I don’t know the end of the Saxham story, and I don’t want to. I sincerely hope it never ends. There’s certainly not going to be a fairy-story end, with pumpkins turning into coaches and Cinderellas into princesses. Short of that, so long as the Saxham story goes on, and on, and on, we’ll be content.
I’ve stopped thinking about what’s happening in America. If any country, any state, any group, ever became really strong, really contemptuous of what paggets could do, we’d hear about it. The mere fact that nobody in Britain has heard anything from America for a long time except occasional short-wave broadcasts would be quite enough to show that America is no better off than Europe — and the broadcasts themselves tell us that America is faring no worse.
No, I can’t write Paggets are no more. I can’t even say that there’s any indication paggets ever will be cleared from the face of the earth. All I can say, and I’m glad enough to say that, is that here at Saxham we’re more than holding our own.
It took about a month after the fighting against the Knifers to transform Saxham into a living, working community with a future to look forward to. It was a week before we all knew each other, another week before we really felt secure.
Two weeks at this particular period in the disintegration of human civilization was a very long time indeed. We saw Grantham go from its last pretense of civilization to complete barbarity — in two weeks. After that we went to Melton, which lasted about a month longer as an outpost of human dignity.
Among us, two weeks was long enough to set up a tradition. We were safe and comfortable at Saxham and would always be safe and comfortable — because we had survived for two weeks.
We realized in those very significant fourteen days that what was wearing everybody else down was the constant pressure. If you could relax for a few hours, feel safe for a few hours, your bitter-cruel-selfish-insane determination to live faded and you could think of love, kindness, beauty, pleasure, children, friendship, comfort.
Take the case of Laurie and Loretta. Until the Knifers were cleared from our path, hardly anyone ever had a kind word or a glance for those two, not even Mil had any time for them. We ignored them, we brushed them out of our way, gently, of course, but hardly noticing they were there.
Afterward, they would have been thoroughly spoiled if Mil hadn’t taken a hand and made sure they didn’t get too much attention.
“Watch Ginette and me,” said Mil sternly. “We’re the only two who don’t treat them like toys, just because there are so few children around. Want them to grow up little dictators?”
It had afforded me infinite glee to hear Ginette addressed as “Aunt Ginette,” but I knew better than to tease her about it.
Mona didn’t die, after all.
Everybody had given her up. Even Jenny Mulpeter shook her head when she’d seen her and I asked if Mona had any chance. I had hesitated then, wanting to ask if we should put an end to her pain, but not knowing Jenny well enough at the time to decide how to express the idea.
We let Mona linger on because nobody had the courage to give her the relief she wanted, that’s the plain truth of the matter. Yet as it happened, we were right. She teetered on the edge of death, as Eva had done for a second or two while I was trying to pump life back into her, only Eva had gone over the edge and Mona came back. If anyone else ever asks me to give him that kind of relief, I’ll be even less able to do it than in Mona’s case. Once nobody would have given two cents for Mona’s chances, yet just the other day she had her first baby.
That’s going a long way ahead, though.
I went to see her, once we knew she was going to come through after all, and said: “Well, how about it now, Mona?”
She grinned weakly. “Don, if I knew I had to go through that again, I’d jump off the tower first. You know, I lie here all day and gloat just because there’s no pain any more. You folks don’t realize how lovely it is, just to feel no pain.”
“I was in Grantham the other day. You wouldn’t have had much chance if you’d stayed there, Mona.”
“What’s it like?”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. You’ll have to see it for yourself. And you will see it for yourself, now.”
She sighed. “Yes, it’s good to be alive. Surprising, but good.”
Dave meantime was spending his convalescence patiently working with the two captive padogs. He’d called them Him and Her. At first they had to be very carefully guarded, of course. Soon, however, Dave was trying the experiment of letting one of them free while the other was kept under close guard. We were all pleased to find that though there was still no sign whatever of padog affection for human beings, Him and Her had a very considerable affection for each other. It resembled human love more closely than anything any of us had ever seen in the animal world.
Dave always fed Him and Her, and another good sign — the only other good sign — was that neither of the paggets ever took any opportunity to harm any of us. That indicated no more than that they understood the situation, and that neither wanted any harm to befall the other in retaliation.
Feeding. That was the least pleasant feature of the new existence we were building up for ourselves.
We had eggs, quite a lot of eggs, plenty of milk, butter, we could kill a few chickens occasionally, and a cow or pig even more occasionally, there were vegetables and there would soon be grain. Perhaps next year or the year after we should even be capable of supporting ourselves entirely on our poultry, our cattle, and our land.
At the moment we couldn’t.
If we proposed to go on living, we had to use what was available. And what was available was paggets, even if it made us shudder to think of eating them.
If it hadn’t been for the paggets, we’d still have our well-ordered, rich, safe, bountiful civilization. But that was a long-range view. If it hadn’t been for the paggets, we at Saxham would have starved. Saxham could support only a little more than half the people who now lived there, and there was nothing to be got from the surrounding farms unless we cared to emulate the Knifers’ methods of getting it. They had little enough for themselves — less than we had.
There must be a world food problem such as there had never been before. Paggets had killed off virtually every animal but themselves and mankind. At Saxham we had seen an occasional bird, but never enough to convince us that the birds would ever solve the problem of nesting in a world full of paggets.
We had to live on parats and padogs, chiefly. At first we could barely swallow them, no matter what culinary genius had been lavished on them. But hunger soon made even stringy pacats acceptable — though we hardly ever found pacats in Rutland these days.
We got plenty of opportunity to get used to padog meat after the raid in which forty-one were killed. We had it boiled, stewed, roasted, minced, fried, braised, grilled, we had it every way but raw. The tongues were very good — that was the one good thing that could be said about pagget meat. But it was meat; its effect was the same as that of tender steaks, succulent lamb chops, fried chicken, even if our stomachs didn’t think so.
I don’t mean to infer that we were the only people who were eating paggets. Everyone who was left alive must be doing likewise, with the possible exception of people who lived near the sea. The sea was teeming with fish; it made our mouths water just to think of it. I hadn’t been very keen on fish, B.P. I was so much keener on fish than on paggets, however, that I seriously considered, like everybody else at some time or another, moving a little nearer the sea. We were some thirty miles from the Wash.
We just had to forget that. We couldn’t move Saxham, and in present circumstances the distance to the sea was just too great. Presumably fishermen would still be operating, and selling fish for something, if not money. But thirty miles was becoming a long way. It was too long to walk back through pagget-infested country if something went wrong.
By this time, of course, we’re all used to pagget meat. There haven’t so far been any children brought up on it, so I don’t know if it’s possible for anyone to enjoy pagget meat as we used to enjoy our ham and steaks. It’s food over which few of us have become enthusiastic.
But it kept us alive — which, after all, is the main function of food.
• • •
In those two weeks after the Knifer battles, our complacency went too far, as generally happens. From terror, the men and women under our care went over to complete, unjustified, careless confidence. We had beaten the parats, the padogs, and the Knifers. Nobody, nothing, could stand against us. We were safe in an uncertain world.
I was actually glad when the padogs attacked again and one of the men was killed. I could have told the paggets how to overcome Saxham — simply leave us completely alone for six months, and at the end of that time we’d be so careless that they’d merely have to walk in and take over.
That attack must have been caused by sheer desperation on the padogs’ part. The parats must have been successful in keeping out of their way for a spell. The padogs must have been so hungry that the thought of the riches they knew to be at Saxham drove them mad. Because otherwise they would have known that if they lost forty-three of their number in an attack when the Saxham defense was weak, they weren’t going to fare better when it was at full strength.
Actually we killed only nineteen, because the attack didn’t last long. We kept our own dogs out of it this time. That attack and what happened to it should have convinced the padogs finally of the futility of such attacks, but it didn’t. It took one more fiasco to do that.
Nevertheless, a man was killed. Roger wasn’t an important man among us, to judge from the lack of concern shown over his loss. But he was a man, and the way he was killed showed once again how dangerous the padogs could be.
We’d been shooting into a solid mass of dogs. They kept coming because they couldn’t do us any damage until they reached us. Shoot them as we might, we couldn’t shoot them all, and one reached Roger. It reared up at him, snapped at his throat, and that was that. The fact that the padog fell dead a moment later didn’t reassure those who realized, as most of us did, that it could have been any one of us.
After that we became, slowly and with some setbacks, a community which could survive anything short of direct attack by an army.
The B.B.C. news broadcasts still continued, becoming more irregular as time went by, more liable to technical hitches. And they told us less.
“Strong, self-sufficient groups are forming all over the country,” the announcer said once. “A dozen such groups are known to exist in the South of England …”
And one in Rutland — us.
“There are definite signs that birds are learning to nest in places impregnable to paggets. This is a development of immense importance. Birds could be the most serious enemies of parats and pamice …”
We thought that that was a bit optimistic. We’d seen no such signs.
“A definite diminution in the number of pacats throughout the country has been noticed …” and, later: “Pacats in Britain are almost extinct.”
We had seen indications of this ourselves but hadn’t been able to be sure that this wasn’t purely a local phenomenon. According to the radio news, reports painstakingly collected from all over the country showed that the pacat population had sunk below survival level. The species would soon be as dead as the dodo and the dinosaur.
It was not impossible to understand. Cats, even pagget cats, were solitary animals. That made it easy for men, padogs, parats, even pamice in sufficient numbers, to fall on them and kill them. The efforts of their many enemies had decimated the pacats, until at last it was too late for them even to try to band together and seek safety in numbers.
The question was, was this good news or not? The paggets, from the first, had to some extent balanced each other. The rats might have overrun the earth if it hadn’t been for the check on their procreation applied by the pacats and padogs. Now the first of the new species had fallen, or was about to fall.
There was some suggestion that the second would soon follow them. Pamice were now not nearly as numerous as they had once been. The explanation in this case was not so easy to find. Men had killed huge numbers of pacats, but mankind’s contribution to the destruction of the pamice couldn’t be large. The rats must have warred on them, apparently — but even so, there must be reasons of which we knew nothing for the disappearance of the mice.
Some of the men and women at Saxham went almost mad with joy at this news of the removal of one of our enemies and the approaching removal of another. None of the more thoughtful ones among us was so certain that this was good news.
If any one of the pagget species should be left in possession of the field, the situation might be worse than it was now. We didn’t know, we could never know, to what extent the pagget species had limited each other.
• • •
Mona emerged from the house for the first time since the night battle against the Knifers, pale and shaky but well on the way to complete recovery, on the very day that Edwin drove up in his battered MG.
Not since Ginette arrived had there been such an occasion. We had come to take it for granted that our old French saloon was the only car in running order we’d see for a long time, perhaps the only one we’d ever see. Edwin couldn’t have announced his arrival more dramatically if he’d come riding on an elephant.
He was a tall, friendly looking youngster. I recognized him at once as the engineering student I’d met in Grantham the day I’d brought Steve and Mona back with me, the one who had never turned up.
“You invited me weeks ago to join you here,” he reminded me. “Does that still apply?”
We had turned away scores of people who wanted to join us. We couldn’t house and feed the whole human population of the world. These days it was generally understood throughout the region that we’d take in only people who could show us good reason — who could bring us cattle or horses or special knowledge or something else that we needed.
But I’d always thought Edwin would be a worth-while acquisition to us, and at least he brought another car. Moreover, I’d actually invited him to join us, date unspecified.
“It still applies,” I said.
I got into the car beside him and told him to drive up to the house. The dozen or so people who had come running stepped aside to let the car through.
“Who was that pretty girl at the front door?” he asked with obvious enthusiasm, as he and I maneuvered the two cars to get them both into the garage.
I hadn’t noticed. Mil or Ginette, probably. But when Edwin and I returned from the garage, I saw it was Mona he meant. Someone had brought out a chair for her and she was blinking in the sunlight she hadn’t been out in for weeks.
I introduced them. That baby that Mona had the other day — it was Edwin’s, of course. Edwin and Mona were married as soon as Jenny Mulpeter gave the okay.
Before that, however, the padogs made their third and least successful attack on Saxham.
We’d always been scared of attack by night. It wasn’t only because paggets could see better in the dark than we could. They would know their enemies and we wouldn’t. We’d be afraid of shooting our own dogs, shooting each other, letting paggets through to the house, all sorts of things that might happen in a night attack but not by day.
So we planned that there would never be any such thing as a night attack. Not an attack by darkness, at any rate.
Dave, Edwin, and I made lamps and fixed them at the eight corners of the house — I’ve mentioned already that Saxham was no ordinary building. These weren’t ordinary lamps, either. They were designed to ignite magnesium ribbon which burned with a bright, clear, cold flame for about two minutes. All it was necessary to do was pull a lever six feet from the ground, too high for children or paggets to reach in the normal way. The magnesium lamps twenty feet higher burst into flame, a hard glare that floodlit every corner of the grounds, not brightly, but clearly enough to make accurate shooting possible and prevent us from shooting each other and our own dogs.
This system had its first trial on the night that Mona came back to guard duty. Ginette was on too — they slept together and the guard-duty schedule was arranged by numbered bedrooms. There were eight on duty every night now instead of the three which had once been our limit.
There must have been fifty padogs. An instant after the first alarm, Ginette, Mona, Harry, and whoever else were the guards that night, were racing for the corners of the house, shouting at the tops of their voices and firing behind them as they ran, not so much in the hope of killing padogs as to waken us up.
Dave and I, who had been sound asleep, were at our window even before the flares went on. We saw the first lamp flood the ground with blue-white light, and saw the padogs at the walls and inside it, and saw the effect of the glare on the padogs.
They nearly abandoned the attack. That was obvious in the way they reared, startled, as that light flashed, then another, then another. Dave and I had time to get downstairs and did so. When we got outside, the padogs had rallied and were racing in a solid bunch toward the house. I heard Ginette sharply recalling two of our dogs who were rushing madly into action. She was having a hard time of it. It was always more difficult to keep the dogs out of action than urge them into it.
Shots sounded irregularly but rapidly. Every second more men and women poured from the house; others whose bedroom windows were conveniently situated were shooting from there. Two or three padogs fell, a dozen, then a score. It was exactly a score, for we counted that many bodies a little later. The padogs made just that one rush. Going on with the attack would have been suicidal, and they realized it. They disappeared quickly and quietly, leaving their twenty dead behind them, and the flares burned for one and a half minutes more after the last live padog had gone.
The night attack we’d once feared so much was over in half a minute. Our casualties, nil.
We collected the bodies and replaced the magnesium wire in the lamps. Only one had failed to ignite — they were a brilliant success, and Dave, Edwin, and I felt very pleased with ourselves. Edwin was so delighted that he kissed Mona — but perhaps he hadn’t really needed much of an excuse for that.
There was another consequence of this action. Ginette had done so much shouting in the encounter that her voice went husky and then became a croak and finally disappeared altogether.
It was a chance not to be missed. I cornered her in her room when I knew Mona wasn’t there. She was sitting on a couch sewing something, an unusual occupation for her. I took it away from her, put it down, lifted Ginette’s legs unceremoniously and tipped her flat on the couch, sat on the couch in front of her, and just to make sure, put my hands on her shoulders and leaned on them.
“Ginette,” I said tenderly, “I want to talk to you.”
Even Ginette couldn’t help grinning. It was all she could do, since she could hardly raise a whisper.
“The fates are rooting for me,” I said. “They even took your voice away. So you can’t make me lose my temper this time. Ginette, will you marry me? No, take that back. I’ll start again. Ginette, I love you. Ginette, will you marry me?”
I turned my head away as she whispered something, but didn’t take my weight off her shoulders. “I didn’t hear that,” I declared. “And don’t say it again, either. Ginette, I still mean what I said in Cambridge. Only I’m adding this to it — I love you. Yes, I know I’m crazy. I think you’re lovely and wonderful and brave and sensible — and you can’t help being a bitch, can you?”
“Don — why didn’t you say that before?” she whispered.
I grinned. “If I’d called you a bitch before, you’d have scratched my eyes out,” I said. “The only reason why you’re not doing it now is because I’ve got a good hold on you. Yes, I know you mean why didn’t I tell you I loved you. Because I didn’t, Ginette. I didn’t love you at first sight. Are you angry, as usual?”
“No,” she whispered. “You can let me go — I won’t bite.”
“Perhaps not, but the question is, will you marry me?”
“Yes, Don. Why did you think I came after you from Cambridge?”
I was still holding her down, only now she wasn’t struggling, wasn’t even tense. She was relaxed, surrendering, a smile I had never seen on her face. It was a face which should smile more often.
“I may get a throat infection,” I said, “but it can’t be helped. Ginette, I’ve kissed you once or twice before and I always had to hold you down before I could do it. This time, say you want to be kissed.”
“I want to be kissed,” she whispered. “I always did, really. What did you think I was — an amoeba?”
We kissed. And, pleasant as it had been when I’d stolen kisses, it was a million times better when I didn’t have to steal them any more. Ginette did want to be loved, like any other girl.
Uhuh, I told myself mentally, sceptically. And how long is this going to last?
“Forever,” whispered Ginette, reading my thoughts.
I didn’t believe her, but it was certainly the right thing to say.