Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH (16 page)

We did find a few things. There were two sets of encyclopaedias that had sections on rats. From them we learned that we were about the most hated animals on earth, except maybe snakes and germs.

That seemed strange to us, and unjust. Especially when we learned that some of our close cousins - squirrels, for instance, and rabbits - were well liked. But people think we spread diseases, and I suppose possibly we do, though never intentionally, and surely we never spread as many diseases as people themselves do.

Still, it seemed to us that the main reason we were hated must be that we always lived by stealing. From the earliest times, rats lived around the edges of human cities and farms, stowed away on men's ships, gnawed holes in their floors and stole their food. Sometimes we were accused of biting human children; I didn't believe that, nor did any of us - unless it was some kind of abnormal rat, bred in the worst of city slums. And that, of course, can happen to people, too.

Had we, then, no use at all in the world? One encyclopaedia had a sentence of praise for us: 'The common rat is highly valued as an experimental animal in medical research due to his toughness, intelligence, versatility and biological similarity to man.' We knew quite a bit about
that
already.

But there was one book, written by a famous scientist, that had a chapter about rats. Millions of years ago, he said, rats seemed to be ahead of all the other animals, seemed to be making a civilization of their own. They were well organized and built quite complicated villages in the fields. Their descendants today are the rats known as prairie dogs.

But somehow it didn't work out. The scientist thought maybe it was because the rats' lives were too easy; while the other animals (especially the monkeys) were living in the woods and getting tougher and smarter, the prairie dogs grew soft and lazy and made no more progress. Eventually the monkeys came out of the woods, walking on their hind legs, and took over the prairies and almost everything else. It was then that the rats were driven to become scavengers and thieves, living on the fringes of a world run by men.

Still it was interesting to us that for a while, at least, the rats had been ahead. We wondered. If they had stayed ahead, if they had gone on and developed a real civilization - what would it have been like? Would rats, too, have shed their tails and learned to walk erect? Would they have made tools? Probably, though we thought not so soon and not so many; a rat has a natural set of tools that monkeys lack: sharp pointed teeth that never stop growing. Consider what the beavers can build with no tools but their rodent teeth.

Surely rats would have developed reading and writing, judging by the way we took to it. But what about machines? What about cars and aeroplanes? Maybe not aeroplanes. After all, monkeys, living in trees, must have felt a need to fly, must have envied the birds around them. Rats may not have that instinct.

In the same way, a rat civilization would probably never have built skyscrapers, since rats prefer to live underground. But think of the endless subways-below-subways-below-suhways they would have had.

We thought and talked quite a bit about all this, and we realized that a rat civilization, if one ever did grow up, would not necessarily turn out to be anything at all like human civilization. The fact was, after eight months in the Boniface Estate, none of us was sorry to move out of it. It had given us shelter, free food, and an education, but we were never really comfortable there. Everything in it was designed for animals who looked, moved and thought differently from the way we did. Also, it was above ground, and that never felt quite natural to us.

So, when we left, we decided that our new home should be underground, preferably, if we could find it, in a cave. But where? We thought hard, and studied maps and atlases - there were plenty of those in the study. Finally, we reached some conclusions: To find a cave, we would have to go where there were mountains - there aren't many caves in flatlands. And for food, it would have to be near a town or better, near a farm.

So we wanted to find a farm, preferably a big one, with a big barn and silos full of grain, near the mountains. We studied the maps some more, and it was Jenner, I think, who spotted this area as a good place to look. On the map, a big part of it was covered with the contour lines that show mountains, and across these were written the words, 'Thorn Mountains National Forest'. Beneath that, in smaller letters, it said, 'Protected Wilderness Preserve'. Bordering this, where the mountains turned to foothills, the map showed rolling country with quite a few roads but hardly any towns, which, we thought, ought to mean farmland.

We were right, as of course you know now. It took us two months of steady travelling to get to the Thorn Mountains National Forest, but we found it; we're under the edge of it right now. And there are plenty of caves, most of them never visited by people - because people aren't allowed to drive into a wilderness preserve. There aren't any roads in the forest, but only a few jeep trails used by rangers, and aeroplanes are not permitted to fly over it.

We looked at a lot of caves, some big, some small, some dry, but mostly damp. Before we chose this cave and this farm, however, we found the Toy Tinker.

It began as a sad sort of thing. We found an old man lying in the woods one morning, near one of the jeep trails not so far from here, and he was dead. We don't know what he died of; we guessed it must have been a heart attack. He was dressed in a black suit, old-fashioned in style but neat, not ragged. His hair was white, and his face looked gentle.

'I wonder who he was, and where he was going,' Justin said.

'Whoever he was,' Jenner said, 'he wasn't supposed to be in here at all.'

'We ought to bury him,' I said.

So we did, not by digging a grave, but by covering him with a high mound of leaves and stones and twigs and earth. It was in gathering material for this mound that Justin made the second discovery. He was back in the bushes, out of our sight.

'Look here,' he called. 'I've found a truck.'

It was a very ancient truck, with a small round hood, but it had been lovingly polished and was wonderfully shiny. The body, which was square and large, had been rebuilt and painted red and gold. It had little windows and white curtains, and between them, lettered in gold, were signs:

THE TOY TINKER

Toys

Repairs

Hobby Kits

Model Sets

Electrical Toys

All Work Guaranteed

Obviously the truck had belonged to the old man. He was a pedlar and a mender of toys, the red and gold wagon was his shop and his home, and he had driven into the woods to camp for the night. It was against the law, of course, so he had concealed the truck behind some bushes, off the trail, under a big beech tree. We could see where he had made a campfire, carefully surrounding it with stones and clearing away the brush so he would not set the woods afire. Beyond the beech tree a narrow brook flowed. It was a peaceful spot.

We could see what had probably caused the old man's death: one wheel of the truck had sunk into the soft earth and was stuck. A shovel lay near it - he had been trying to dig it out. The work had been too hard for him, and he had started to go for help when he collapsed.

This much we could figure out just by looking. Then somebody said:

'Whose truck is it now?'

'It belongs to his heirs,' I said.

'Whoever
they
are,' said Jenner. 'He may not even have any. He seems to have been alone.'

'Anyway,' said someone else, 'how would they ever find it?'

'That's true,' I said. 'We don't know who he was, and if we did, we have no way of notifying anyone. So I suppose, if we want it, the truck is ours.'

'Why don't we see what's in it?'

It might almost be easier to tell what
wasn't
in it,' JL Nicodemus continued. 'That truck was as roomy as a small bus, and the old man hadn't wasted a square foot of it. Not that it was cluttered; on the contrary, everything was neatly in place on its shelf, or hook, or in its cabinet.'

It took us a while to understand what a treasure
we
had found. The truck contained, as you might expect, a big stock of toys. It also contained the old man's simple living quarters: a bed, a lamp, a work table, a folding chair, a bucket for carrying water, a plate, pots, pans, and so on. There was a tiny refrigerator with food in it, and some tinned stuff - peas, beans, peaches, things like that.

Most of the toys - we thought at first - we had no particular use for. There were toy cars and trucks, windmills and merry-go-rounds, aeroplanes, boats and a lot of others, mostly run on batteries. It was entertaining to look at them, and some of them we even tried out; for a while the floor looked like Christmas morning.

We tired of that and explored further into the truck. Up near the front we found several large cardboard boxes, and when we opened them we found that they were full of electric motors of assorted sizes - replacement engines for broken or worn-out toys. There were dozens of them, ranging from very small, no bigger than a spool of thread, up to some so heavy we could hardly move them.

Then, next to these, we found the real treasure: the old man's tools. They were neatly arranged in shining rows inside a steel cabinet as big as a trunk. There were screwdrivers, saws, hammers, clamps, vices, wrenches, pliers. There were welding tools, soldering irons, and electric drills. And the beauty of it was, since they were designed for working on toys, they were nearly all miniature, easily small enough for us to handle. Yet they were themselves not toys; they were made of the finest tempered steel, like the tools of a watchmaker or a dentist.

It was Arthur who said it first:

'Do you realize what we've got here? We could open our own machine shop. With these tools and all these motors, we could make anything we wanted.'

'We could,' said Jenner, 'except you've forgotten one thing.'

'What's that?'

'We have no electricity. The old man couldn't have run these tools off batteries. The small toy motors, yes, but not the real ones, not the power tools. He had to plug into house current to use those. See, there's his extension cord on the wall.'

There was a long coil of heavy black cable hanging from a hook on the wall. It had a plug on one end and a socket on the other.

Now another rat spoke up, a rat named Sullivan. He was a great friend of Arthur's, and like him, had a particular interest in engines and electricity.

'Maybe,' he said, 'we could plug into a house current, too.'

'How?' I said. 'Who'd let us?'

'Do you remember that cave we looked at the other day? The one we decided was too close to the farmhouse?'

That was the beginning of it. The end you have seen yourself. He was speaking of the cave you saw today.

We all trooped back to it and examined it more carefully. It
was
too close, or at least closer than we had planned to live to a human habitation. But then we saw the huge rosebush near the tractor shed, where, with quite a lot of digging, we could put a concealed entrance. But most important, we noticed that there was an electric light in the tractor shed.

Mr Fitzgibbon had an underground power cable leading out from his house to the shed. We dug a tunnel to it, tapped it, and we had all the electricity we needed. Near it ran a water pipe. We tapped that, too, and we had running water. Then, a few at a time, we moved the tools and the motors from the Toy Tinker's truck to the cave. We got nearly all of them before the truck disappeared. We went back one day and it was gone - only the hole remained, where its tyre had been sunk. The forest rangers must have found it and hauled it away. But they never discovered or disturbed the mound where the old man lay buried.

So we built ourselves the life you see around you. Our colony thrived and grew to one hundred and fifteen. We taught our children to read and write. We had plenty to eat, running water, electricity, a fan to draw in fresh air, a lift, a refrigerator. Deep underground, our home stayed warm in winter and cool in summer. It was a comfortable, almost luxurious existence.

And yet all was not well. After the first burst of energy, the moving in of the machines, the digging of tunnels and rooms - after that was done, a feeling of discontent settled upon us like some creeping disease.

We were reluctant to admit it at first. We tried to ignore the feeling or to fight it off by building more things - bigger rooms, fancier furniture, carpeted hallways, things we did not really need. I was reminded of a story I had read at the Boniface Estate when I was looking for things written about rats. It was about a woman in a small town who bought a vacuum cleaner. Her name was Mrs Jones, and up until then she, like all of her neighbours, had kept her house spotlessly clean by using a broom and a mop. But the vacuum cleaner did it faster and better, and soon Mrs Jones was the envy of all the other housewives in town - so they bought vacuum cleaners, too.