He was right, of course. The building had central air conditioning; what we had to do was find the main air shaft and explore it. There would have to be an intake at one end and an outlet at the other. But that was easier said than done, and before it was done there were questions to be answered. What about the rest of the rats? There were twenty of us in the laboratory, and we had to let the others know.
So, one by one we woke them and showed them how to open their cages. It was an odd assembly that gathered that night, under the dimmed lights in the echoing laboratory, on the shelf where Justin and I had talked. We all knew each other in a way, from the passing of messages over the preceding months; yet except for Jenner and me, none of us had ever really met. We were strangers — though, as you can imagine, it did not take long for us to develop a feeling of comradeship, for we twenty were alone in a strange world. Just how alone and how strange none of us really understood at first; yet in a way we sensed it from the beginning. The group looked to me as leader, probably because it was Justin and I who first set them free, and because Justin was obviously younger than I.
We did not attempt to leave that night, but went together and looked at the metal grid Justin had discovered, and made plans for exploring the air ducts. Jenner was astute at that sort of thing; he could foresee problems.
‘With a vent like this leading to every room,’ he said, ‘it will be easy to get lost. When we explore, we’re going to need some way of finding our way back here.’
‘Why should we come back?’ someone asked.
‘Because it may take more than one night to find the way out. If it does, whoever is doing the exploring must be back in his cage by morning. Otherwise Dr Schultz will find out.’
Jenner was right. It took us about a week. What we did, after some discussion, was to find some equipment: first, a large spool of thread in one of the cabinets where some of us had seen Julie place it one day; second, a screwdriver that was kept on a shelf near the electric equipment — because as Jenner pointed out, there would probably be a screen over the end of the air-shaft to keep out debris, and we might have to pry it loose. What we really needed was a light, for the ducts, at night, were completely dark. But there was none to be had, not even a box of matches. The thread and screwdriver we hid in the duct, a few feet from the entrance. We could only hope they would not be missed, or that if they were, we wouldn’t be suspected.
Justin and two others were chosen as the exploration party (one of the others was Arthur, whom you’ve met). They had a terrible time at first: here was a maze to end all mazes, and in the dark they quickly lost their sense of direction. Still they kept at it, night after night, exploring the network of shafts that laced like a cubical spiderweb through the walls and ceilings of the building. They would tie the end of their thread to the grid in our laboratory and unroll it from the spool as they went. Time and time again they reached the end of the thread and had to come back.
‘It just isn’t long enough,’ Justin would complain. ‘Every time I come to the end, I think: if I could just go ten feet farther …’
And finally, that’s what he did. On the seventh night, just as the thread ran out, he and the other two reached a shaft that was wider than any they had found before, and it seemed, as they walked along it, to be slanting gently upward. But the spool was empty.
‘You wait here,’ Justin said to the others. ‘I’m going just a little way farther. Hang on to the spool, and if I call, call back.’ (They had tied the end of the thread around the spool so they would not lose it in the dark.)
Justin had a hunch. The air coming through the shaft had a fresher smell where they were, and seemed to be blowing harder than in the other shafts. Up ahead he thought he could hear the whir of a machine running quietly, and there was a faint vibration in the metal under his feet. He went on. The shaft turned upward at a sharp angle — and then, straight ahead, he saw it: a patch of lighter-coloured darkness than the pitch black around him, and in the middle of it, three stars twinkling. It was the open sky. Across the opening there was, as Jenner had predicted, a coarse screen of heavy wire.
He ran towards it for a few seconds longer, and then stopped. The sound of the machine had grown suddenly louder, changing from a whir to a roar. It had, obviously, shifted speed; an automatic switch somewhere in the building had turned it from low to high, and the air blowing past Justin came on so hard it made him gasp. He braced his feet against the metal and held on. In a minute, as suddenly as it had roared, the machine returned to a whisper. He looked around and realized he was lucky to have stopped; by the dim light from the sky he could see that he had reached the point where perhaps two dozen air shafts came together like branches into the trunk of a tree. If he had gone a few steps farther he would never have been able to distinguish which shaft was his. He turned in his tracks, and in a few minutes he rejoined his friends.
We had a meeting that night, and Justin told all of us what he had found. He had left the thread, anchored by the screwdriver, to guide us out. Some were for leaving immediately, but it was late, and Jenner and I argued against it. We did not know how long it would take us to break through the screen at the end. If it should take more than an hour or two, daylight would be upon us. We would then be unable to risk returning to the laboratory, and would have to spend the day in the shaft — or try to get away by broad daylight. Dr Schultz might even figure out how we had gone and trap us in the air shaft.
Finally, reluctantly, everyone agreed to spend one more day in the laboratory and leave early the next night. But it was a hard decision, with freedom so near and everyone thinking as I did: ‘Suppose …’ Suppose Dr Schultz grew suspicious and put locks on our cages? Suppose someone found our thread and pulled it out? (This was unlikely — the near end, tied to the spool, was six feet up the shaft, well hidden.) Just the same, we were uneasy.
Then, just as we were ending our meeting, a new complication arose. We had been standing in a rough circle on the floor of the laboratory, just outside the two screen doors that enclosed the mice cages. Now, from inside the cabinet, came a voice:
‘Nicodemus.’ It was a clear but plaintive call, the voice of a mouse. We had almost forgotten the mice were there, and I was startled to hear that one of them knew my name. We all grew quiet.
‘Who’s calling me?’ I asked.
‘My name is Jonathan,’ said the voice. ‘We have been listening to your talk about going out. We would like to go, too, but we cannot open our cages.’
As you can imagine, this caused a certain consternation, coming at the last minute. None of us knew much about the mice, except what we had heard Dr Schultz dictate into his tape recorder. From that, we had learned only that they had been getting the same injections we were getting, and that the treatment had worked about as well on them as on us. They were a sort of side experiment, without a control group.
Justin was studying the cabinet.
‘Why not?’ he said. ‘If we can get the doors open.’
Someone muttered: ‘They’ll slow us down.’
‘No,’ said the mouse Jonathan. ‘We will not. Only open our cages when you go, and we will make our own way. We won’t even stay with you, if you prefer.’
‘How many are you?’ I asked.
‘Only eight. And the cabinet doors are easy to open. There’s just a simple hook, half-way up.’
But Justin and Arthur had already figured that out. They climbed up the screen, unhooked the hook, and the doors swung open.
‘The cages open the same way as yours,’ said another mouse, ‘but we can’t reach far enough to unlatch them.’
‘All right,’ I said. ‘Tomorrow night, as soon as Dr Schultz and the others leave, we’ll open your cages, and you can follow the thread with us to get out. After that you’re on your own.’
‘Agreed,’ said Jonathan, ‘and thank you.’
‘And now,’ I said, ‘we should all get back to the cages. Justin, please hook the doors again.’
I
had latched myself into my cage and was getting ready for sleep when I heard a scratching noise on the door, and there was Jenner, climbing down from above.
‘Nicodemus,’ he said, ‘can I come in?’
‘Of course. But it’s getting towards morning.’
‘I won’t stay long.’ He unlatched the door and entered.
‘There’s something we’ve got to decide.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘I’ve been thinking about it, too.’
‘When we do get out, where are we going to go?’
I could not see Jenner’s face in the dark of the cage, but I knew from his voice that he was worrying. I said:
‘At first I thought, home, of course. But then, when I began remembering, I realized that won’t work. We could find the way, I suppose, now that we can read. But if we did — what then? We wouldn’t find anyone we know.’
‘And yet,’ Jenner said, ‘you know that’s not the real point.’
‘No.’
‘The real point is this: We don’t know where to go because we don’t know what we are. Do you want to go back to living in a sewer-pipe? And eating other people’s garbage? Because that’s what rats do. But the fact is, we aren’t rats any more. We’re something Dr Schultz has made. Something new. Dr Schultz says our intelligence has increased more than one thousand per cent. I suspect he’s underestimated; I think we’re probably as intelligent as he is — maybe more. We can read, and with a little practise, we’ll be able to write, too. I mean to do both. I think we can learn to do anything we want. But where do we do it? Where does a group of civilized rats fit in?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘We’re going to have to find out. It won’t be easy. But even so, the first step must be to get out of here. We’re lucky to have a chance, but it won’t last. We’re a jump ahead of Dr Schultz; if he knew what we know, he wouldn’t leave us alone in here another night. And he’s sure to find out soon.’
‘Another thing to worry about,’ Jenner said. ‘If we do get away, when he finds we’re gone — won’t he figure out how we did it? And won’t he realize that we must have learned to read?’
‘Probably.’
‘And then what? What will happen when he announces that there’s a group of civilized rats roaming loose — rats that can read, and think, and figure things out?’
I said: ‘Let’s wait until we’re free before we worry about that.’
But Jenner was right. It was a thing to worry about, and maybe it still is.
The next day was terrible. I kept expecting to hear Dr Schultz say: ‘Who took my screwdriver?’ And then to hear Julie add: ‘My thread is missing, too.’ That could have happened and set them to thinking — but it didn’t, and that night, an hour after Julie, George, and Dr Schultz left the laboratory, we were out of our cages and gathered, the whole group of us, before the mouse cabinet. Justin opened its doors, unlatched their cages, and the mice came out. They looked very small and frightened, but one strode bravely forward.
‘You are Nicodemus?’ he said to me. ‘I’m Jonathan. Thank you for taking us out with you.’
‘We’re not out yet,’ I said, ‘but you’re welcome.’
We had no time for chatting. The light coming in the windows was turning grey; in less than an hour it would be dark, and we would need light to figure out how to open the screen at the end of the shaft.
We went to the opening in the baseboard.
‘Justin,’ I said, ‘take the lead. Roll up the thread as you go. I’ll bring up the rear. No noise. There’s sure to be somebody awake somewhere in the building. We don’t want them to hear us.’ I did not want to leave the thread where it might be found: the more I thought about it, the more I felt sure Dr Schultz would try to track us down, for quite a few reasons.
Justin lifted the grid, pushed open the sliding panel, and one by one we went through. As I watched the others go ahead of me, I noticed for the first time that one of the mice was white. Then I went in myself, closing the grid behind me and pushing the panel half shut again, its normal position.
With Justin leading the way, we moved through the dark passage quickly and easily. In only fifteen or twenty minutes we had reached the end of the thread; then, as Justin had told us it would, the shaft widened; we could hear the whir of the machine ahead, and almost immediately we saw a square of grey daylight. We reached the end of the shaft, and there a terrible thing happened.
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.
The Boniface Estate
Mrs Frisby said: ‘Jonathan and Mr Ages got the screen open.’
‘Yes,’ Nicodemus said, ‘and without them I doubt that we could have done i
t. 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.
Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH (Puffin Modern Classics) Page 10
