Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH (14 page)

Justin - you will recall - had told us that the machine, the pump that pulled air through the shaft, had switched from low speed to high when he had first explored through there. So we were forewarned. The trouble was, the forewarning was no use at all, not so far as the mice were concerned.

We were approaching the lighted square of the opening when the roar began. The blast of air came like a sudden whistling gale; it took my breath and flattened my ears against my head, and I closed my eyes instinctively. I was still in the rear, and when I opened my eyes again I saw one of the mice sliding past me, clawing uselessly with his small nails at the smooth metal beneath him. Another followed him, and still another, as one by one they were blown backward into the dark maze of tunnels we had just left. I braced myself in the corner of the shaft and grabbed at one as he slid by. It was the white mouse. I caught him by one leg, pulled him around behind me and held on. Another blew face on into the rat ahead of me and stopped there - it was Jonathan, who had been near the lead. But the rest were lost, six in all. They were simply too light; they blew away like dead leaves, and we never saw them again.

In another minute the roar stopped, the rush of air slowed from a gale to a breeze, and we were able to go forward again.

I said to the white mouse: 'You'd better hold on to me. That might happen again.'

He looked at me in dismay. 'But what about the others? Six are lost! I've got to go back and look for them.'

Jonathan quickly joined him: I'll go with you.'

'No,' I said. 'That would be useless and foolish. You have no idea which shaft they were blown into, nor even if they all went the same way. And if you should find them - how would you find your way out again? And suppose the wind comes again? Then there would be eight lost instead of six.'

The wind did come again, half a dozen times more, while we worked with the screwdriver to pry open the screen. Each time
we
had to stop work and hang on. The two mice clung to the screen itself; some of us braced ourselves behind them, in case they should slip. And Justin, taking the thread with him as a guideline, went back to search for the other six. He explored shaft after shaft to the end of the spool, calling softly as he went - but it was futile. To this day we don't know what became of those six mice. They may have found their way out eventually, or they may have died in there. We left an opening in the screen for them just in case.

The screen. It was heavy wire, with holes about the size of an acorn, and it was set in a steel frame. We pried and hammered at it with the screwdriver, but we could not move it. It was fastened on the outside - we couldn't see how. Finally the white mouse had an idea.

'Push the screwdriver through the wire near the bottom,' he said, 'and pry up.' We did, and the wire bent a fraction of an inch. We did it again, prying down, then left, then right. The hole in the wire grew slowly bigger, until the white mouse said: 'I think that's enough.' He climbed to the small opening and by squirming and twisting, he got through. Jonathan followed him; they both fell out of sight, but in a minute Jonathan's head came back in view on the outside.

'It's a sliding bolt,' he said. 'We're working on it.' Inside we could hear the faint rasping as the two mice tugged on the bolt handle, working it back. Then the crack at the base of the screen widened; we pushed it open, and we were standing on the roof of Nimh, free.

Mrs Frisby said: 'Jonathan and Mr Ages got the screen open.'

'Yes,' Nicodemus said, 'and without them I doubt that we could have done it. The steel frame was strong, the bolt was secure, and the wire so stiff, we could not have bent it enough for one of us to go through. So we were glad they were with us and asked them if they would, after all, like to stay with us. Since there were only two of them, they said they would, for the time being at least.'

And now began a journey that was to last, with some interruptions, for almost two years. Parts of it were pleasant (it was a joyful feeling, at first, just to be free again and to get those laboratory collars off), and parts of it were terrible. I have made notes about all of it, and if the time ever comes when rats publish books of their own, I intend to write a book about it. It would be a long book, full of trouble and danger, too much to tell now. It was in one of the dangerous times that I lost my eye and got the scar you can see on my face.

But we did have some happy times, and some pieces of great good luck, two in particular, that help to explain how we got here and what our plans are now.

It was early summer when we got out. We had known that beforehand - we could tell by the lateness of the light through the windows, though it was dark when we finally stood on the roof. We had no trouble getting down the side of the building, however. There were downspouts in the corners with plenty of toeholds (we dropped the screwdriver and spool of thread into one of these); a little lower there was ivy; we were all good climbers, and there was moonlight to see by. In less than fifteen minutes we were on the ground. Staying in the darkest shadows, under the bushes when we could, we sped away from Nimh, not knowing or caring at first what direction we were going. Nobody saw us.

During the next few weeks we lived as we could. We had, in a way, to learn all over again how to get along, for although the world outside the laboratory was the same, we ourselves were different. We were, a couple of times, reduced to eating from dumps and garbage cans. But knowing how to read, we quickly learned to recognize signs on buildings: Groceries, Supermarket, Meats & Vegetables, for instance, let us know that there was food inside for the taking. And once inside a supermarket at night (they always leave a few lights on) we could even read the signs on the wall directing us to Section 8 for Dairy Products (cheese), Section 3 for Baked Goods, and so on. In the country there were barns and silos stocked with grain and corn, and chicken houses full of eggs.

Occasionally we came upon other rats, and a few times we talked with them, but not for long. Because after just a few words they would begin to look at us strangely, and edge away. Somehow they could tell that we were different. I think we even looked different; either the diet or the injections at Nimh had made us bigger and stronger than other rats, and all the strange rats we saw looked, to us, surprisingly weak and puny. So we were set apart from even our own kind.

It was while we were in the country that we had our first important stroke of luck. We had just decided, after nearly four months of freedom and constant roving, to find a place to settle down - if not permanently, at least for the winter. We thought that it should be in the country, but not too far from a town, so that we would have access to grocery stores as well as barns and gardens.

(It was about this time, too, that I began to wonder, and worry somewhat, about the fact that whatever we ate, whatever we needed, must always be stolen. Rats had always lived that way. And yet - why? I talked to some of the others about this. It was the beginning of a discontent and an idea that kept growing, although slowly.)

The season was autumn. We were walking one evening down a winding country road. We never walked really
on
the road, but along the edge, so that we could vanish into the bushes or a ditch if anyone came along. You can imagine that twenty rats and two mice travelling in procession would cause some comment, and we did not want that.

As we walked, we reached a very high fence of wrought iron, the kind that looks like a row of black iron spears fastened together, with pointed tops - an expensive fence, surrounding a large estate with a big, expensive-looking house in the middle, and well-kept grounds and gardens. We walked along past this fence until we reached a gate.

'There's nobody living in there,' said Justin.

'How do you know?'

The gate's padlocked. And look. Dead weeds standing outside it, not even bent. Nobody's driven in here for a while.'

The house had a quiet, deserted look. There was a letterbox in front, hanging, open, empty.

'I wonder if we could get in,'Jenner said.

'Why should we?'

'It's a big place. It would have a big pantry, big cupboard, big freezer. If it's as empty as it looks…'

We turned into the grounds, moving cautiously, and from beneath some bushes we watched the windows. As dusk fell, lights came on in several of them, both upstairs and down.

Jenner said: 'That's supposed to make us
think
there's someone there.'

'Yes,' said Justin, 'but there isn't. I could see one of the lamps when it came on. There was nobody near it. And they all came on at the same time.'

'Automatic switches. To keep burglars away.'

'Well, they're not keeping me away,' said Justin. He ran to the house, climbed to one of the windowsills, and looked in. He tried another. Then came back. 'Nobody,' he said.

So we went in. We found a small window in the back with a cracked pane, knocked out one corner of the glass, and climbed through. At first, we planned just to look for food. We found it, too, enough to last us for a year or more. As Jenner had predicted, there was a big freezer, well stocked - bread, meat, vegetables, everything - and a whole room full of shelves covered with tinned food. The tins baffled us at first, as they had in the grocery stores. We could read what was in them, but we couldn't get it out. Then Arthur found a machine on the kitchen counter. He read the instructions on the side of it: Slide tin under cutter and press switch. We tried it. The tin turned slowly around in the machine, and when we pulled it out, the top had been cut free. I'll always remember what was in that first tin - vegetable soup, delicious.

After we had eaten, we wandered around the house. It was a rich man's mansion, with beautiful furniture and fine rugs and carpeting on the floor. There was a crystal chandelier in the dining room, and a big stone fireplace in the living room.

But the greatest treasure of all, for us, was in the study. This was a large rectangular room, with walnut panelling, a walnut desk, leather chairs, and walls lined to the ceiling with books. Thousands of books, about every subject you could think of. There were shelves of paperbacks; there were encyclopaedias, histories, novels, philosophies, and textbooks of physics, chemistry, electrical engineering, and others, more than I can name. Luckily, there was even one of those small ladders-on-wheels they use in some libraries to get to the top shelves.

Well, we fell on those books with even more appetite than on the food, and in the end, we moved into the house and stayed all winter. We could do that, it turned out, without much fear of discovery. We learned that from some newspaper cuttings I found on the desk in the study: They were about a wedding, and most of them showed pictures of a newly married couple leaving a house to begin their honeymoon. The groom was a Mr Gordon Boniface - 'heir to the Gould-Stetson fortune' - and the house they were leaving was the house we were in. According to the clippings, they were going on a trip all the way around the world. They were coming back to the Boniface Estate in May. Until then, it was our estate.

Oh, there was a caretaker-gardener who came three times a week, and once in a while he would check the house in a cursory sort of way. That is, he would unlock the front door, glance around to see that everything looked all right, and then lock it and leave. But he didn't live there; he lived in a small house down the road. And we were expecting him when he came; we had figured out, from the way the place was kept up, the lawns mowed, leaves raked, gardens weeded and watered, that there had to be somebody working on it. So we posted a watch, saw him coming, and kept watching him all the time he was there. And we made sure, when he looked in the house, that everything
did
look all right.

This involved a certain amount of work. We had to haul all our empty tin cans and other rubbish at night out into a hidden place in the woods quite far from the house. We cleaned up after ourselves carefully; we learned to use the water taps and the dusting cloths we found in the kitchen cupboard. If the caretaker had looked more closely, in fact, he would have seen that the kitchen counters were somewhat shinier than they should have been in an empty house. But he didn't. He never even noticed the small corner of glass missing from the back window.

And all winter, far into the night, we read books and we practised writing.