that they started acting like the paggets you know.”
She moved against me uneasily. I thought she was trying to get away and slackened my grasp round her shoulders. But it wasn’t that. She even snuggled against me more closely. I wondered if this was a permanent thaw.
When she spoke, there was no change of subject, however. “Do they know how many of them there are?”
“I think in a vague way they must. When there are enough of them, we’ll have to get used to parats swarming all over us in their hundreds — ”
Perhaps I introduced the idea rather abruptly, and it wasn’t exactly a pleasant idea to introduce anyway. At any rate, it was too much for Ginette, and I realized that what had been making her wriggle uneasily was internal disorder, brought on partly by the motion of the ship, no doubt, and partly by the chill sea air.
With next to no warning, she vomited over the side. “Go away!” she croaked. “Leave me in peace!”
Realizing that she really meant it, that she didn’t mind being sick so much as my being there to see it, I beat a retreat. I wondered how much of it was seasickness, and how much was owing to the mention of parats swarming all over us.
I wasn’t exactly pleased that Ginette was sick, but I couldn’t help gloating a little that I wasn’t, and because, when all was said and done, Ginette was always so militantly independent that it was only natural to gloat a little when anything like this happened.
I knew better than to gloat in her presence, however, or even mention the matter again. After twenty-four hours in my company, Ginette was at last thawing a little. She had been talking to me without quarreling, she had let me put my arm round her, she had called me Don, and she had at times spoken so mildly that I could see us becoming quite friendly in no time at all.
We had hardly landed at Dover when Ginette, still rather pale but otherwise recovered from her sickness, gathered her things together and said briefly: “You can let me out here. Good-by.”
I stopped the car. I could hardly believe I’d heard her aright, she spoke so coldly and abruptly. I wondered, fleetingly, if she was annoyed with me because she had been sick. With Ginette, that was very likely.
“Let you out?” I repeated stupidly.
“That’s what I said.”
“Just like that?”
“Just like that,” she said flatly.
“Can’t I even take you a little on your way?”
She hadn’t said, so far, where in England she intended to go.
“You’re going to Rutland.” But she still didn’t volunteer where she was going.
Dover is on the southeast tip of England. To go almost anywhere on the island it’s necessary to go northwest. If she was going any distance at all she’d have to go through Tonbridge, Maidstone, or Chatham, and it didn’t matter to me which way I went.
“Why are you so bloody independent, Ginette?” I asked, suddenly annoyed.
“It’s the only way to be in this world,” she retorted.
I don’t lose my temper easily — or get it back easily, once I’ve lost it. I was annoyed partly because I’d been telling myself Ginette was warming to me, and here she was back to her worst again. Partly because it was so ridiculous that Ginette should be so unfriendly without my having given her cause. Partly because sheer male conceit made me dislike her independence, made me feel she should be asking for my help, or advice at least, instead of insisting so coldly that she needed neither.
And perhaps there were other reasons too.
“You can only be independent if people let you,” I said angrily.
“What gave you that idea?”
“I could keep you with me if I liked.”
“That’s not worth answering,” she said disdainfully.
“Maybe not, but it’s true. I can do what I like with you, Ginette.”
“I can see no point in continuing this discussion. Already I like you a lot less than when you started it. Good-by, I said.”
I hadn’t fallen in love with Ginette, not in the twenty-four hours I had known her. But I had grown used to her, I liked her to be around despite the rather obvious fact that she wasn’t the friendliest person in the world, and finding Mil was still highly hypothetical. I didn’t want Ginette to leave me, particularly like this.
Because I was angry, instead of trying to be persuasive I grabbed her arm and said fiercely: “You’ll go when I let you go, not before.”
Ginette merely looked at me coldly, with steely patience. She didn’t speak, not until I became a little ashamed of myself and let her go.
“Thank you,” she said frostily then. “That’s very kind of you.”
“Don’t be a little fool, Ginette. Where are you going?”
“Meaning you’ll take me there?”
“Meaning I might, if I knew where it was.”
“In view of this chivalrous demonstration of yours,” she said bitingly, “I’m even more certain I was right the first time.”
We didn’t speak another word as she picked up her valise, opened the door of the car, got out, slammed the door, and walked away.
I was still furious. I had half offered to take her anywhere she liked, and she had spurned the offer. It didn’t occur to me then that the car, which we had stolen, certainly, but which was ours now, was as much Ginette’s as mine, and that if I was going to take it Ginette had every right to expect to be taken to her destination first, without any condescension on my part.
It didn’t occur to me either that Ginette, having been unusually mild and friendly a short time before, was all the more likely to be prickly again later — because Ginette was like that. I didn’t reflect that, Ginette being Ginette, I’d probably have to wait an hour or two before she was again a few degrees above freezing.
I didn’t remind myself that when Ginette had been unreasonable before, I’d made a joke of it instead of losing my temper, and she hadn’t been immune to an appeal to her sense of humor.
No, all I thought about was that Ginette was walking out of my life, and on her terms, not mine. I pictured myself going after her, bundling her violently into the car, and taking her with me like a cave man carrying off his mate. I enjoyed the picture. I didn’t have to worry about consequences, for I was pretty sure no one would be much concerned any more about any girl’s story that she had been abducted. If I made Ginette come with me, the only danger I’d have to watch out for was Ginette. Which, admittedly, was enough.
It was ridiculous, stupid, insane, insufferable that she should walk away like that. I remembered the incident of Boulogne. Ginette wasn’t going to get far before the business started at Boulogne was finished. Then what? After that had happened two or three times, her attitude was bound to change, I figured. She would realize the advantages to a woman in these times of the protection of a man, a strong man, whether there was any sex in the relationship or not. She would …
But through my anger I realized that Ginette was never going to change, really. People carry round two patterns of life with them, the more obvious one being the way they act toward others, and the much less obvious one being the way others act toward them. When a man gets to hate his groove and goes somewhere else where things are going to be different, so different, pretty soon he finds that he’s not only in a groove again but it’s the same groove.
Ginette might be broken, her pride and independence humbled by the things that were going to happen to her, but it wasn’t really likely. I was forced to the reluctant realization that she could afford to walk out of my life as she had just done, and that she would continue to make of her life what she wanted, not what anyone else tried to impose on her.
And with that conclusion my resentment faded and I started the car with sudden urgency. I no longer wanted to force Ginette to go with me, but I did want to make it possible for her to find me or for me to find her. We had experienced enough together in twenty-four hours for that, surely.