Having seen the car disposed in Dave’s friend’s garage, and having heard his detailed explanation why it was reasonably safe, I no longer felt the slightest surprise at the scarcity of vehicles. The paggets of England were learning what the paggets of America had known long ago. It was only to be expected.
There were at this stage no padogs or pacats to be seen within the city of London. They preyed to some extent on the outskirts, their limit of penetration extending only a little further inward at night. The reason for this was obvious: any dog or cat, pagget or otherwise, was outlaw, obligatory game for any able-bodied human being. By this time ordinary dogs and cats were virtually extinct, anyway. Any dog or cat you saw was a pagget.
A pagget dog or cat which showed itself, say, two miles within an urban area was virtually doomed. It might get away from the first groups of people who saw it, but the cries, shouts, screams, and whistles which rent the air in its wake were generally sufficient to band together an efficient anti-pagget force somewhere on its escape route.
Dogs and cats, therefore, were no danger in the center of a city like London. They had too great a distance to penetrate. It wasn’t worth it. Paggets were courageous enough, in some ways much more courageous than their less intelligent ancestors had been, but they loved life more than non-pagget animals, and any risks they took had to be reasonable, with some hope of gain. If you made it clear to them that something was so dangerous that they’d probably die if they attempted to do it, they’d prudently withdraw.
Parats and pamice, on the other hand, overran the city. There was virtually no electricity left. Electricity was far too vulnerable to paggets. No telephones were in regular, continuous use. No food could be left in anything more vulnerable than metal boxes, and fairly tough ones at that. No water cisterns were safe: the parats had an unpleasant habit of perforating all tanks just to be a nuisance. No gas supply could be regarded as assured. Many houses, about seventy-five per cent, still had their gas supply, but at any moment paggets might sever it somewhere, probably in several places once they got round to it. Lead was no protection against rats. They could eat it away if it was thick. If it was thin, they simply bit through it.
And cars, like the gas supply to houses, were being put out of action one by one. Dave’s friend’s garage was concrete, with no windows, a concrete floor and steel doors which he had acquired from somewhere recently and used to replace the original wooden, highly vulnerable, doors. One would have thought Dave’s friend, whose name, I think, was Liverage, would still be running his car, since his garage was so safe; but a garage is only one end of the two all journeys have, and from one such journey it hadn’t returned.
You had to leave your car untended sometimes, or it was no use to you. Looking outside to make sure it was still there did no good at all — there might be an army of paggets under the bonnet. On any one journey the chances of pagget sabotage were slight. However, as you went on using your car, pagget damage became more and more likely. Eventually, inevitable.
What could paggets do? The commonest thing, of course, was severing wiring. The paggets had discovered, however, that this generally caused only a temporary breakdown. Now they were removing whole sections of wiring and dropping it down sewers. Cable was becoming difficult to obtain … a car temporarily damaged might have to be left while its owner went in search of cable, and when he returned he was quite likely to find it permanently damaged. Holing the gasoline tank or the gasoline feed was another simple expedient — the paggets, though they never understood human machines, generally found very rapidly by trial and error how to put them out of action. Tearing radiator hoses to pieces was also very simple. Ripping the tires to ruin was the work of a moment. Given time, parats could sever tough brake cables.
That was how car after car was going out of commission. If you were a fair mechanic and had plenty of materials and means to guard them, you could keep your car on the road. Short of that, you hadn’t much chance. Those who could do major jobs on cars were kept busy with essential vehicles; the trucks which brought food supplies, doctors’ cars, water wagons which supplied areas in which pagget pipe-bursting activity had been heavy, police cars — for, sad to say, it was proving very difficult to maintain some semblance of order.
Ginette and I wandered about in the gloom, finding such things out for ourselves. There was no street lighting any more, of course, but on this particular night there was a full moon and a cloudless sky, and we didn’t miss the street lamps. Everywhere we saw abandoned cars, many looking brand new and perfect. Investigation showed, however, that most of these cars would probably never run again, though there was little wrong with them by pre-pagget standards.
That was why we’d seen so few cars. Of the five million vehicles in the country, how many were still running? A hundred thousand? Ten thousand? It was anybody’s guess.
“That’s what we’ll have to watch,” I mused after one such investigation. “Wires first, to put the car temporarily out of commission. One parat can attend to that. Then, when you go for help, gasoline tank and radiator hoses. When you come back you can repair the wiring, but you need gasoline and you can’t drive very far without water — you may just have to abandon the car …”
Ginette, with feminine ignorance of mechanical matters, was impatient. “If we can’t go by car, we walk,” she said indifferently.
“Maybe. London to Cambridge is an hour and a half at most by car, with no heavy traffic to make it difficult. Two days on foot — perhaps.”
She seemed impressed by this, obviously not having seen it that way before.
We walked in silence for a bit, still arm in arm. Presently I said: “Ginette, are you married?”
“No,” she said laconically.
“Going to be?”
“Oh, I expect so, someday.”
“What’s the matter with me?”
“Are you proposing to me?”
“No, that’s not what I meant. I mean, you act as if I had leprosy or something.”
She was silent.
“What don’t you like about me?” I persisted.
Again she stayed silent for a while, and I thought she wasn’t going to answer me at all. But at last she said: “Your wife died yesterday morning — even yesterday you didn’t seem to care. And now — she might have been dead five years for all she seems to mean to you.”
This seemed to me to be hitting below the belt. I felt sick, a little angry at the suggestion, but more hurt, disappointed, disgusted, indignant. I’d spent the two days fighting against the loss of Gloria and was only too glad I’d been fairly successful.
“I always knew you didn’t mind what you said, Ginette,” I said in what I hoped was a reasonably well controlled voice, “but I never thought you had a nasty mind.”
“Nasty mind!” she exclaimed indignantly. “Why — ”
“I’m not going to talk about it. If you can’t shut up, find your own way home. Another thing. I’ve been sorry you were leaving us tomorrow. I’d hoped to be able to persuade you to come on and perhaps settle with us. But if that’s the way your mind works, the sooner we get rid of you tomorrow the better I’ll be pleased.”
“Well, isn’t that what I’ve been saying all along?”
“Oh yes. Only now we’re both of the same mind.”
A little defensively, she reverted to the earlier topic. “Well, if you do care about your wife, you certainly never gave any sign of it.”
“You’d think I was trying to be sarcastic, I suppose, if I told you I cried myself to sleep last night?”
“Well … wouldn’t you be?”
“I told you I didn’t want to talk about it.”
“If you said you really cared about your wife, I’d believe you.”
“Why should you? You apparently want to think I don’t, since you believed it so readily.”
“You don’t argue like a man who really cares.”
My temper flew to the winds and I did what I’d often wanted to do. I whirled and slapped Ginette as hard as I could. It sounded like a whipcrack, and she staggered and nearly fell under the force of it.
“Thank you,” she gasped. “That was all that was needed.”
She turned and would have run off into the night, but I caught her arm. “Go if you like, but be ready tomorrow,” I said. “FU take you to Cambridge, I told you — as a duty.”
“Let me go!” she exclaimed, furious.
She didn’t expect me to, apparently. When I did, she staggered again and seemed a little uncertain what to do, though still furious. Even in the moonlight I could see her cheek going dull red.
“Go if you like,” I said wearily. “I looked for you once, but I won’t again.”
Still she hesitated. I took a grip on myself. I was angry, but I hadn’t forgotten anything, and I knew that if she disappeared into the night and I never saw her again I’d blame myself later for not doing what I could to bestow her safely.
“All right,” I said. “Let’s go back, and not talk.”
She took me at my word. We walked back together, without touching each other, without saying a word.
I soon realized that I hadn’t been as blameless in the quarrel as I’d have liked to believe. Ginette couldn’t be blamed for thinking I hadn’t cared much about Gloria.
In fact, through the brief quarrel I’d been more to blame than Ginette. Much more. She had been the one who was reasonable, I the one who got angry without just cause. It seemed unfair, because when we weren’t quarreling she said all sorts of things I might get angry about, but never did, and yet when we had a fight I was in the wrong.
I’d have admitted it, only I told myself Ginette wouldn’t be magnanimous in reconciliation. If I apologized, it would only start the quarrel again. Some people are like that. You can start a quarrel with them, but you can never make it up afterward. The best you can do is pretend nothing ever happened.
So when we reached Leverage’s house it was still in the same stubborn silence, with me twice as upset by the quarrel as I’d have been if Ginette had been in the wrong, not me, and not nearly as ready to make it up.
I should understand Ginette, for I was capable of the same obstinacy and resentment, even if it didn’t happen to me as often as it happened to her. I made a strong resolution never to let it happen again.
Everybody knows how much such resolutions are worth.