Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH (21 page)

'Maybe some other motors had been stolen,' Justin said. 'Or some tools. That would make them seem mechanized.'

'It would,' said Nicodemus. 'And it would explain what the doctor meant when he said they had more checking to do in the town.'

'They're looking for the things that were missing,' Arthur said, sounding suddenly worried. 'They're looking for Jenner's headquarters. And if they find it…'

'We're just guessing, of course,' Nicodemus said. 'But it's a possibility.'

'And a bad one.'

'It means,' Nicodemus continued,'that we have no choice. We've got to assume they're from Nimh.

We've also got to assume that by now they may have found Jenner's headquarters - whatever cave or cavern they were using.'

'And,' said Justin,'that now they're looking for us.'

'Why for us?' asked one of the rats. 'Why wouldn't they think Jenner's group are the only ones?'

'They might,' Nicodemus admitted, 'but I don't think so. After all, they know that there were twenty of us originally. Why should there be only seven now? And we already know that they're coming out here - in quite a hurry at that. So if they're from Nimh, obviously they
are
looking for us.'

'I think,' said Arthur,'that we've got to make some plans, and quickly.'

'I agree,' said Nicodemus. 'It's a new situation, and a tricky one. We won't be able to do everything we hoped to. There isn't time. And somehow we have to convince the exterminators, when they come, that we aren't more of the mechanized rats they're looking for.

'We won't be able to move any more food to Thorn Valley,' Nicodemus continued. 'We'll have to get along on what we've already got stored there - about an eighteen-month supply, if we're careful. The seeds, I believe, are already moved.'

'Yes,' said Arthur. 'The last load went yesterday.'

'So with luck, we'll have our own first crops this summer and autumn.

'We won't have time to destroy the motors, or the books, or the furniture as we planned. Instead, we'll move everything to the cave. And then we'll seal off all the entrances to the cave as if it had never existed.'

'That can be done,' Arthur said.

'But there's more. We've got to pull all the wires and lights from the tunnel - they're likely to dig it up. And the carpet. We've got to tear down the arch.

'Then, when all that's done, when everything is hidden in the cave, we'll fill in the stairway and the lift shaft. We'll seal off everything except the upper storage room and the tunnels leading in the front and out of the back.

'When they dig, let them find that room. It's as big as an ordinary rat hole.

'Justin, tonight, take a group of a dozen or so. Go to the Fitzgibbons' dustbin. Bring back a load of the worst-smelling rubbish you can find. The storage room is going to become an ordinary, typical rat hole, not in the least mechanized or civilized.'

Nicodemus turned to Arthur: 'What do you think?'

'I think we can do it all. We won't get much sleep, though.'

Justin said: 'But there's one more thing. Won't they think it's odd - especially if they're from Nimh -finding just an empty hole?'

Nicodemus said: 'I was coming to that.' He sounded suddenly very tired. 'Tomorrow morning, as soon as it's light, the main group leaves for Thorn Valley. But some of us will have to stay behind. As Justin says, if they find just an empty hole, they're sure to be suspicious, and they'll keep on digging. So when they come with their gas truck, they've got to find some rats here. A rear guard. I'd say at least ten.'

Mrs Frisby walked slowly home, keeping to the edge of the woods, keeping out of sight.

Justin had instantly volunteered for the rear guard. Brutus was second, and behind him, eight more; there were fifty more waiting behind them. 'Enough, enough,' said Nicodemus. Isabella, in tears, had run forward. 'I
want
to stay,
please
,' she had pleaded, looking despairingly at Justin. 'No children,' said Nicodemus, and her mother led her away, still weeping.

Those ten, the ten who would remain, did not face certain death, nor certain capture. The exterminators (they presumed) would make noise, especially if they cleared away the rosebush. The rats would be alerted. When the men pumped gas (as expected) into the hole, the pump would also make a noise; the air below would move as the gas flowed in. When they felt that, the rats would scramble out of the back exit, past the sealed-off cave, emerge as noisily as possible in the blackberry bramble - indeed, show themselves - and dash off into the woods.

'But won't they block the rear exit?'

'Or put a net over it?'

'We'll give them another exit to block,' Arthur had said cryptically. 'One that's easier to find.'

'Mother, why are you so quiet?' asked Teresa. They were sitting down to dinner for the first time in their newly moved house. 'You seem sad.'

'I suppose I am,' Mrs Frisby said. 'Because the rats are all going away.'

'But that's no reason. It's true, they moved our house, and that was nice of them. But we didn't really
know
them.'

'I was getting to know them pretty well.'

'Where are they going?' Cynthia asked.

'To a new home, a long way away.'

'When?'

'Tomorrow morning.'

'Will you go to see them off?'

'I think I will.'

'But why are they moving away?' asked Timothy.

'Because they want to,' said Mrs Frisby. Someday soon she would tell them the whole story. But not that night.

The next morning Mr Fitzgibbon started the larger of his two tractors, the huge one he kept in the barn, the one that pulled the combine in the autumn harvest. With help from Paul and Billy he bolted the big bulldozer blade to the front of it, rumbled it up through the barnyard gate and stopped it near the rosebush.

'We'll wait until they come,' he said, turning off the engine.

Mrs Frisby could not bear to watch; and yet, even more, she could not bear not to watch. She knew there was nothing to be gained by it, nothing she could do. Yet how could she stay at home when the ten rats, including Justin and Brutus, were waiting bravely underground? She could not.

She thought at first of her watch-hole in the corner post. Then she decided against it. Nearer to the rosebush, on the edge of the woods, stood a hickory tree, its scaly bark like a ladder inviting her to climb. Ten feet up on this tree a large branch jutted straight out. On this branch, up close to the trunk, she had a vantage point from which, herself unseen, she could look down on the rosebush and also see into the woods to a blackberry bramble where, though she had never been in it, she was sure the rats' rear exit must be hidden. She settled down to wait. It was a chilly morning, with a damp breeze and a grey mist that blew by in patches.

Somewhere near the middle of the morning a square white truck came into the driveway. It went first to the house. A man in a white coverall uniform climbed out and knocked on the Fitzgibbons' door; it was too far away for Mrs Frisby to hear the knock, or to hear what the man said when Mrs Fitzgibbon came out on the porch. But ten seconds later Billy ran from the house to the barn, where Mr Fitzgibbon was working. The man returned to the truck and waited, standing outside the open cab door. Through the windscreen she could see that two more men sat in the front seat, and that one of them wore horn-rimmed glasses.

Now Mr Fitzgibbon approached the truck, Billy dancing beside him, apparently in some excitement. There was a conference, none of which Mrs Frisby could hear, accompanied by gestures towards the rosebush and the waiting bulldozer. The man in white climbed back into the driver's seat and drove the truck across the grass. He backed it up beside the bulldozer, stopping perhaps ten feet from the bush. Mrs Frisby stared at it. If there was anything printed on it, it must be on the other side, away from her. Then the three men climbed out, and she could hear what they said.

'It's a big one, all right,' said one of the men. 'And look at those thorns. It's hard to see how even a rat could get in there.'

The man in the horn-rims walked around the edge of the bush, examining it closely. He bent over.

'Look at this,' he said. 'There's the entrance hole, very neatly hidden. And look behind it - a path leading in.'

He turned to Mr Fitzgibbon, who had walked up with Billy.

'You were right. You'll need to bulldoze it. It would take us all day to hack our way in there. But cut it off just at the surface if you can. If you dig too deep and open the hole, they'll get away.'

He added: 'You'd better tell the boy to keep back. We'll be using cyanide, and it's dangerous.'

Billy, after some argument, was dispatched to the back porch, where Mrs Fitzgibbon was also watching.

One of the men had walked around to the far side of the bush, the side near Mrs Frisby's tree.

'Doc,' he called, 'here's another entrance in the bush, and there's a hole just inside it.'

'Doc' was the man in the horn-rims. He was a doctor, Mrs Frisby thought; Doctor Somebody. He was in charge.

'Can you get at it?' he asked.

'Not very well. Too many thorns.'

The man who was a doctor walked around and looked at it. 'No,' he said. 'Anyway, that would be the escape hatch. We'll find the main hole nearer the middle of the bush.'

He turned to Mr Fitzgibbon, who had mounted the tractor. 'Okay,' said the doctor. 'Can you push it that way - away from the shed?'

Mr Fitzgibbon nodded, and the motor started with a roar. He pulled a lever and flexed the heavy steel blade up and down, bringing the bottom edge to rest just even with the ground. The blade was fully eight feet across. He pulled another lever; the wheels, with tyres as tall as windows, dug in and the blade scraped forward.

The bush fought back, then yielded angrily, snapping and crackling before the inexorable thrust of steel. A single sweep, and a third of it lay, a writhing heap of thorns, in a pile twenty feet away. The ground trembled under the wheels, and Mrs Frisby thought of the ten rats huddled below. Supposing the weight collapsed the earth, caved in the storage room and trapped them? Another sweep, and a third. Only a thorny stubble now stood where the bush had been. On the porch Mrs Fitzgibbon covered her eyes with her hands, and Billy cheered in excitement,

Plainly exposed were two holes - simple, round rat holes. There was no trace of the small mound nor the elegant arched entrance. Arthur had done his work thoroughly. Mrs Frisby wondered for a moment at the second hole. Then she remembered his saying: 'We'll give them another rear exit to block.' Of course! They had dug another hole, most likely, she thought, just a dummy, leading nowhere.

The men in the white suits went into action. The back doors of the truck were opened and a long, flexible pipe unrolled. It looked like a fire hose, except that at the end, instead of a nozzle, there was a round plunger like a big rubber ball cut in half. One of the men donned a mask with a glass visor and a tube that ran to a pack on his back. A gas mask.

The masked man pulled the hose over to the centre rat hole and pressed the plunger over it, covering it completely.

From the back of the truck the other two took a large box made of wood and wire, almost a yard wide, and placed it over the second hole. It was a cage, but half of its bottom was a trapdoor, neatly mounted on hinges. This they raised, placing the open part directly over the opening in the earth. Then they backed away, one of them holding a trip cord which would close the trapdoor after the rats were inside.

'All set?' The doctor called to the man in the mask.

The mask nodded.

'Keep back, now,' said the doctor to Mr Fitzgibbon, who had left his tractor to watch. He walked to the truck, reached inside, and turned a switch. Mrs Frisby heard the soft throb of a pump.

Now.

She turned and watched the blackberry bramble in the woods. Would they hear the pump? Where were they? Oh,
let
them come out. Almost a minute passed. The men in white watched the trap. Nothing moved.

Then she saw it. Behind the bramble, half-hidden by a swirl of mist, a grey-brown shape, a rat, shaking earth from his ears. Another. Then three more. They huddled in silence, waiting. More. How many? Ten? Seven. Only seven. Where were the other three? Still they waited.

Then, as if by agreement, they stopped waiting. They ran. All seven of them, not back into the woods to safety, but out of the woods, towards the stubble of the rosebush, towards the men. At the edge of the bush, they stopped as if in confusion, ran to the left, ran to the right, then fled back into the woods again. Now they were out of sight of the men, but not of Mrs Frisby. Instantly they regrouped behind the blackberry bramble and charged out again - but this time in smaller numbers: first two, then three, then two again. She saw what they were up to. They were not in the least confused; they were making seven rats look like twenty rats, or forty, a steady stream of them. In the mist, in the hectic turning, running, turning, hiding, she could not tell whether or not she recognized any of them.

The men shouted: