It was strange how little we talked of the Knifers and their probable attack. We made arrangements for everybody to be roused, any night, but in general we went on the assumption that Jake’s story was substantially true and that we had ten days’ grace. We left detailed planning on our defense then until nearer the time, simply because with so much being done every day the situation at Saxham would be quite different in ten days.
The day after Jake delivered his warning Mil and Dave complained that now they’d have to wait until after the raid before going to Grantham to get married. That was a shock. I knew it was coming but hadn’t expected it nearly so soon.
“Mil’s a remarkable girl, Don,” Dave told me, sucking his pipe thoughtfully. “She makes you realize how nearly everybody spends ninety-five per cent of the time saying things he doesn’t mean. If it had been anybody else but Mil, we wouldn’t have been getting married for weeks yet. But she — ”
“I know,” I said. “She said that since it’s bound to happen sooner or later, the quicker you get into bed together the better.”
“Well, not that exactly. Though maybe that’s what she meant.”
“That’s certainly what she meant. The thing about Mil is, she doesn’t think in symbols. Never did. When most girls think of marriage, they think of a white wedding dress, a picture in the paper, the place where they’re going for the honeymoon, their trousseau, and an attentive male figure in the background, not quite in focus. Well, Mil realizes that since you and she are living in this house anyway, the only difference when you’re married is that you’ll sleep together. Reasonable, isn’t it?”
Dave couldn’t deny it, but he changed the subject hurriedly. Both with Mil and with me he sometimes seemed a little nervous not of what we were saying but of what we might say next. Dave’s thinking was straight enough, but even being married to Mil didn’t make him brutally frank like her.
Eva, of course, was the type of girl who thought of marriage in symbols. It would break her heart, I reflected, if she wasn’t married in a church, wearing a white dress.
During the next day or two I tried not to be alone with Eva very much. Her efforts were directed the other way. In fact, it was remarkable how quickly and completely she changed once she fancied herself in love with me. Instead of being shy and a little priggish, she seemed to throw all scruples out of the window and didn’t care how she got me, so long as she got me.
You often find that. If a girl doesn’t care about you, she acts like a book on etiquette crossed with a sermon on morality. If she does, her training doesn’t matter, she acts like a French tart.
And it’s a mistake. I think quite possibly in the next two days I’d have asked Eva to marry me if she had left well enough alone. But she didn’t. She pretended, of all things, to be the kind of gay, reckless playgirl whom she imagined I must admire.
Before Clare, which I found almost incredible, she carried on with me one of those half-arch, half-promiscuous conversational flirtations with which so-called sophisticated men and women while away a dull social occasion, meaning nothing very much by it. Only Eva obviously meant it all.
Working with Dave and me she talked incessantly and with forced gaiety, and the burden of her song was that since things were so terrible, surely it was justifiable for everyone to get as much fun as he or she could, regardless of what used to be considered right and wrong, and get some happiness out of life somehow.
In Mil’s presence she said weren’t things pretty dull around Saxham, and shouldn’t the girls try to brighten things up, shouldn’t they wear gayer clothes and make themselves look more attractive, why should everybody be so stuffy?
And she practically forced me to happen to find her on the flat roof of the east wing sun-bathing in a red two-piece swimsuit, which I strongly suspected her of modifying for the occasion. This, I gathered, as soon as I saw her, was supposed to be it.
If I hadn’t thought that, it probably would have been it.
It was quite warm, but hardly warm enough to make sun-bathing imperative. When she saw me Eva sat up quickly and reached for her jacket, then laughed and said: “It’s only you, Don.”
“Yes,” I agreed, “it’s only me.”
She left the jacket alone. “Do you like girls with a tan?” she asked anxiously.
“With or without,” I said. “But I don’t think you need worry about it yet.”
She looked up uncertainly, wondering if I meant that it was none of my concern whether she was tanned or not. She looked back at her white legs, was reassured, and laughed again.
“This country isn’t like America,” she said. “If you’re to get a tan at all, you have to take every chance. Like my costume?”
I could hardly help liking it, having imperfect control over my instincts. I might think, impersonally, that when we had such a big short-term problem on our hands as the Knifers, and an even bigger long-term problem like the paggets, it was hardly the time to act as if we were on vacation on the Riviera. But when a beautiful girl throws herself at your head, you can hardly help feeling she couldn’t have picked out a nicer fellow.
That’s why flattery so often pays off, I guess. If Eva had acted this way toward somebody else, I’d probably have thought harsh things about her. It being me, however, I couldn’t.
“Very nice,” I said.
“You don’t think it’s too …?”
I grinned. “Of course, but isn’t it meant to be too …?”
She colored but managed to laugh, still the gay, reckless playgirl.
“I suppose I asked for that,” she admitted.
“Listen, Eva,” I said, not unkindly, “I think you’ve got me wrong. I may have an American accent, but I’m not like the big, strong, love-’em-and-leave-’em he-men you’ve seen in the movies. I’m a quiet, peaceable, well-behaved citizen if I’m let. I don’t meet girls, look them up and down appraisingly, fling them across my saddle, and ride off with them into the desert five minutes after meeting them. I’m not scolding you, I’m just telling you so you’ll know.”
She took that more boldly than I expected. “Now I know,” she said, smiling, though her face was still pink. “There’s only one thing I can say to that. I love you, Don.”
She had disconcerted me in her turn. I tried not to show it. “That’s just it,” I said. “I don’t know if I love you.”
“When will you know?”
“Let’s wait and see, shall we? Remember, Eva, it’s only a week or two since Gloria died. My wife.”
I should have said that before. It enabled me to retreat in good order, and at the moment that was what I wanted to do.
“Oh, of course,” said Eva, dashed. “I forgot about that.”
She seemed to be searching for something suitable to say about Gloria. Before she could find it I said I had something to do and made my escape.
Funny, thinking of it as an escape — from a girl like that. I had no clear idea why I hadn’t taken Eva in my arms and said I loved her and all the other things she wanted me to say, unless it was because she was too blatantly asking me to do it, before I’d made up my mind.
I felt rather irritated when Mil asked bluntly, as she and I were going upstairs to bed that night, neither of us being on guard duty, why I didn’t marry Eva.
“It’s all very well for you and Dave,” I retorted. “It’s easy enough to decide something when there’s nothing very much against it.”
“Well, what’s against your marrying Eva?”
“I don’t know her.”
“But you’re not making much effort to get to know her. You avoid her instead of — ”
“So I do. Because Eva’s staying here, and so am I. A sailor can have a girl in every port because he can sail away and leave them behind. I can’t. See what I mean?”
Mil considered. “Something in that,” she admitted. “I suppose you could hardly … no, you couldn’t. Oh well, it’s your business.”
“That’s just what I was thinking,” I said tartly.
“All the same,” she murmured, “for a man who chose Gloria the first time — ”
“Shut up,” I said rudely, and in case she didn’t, went into my bedroom and closed the door. It was bad enough having Eva’s resemblance to Gloria to think about without Mil thinking about it too.
Dave and I were sleeping together. Parats very seldom got into the house, but there was no denying that an occasional one did, despite the dogs, the guards, and the practically sealed building. The rule that nobody slept alone still applied.
He was in bed, lying back, the empty pipe in his mouth as usual. I grinned at sight of it. Some people objected to smoking in bed, but nobody could object to Dave smoking his empty pipe. I tried to picture his pipe lit and couldn’t do it. I’d never seen it lit and possibly never would. Tobacco had been one of the first things to disappear. Some people smoked evil-smelling preparations of their own; most, however, decided gloomily it was tobacco or nothing.
“Don,” said Dave slowly, “I’ve been thinking. What’s going to be the end of this pagget business? The ultimate end?”
“I wish I knew.”
“I mean, are we going to kill them all off, in the end, or are they going to kill us off, or what?”
“Neither,” I said.
“Why not?”
“How could you ever kill off all the parats? They’re all over the world now. I don’t know whether it was blind luck or brilliance on their part, Dave, but from the beginning they did the right thing, the only thing for their own survival. They attacked not us so much as our communications, our machines. So that now we can see what we might have done against them, but we’re no longer in a position to do it.”
“What could we have done?”
“Exterminate them with every resource we used to have. Enclose areas so that nothing could escape, airlift everybody out, and gas the area. Plow up the ground paggets might be living in. Set fire to forests and prairies. Clear whole sections with flame throwers. Get the paggets on the run and keep them on the run. Pay a bounty for every pagget skin so that everybody who wasn’t in the official anti-pagget force would be hunting them on his own. Arm and train everybody so that when pagget and human met, the pagget would nearly always be killed. Breed and let loose all the natural enemies of rats, mice, cats, and dogs — we’d have a plague of them afterward, but we could deal with that. Gather in and guard anything the paggets could live on. Develop poisons, gases, weapons, techniques that could be used against paggets without harming human beings — ”
“But we can do all these things now.”
“No we can’t. We’ve thrown away our chance. We’ve let the paggets destroy our communications, put our machines out of action, break up our organization, get us on the run. And we’ve let them multiply so that now we can probably never destroy them all.”
Dave nodded. “Yet you don’t think they can destroy us?”
“No. We’re bigger and stronger than they are, after all. Mind, if they worked together they might beat us — but I don’t think they’ll ever do that. They hate each other too much.”
“There must be some answer.”
I’d been thinking about the problem longer than he had The effect was to make me less optimistic.
We’re so ingenious — or we used to be B.P. — that we’re inclined to think hardly anything is irreparable. Things are destroyed and they’re put together again better than they were before. A bridge falls — a better bridge is built, one that won’t fall. And we all remembered so well what things had been like B.P. that it seemed just a matter of repairing, rebuilding, renewing our mighty, leisured, safe civilization.
However, the paggets were more than just an incident. In five thousand years perhaps we’d have worked out how to live in peace with them, but short of that there didn’t seem to me much chance of returning to the pre-pagget world — Gloria’s world. If she had committed suicide, and perhaps in a way she had, it hadn’t been an insane thing for her to do. She couldn’t, by staying alive a year or five years longer, live through the emergency and reach a happy time when the paggets could be forgotten.
No, the world was and would be henceforth a different world from the one in which Gloria had been happy, and if people looked around it and didn’t like it, you could hardly call them insane for getting out of it.
“Islands, perhaps,” Dave mused. “Suppose we took a lot of people to some island — Arran, perhaps — and cleared every pagget from it …”
“You’d only have on a bigger scale,” I concluded, “what we can do here. Once we settle with the Knifers, I mean.”
Dave refused to be diverted, and perhaps he was right. The Knifers were certainly something to be reckoned with, but there had been pirate bands in many ages. That problem wasn’t new. True, it was quite possible that within two weeks Saxham might have ceased to be an independent entity and some of us might no longer have any interest in anything at all, but men had fought men all through history. This was the first time men had faced something bigger, more serious, than any struggle with their own kind.
“Then — is there any place where we can live and paggets can’t?” Dave wondered.
“You might have something there. But I doubt it. No, Dave, the only thing I’ve ever been able to think of is gas. Poison gas, lots of it. Human beings can wear masks, paggets can’t.”
Dave looked up with interest. “Why don’t they try that?”
“I expect it’s been tried — in fact, I’m certain it has. The trouble is, gas dissipates too easily. You’d need thousands of cylinders to clear a small island — and even then you wouldn’t have cleared it completely. You might kill thousands of paggets, but hundreds would be left …”
We talked in this fashion for a long time, dispassionately. That was something Mil, Dave, and I had in common. We didn’t get wild about the paggets, not any more. Getting wild did them no harm. In fact, they thrived on it.
We talked and got nowhere. Wells’s Martians had obligingly died off at the height of their power, when all mankind’s efforts against them had failed, but our paggets weren’t going to do anything so co-operative.