‘I suppose so,’ said Mrs Frisby. ‘For a while yet. But that won’t last long.’
‘That’s what my mother says. But it seems long. And Justin might marry somebody else.’
‘Maybe not,’ said Mrs Frisby, who could see beyond the tip of her nose. ‘He’s pretty young himself yet. What’s your name?’
‘Isabella.’
‘It’s a pretty name.’
‘It’s all right. Only my brother calls me Izzy. I don’t like that.’
‘I don’t wonder. Where’s your brother?’
‘At the meeting. He’s older. All the men are at the meeting. But my mother didn’t go. The mothers don’t always go. She’s in the grain room, packing grain.’
‘Packing grain?’
‘For the Plan. She doesn’t like the Plan, though.’
The Plan again.
‘What is the Plan? Why doesn’t she like it?’
‘It’s just — the Plan. For where we’re going to live and all that. She doesn’t like it because she says it’s too hard — no more electric lights, no more refrigerator, no more running water. But she isn’t deserting or anything. Not like Jenner. We didn’t like Jenner.’
‘Who’s Jenner?’
‘He was in the group, but he quit. Maybe he went back to Nimh. We don’t know.’
Mrs Frisby was gradually getting a picture of life in the rat colony — a somewhat confusing one because Isabella was a child, but nonetheless certain things were apparent: They had a grain room (presumably for food storage); the females sometimes went to meetings and sometimes not; Nicodemus seemed to be the leader; they had a Plan for the future that some rats did not like; and one, named Jenner, had deserted. Or had others gone with him? She was about to ask Isabella when the library door opened and Nicodemus, Justin, and Mr Ages entered. Another rat came with them, a stranger.
A Powder for Dragon
The strange rat was named Arthur. He was stocky, square and muscular, with bright, hard eyes. He looked efficient.
‘You might call him our chief engineer,’ said Nicodemus to Mrs Frisby, ‘as, indeed, you might call Justin the captain of the guard — if we had any such titles, but we don’t. Mr Ages thought Arthur should come along, though he didn’t say why. So we still don’t know what your problem is.’
Isabella was gone. She had dropped her papers on the floor again when the others had entered, and Justin, to her intense confusion and visible delight, had helped her pick them up.
‘Hello, Izzy,’ he said. ‘How’s the reading coming?’
‘It’s fine,’ she said. ‘I finished the Third Reader last week. Now I’m on the Fourth.’
‘The Fourth Reader already! You’re getting quite grown up!’ At that she had almost dropped the papers a third time and made a dash for the door. It did not matter, Mrs Frisby noticed, if Justin called her Izzy — just so long as he called her something.
Nicodemus closed the door behind her, then sat down on one of the benches, facing Mrs Frisby; the others sat down, too, Mr Ages stretching his splinted leg in front of him. Nicodemus took the reading glass from his satchel, opened it, and through it gravely examined Mrs Frisby’s face. ‘You will forgive the glass and the scrutiny,’ he said. ‘When I lost my left eye, I also damaged the right one; I can see little close-up without the glass — indeed, not very much even with it.’ At length he folded the glass and put it on the table.
‘Now,’ he said, ‘what is it we can do to help you?’
So Mrs Frisby recounted once more the events that had led to her coming there, and at the end repeated what the owl had advised her to say — move the house into the lee of the stone.
She added: ‘I don’t understand just what he meant by that. Jeremy — the crow — says it means the side where there’s no wind. But what good would that do?’
‘I think I know what he meant,’ said Nicodemus. ‘In a broad sense, lee means the sheltered side. A bird, flying over Mr Fitzgibbon’s garden, would notice something most of us would miss.’
He reached down into his satchel and took out a sheet of paper and a pencil; he opened the reading glass again. As he talked, he drew a sketch:
‘When a farmer ploughs a field with a big rock in it, he ploughs around the rock — close on each side, leaving a triangle of unploughed land on each end.
‘Mrs Frisby’s house is beside the rock, and will get ploughed up — and probably crushed, as the owl said. But if we can move it a few feet — so that it lies buried behind the rock — in the lee — then she and her children can stay in it as long as they need to.
‘From the air, the way the owl sees it, the garden would look like that.’ He inspected the sketch through the reading glass and then placed it on the table.
Mrs Frisby climbed up on the bench and looked at it. It was a rough map, showing the garden, the big stone near the middle, and the way the furrows made by the plough would curve around it, rather like waves around a boat.
‘Show me where your house is buried,’ said Nicodemus. Mrs Frisby pointed to the spot on the sketch.
‘I know where that cement block is,’ said the rat named Arthur. ‘In fact, I thought about bringing it in, but I decided it was too long a haul. They had it tied on top of the harrow for weight, and it fell off just as they were finishing the garden.’
‘Can you move it,’ asked Nicodemus, pointing at the sketch, ‘to this spot right there, and bury it again?’
‘Yes,’ said Arthur. ‘That shouldn’t be hard.’
Mrs Frisby was delighted; looking at the map, it all became clear, and she could see what a beautifully simple idea it was. When Mr Fitzgibbon ploughed, he would go right past their house; they would not have to move until Timothy was well and until the weather was truly warm. She remembered again what her husband had said — how easy to unlock a door when you have the key. She had found the key. Or rather, the owl had found it.
Nicodemus asked Arthur: ‘How long will it take?’
‘Depends. With a party of ten, a couple of hours. With twenty, maybe an hour.’
‘We can spare twenty. But it’s still too long.’ He looked worried.
So did Arthur. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘We’ll have to work at night — but even so … There’s just no cover at all. It’s wide open.’
‘We’ll have to take care of Dragon,’ said Justin.
‘Yes,’ said Mr Ages, ‘and with this leg, I can’t do it. I’d never make it to the bowl, much less get back again.’
Mrs Frisby, looking at their baffled faces, felt her delight subsiding. Obviously something was wrong.
‘I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘I know about Dragon, of course, but …’
‘At night,’ said Justin, ‘Dragon prowls the farmyard like a tiger. And you don’t see him until he’s on top of you.’
‘Then you can’t move my house after all.’
‘Well,’ Justin said, ‘ordinarily …’ He turned to Nicodemus. ‘Should I explain it to her?’
‘Yes,’ said Nicodemus.
‘Ordinarily,’ said Justin, ‘when we have a long project to do at night — sometimes even by day — we make sure Dragon won’t bother us: We put sleeping powder in his food. Mr Ages makes it. It doesn’t do the cat any harm; but he stays extremely drowsy for the next eight hours or so. We station a sentry to watch him, and we’re free to work.’
‘You did it yesterday!’ cried Mrs Frisby, remembering the figures toiling with the wire through the grass, remembering how strangely disinterested Dragon had seemed when he saw her. ‘I saw the cat sleeping in the yard.’
‘Yes,’ said Justin, ‘but today Mr Ages has a broken leg.’
‘Then he can’t make the powder?’
‘It isn’t that,’ said Mr Ages. ‘I’ve plenty of powder.’
‘The trouble is,’ said Justin, ‘it’s Mr Ages who puts it in Dragon’s dinner bowl, inside the farm kitchen. With his leg broken, he can’t move fast enough.’
‘But why Mr Ages?’ said Mrs Frisby. ‘Can’t s
omeone else do it?’
‘I’d be glad to do it myself,’ said Justin, ‘but I’m too big.’
‘You see,’ Nicodemus explained, ‘Mrs Fitzgibbon feeds the cat in the morning and in the evening, and his bowl is always kept in the same place — next to a cabinet in one corner of the kitchen. There’s a very shallow space between the floor and the bottom of the cabinet. A few years ago when we conceived the idea of putting Dragon to sleep, we cut a hole in the floor just behind the cabinet — if we put it anywhere else they’d see it. To reach the bowl, Mr Ages crawls under the cabinet. When he gets to the edge, he makes a quick dash to the bowl, drops in the powder, and dashes back out of sight. But with a broken leg, he can’t dash.’
‘We might try leaving some bait outside the house,’ said Justin. ‘That worked once.’
‘Once out of a dozen tries,’ said Nicodemus. ‘It isn’t dependable, and we don’t have much time. To be safe, we ought to move that block tonight.’
‘If we had some catfood …’ said Justin, thinking aloud. ‘He might eat that, even on the porch, because he knows it’s his. Maybe tonight I could go in through the attic and down to the kitchen …’
‘No use,’ said Mr Ages. ‘They keep it in a metal cabinet up on the wall. You couldn’t get it without a crew. And that would make too much noise.’
‘Anyway,’ said Nicodemus, ‘it would put off moving the block until tomorrow night.’
‘Then,’ Justin said, ‘I guess what we do is stake our scouts wherever we can, try to keep track of Dragon, and hope for the best. Some nights he doesn’t go near the garden at all. We might be lucky.’
‘Or we might not,’ said Arthur. ‘I don’t like it. We can’t dig that block out without some noise, you know.’
Mrs Frisby interrupted quietly. ‘There is another way,’ she said. ‘If Mr Ages can get into the kitchen, so can I. If you will give me the powder and show me the way, I will try to put it in Dragon’s bowl.’
Justin said quickly: ‘No. It’s no job for a lady.’
‘You forget,’ Mrs Frisby said. ‘I’m Timothy’s mother. If you, and Arthur, and others in your group can take risks to save him, surely I can, too. And consider this: I don’t want any of you to be hurt — maybe even killed — by Dragon. But even more, I don’t want the attempt to fail. Perhaps the worst that will happen to you, with luck, is that you will have to scatter and run, and leave my house unmoved. But then what will happen to us? Timothy, at least, will die. So if there is no one else to put the cat to sleep, I must do it.’
Nicodemus considered, and then spoke:
‘She’s right, of course. If she chooses to take the risk, we can’t deny her the right.’ To Mrs Frisby he added: ‘But you should know that the danger is great. It was in the same kitchen yesterday, running from Dragon’s bowl, that Mr Ages got his leg broken. And it was in doing the same thing, last year, that your husband died.’
The Marketplace
Mrs Frisby’s head was buried in her arms. ‘I never knew,’ she said. ‘All I knew was that he didn’t come back. But I never knew what happened. I didn’t even know he knew you. Why didn’t he ever tell me?’
Justin touched her shoulder gently. ‘It’s hard for you to learn it this way, so suddenly,’ he said. ‘We thought about telling you when it happened, but we decided we shouldn’t. It wouldn’t have done any good.’
‘You ask why Jonathan never told you about us,’ Nicodemus added. ‘He had a reason, a good one. Still he worried about it a lot, and he might have told you in the end. But then it was too late.’
‘What was the reason?’ Mrs Frisby raised her face. There were tears on her cheeks, but she had stopped crying.
‘To answer that I would have to tell you quite a long story — the whole story about us, and Nimh, and Jonathan, and how we came here. He came with us, you see. I don’t mind doing that but I don’t know if there is time now.’
‘I think there is,’ said Justin, ‘if Mr Ages and I go to get the powder while you’re telling it.’
‘With this leg,’ said Mr Ages glumly, ‘that will take long enough to tell it twice.’
‘I had forgotten,’ said Justin contritely. ‘Would it be better if I went alone?’
‘No,’ said Mr Ages. ‘There are so many different powders in my storeroom. You wouldn’t know which to bring back. I’ll go with you. But we’ll go slowly.’
‘And I,’ said Arthur, ‘will see about the equipment for tonight. We’ll need shovels, crowbars, block and tackle, rollers …’ He left, still listing tools.
Nicodemus said to Mrs Frisby, ‘I think that we, too, should leave the library. There will be others coming in, like Isabella, to practise reading, and some to do research.’
‘Research?’
‘We’ve got some new books on agriculture — farming, gardening, fertilizing, things like that — and we’re studying them. It’s part of the Plan.’
‘I don’t know what the Plan is.’
‘No,’ agreed Nicodemus, ‘but when I’ve told you our story, you’ll understand that, too.’
He opened the door and led Mrs Frisby down the corridor past several more doors, all closed. He stopped before one, which he opened.
‘My office,’ he said. ‘Please come in.’
The room she entered was smaller than the library, but much more comfortably — almost elegantly — furnished. There was a rug on the floor (the same pattern, she noticed, as the carpet in the hallway above), a light recessed in the ceiling and another in the wall next to a table. There were bookshelves; on one shelf an electric clock hummed quietly to itself. A book lay open on the table, with a chair in front of it; against the opposite wall stood a small sofa, neatly upholstered in cloth. But what attracted Mrs Frisby’s attention most was a box in one corner of the room, a box with dials and a small light shining on the front; from this box came the soft sound of music. She listened entranced.
‘You like music?’ said Nicodemus. ‘So do I.’
‘That must be a radio.’ Again, something vaguely remembered from what Jonathan had once told her. Music. She had heard it only two or three times in her life, when the Fitzgibbons had left a window open and someone was playing inside. And never up close. It was a lovely sound.
‘Yes,’ said Nicodemus. ‘We didn’t get it for music, of course, but to hear the news. Still, as long as it’s here — why not use it?’
He sat down, and so did Mrs Frisby.
‘Now,’ he said, ‘I will tell you about Nimh. You’ll be interested, I think, because your husband was part of it. And when I’m finished, I think you will see why he felt he could not tell you himself.’
The story begins (Nicodemus continued) not at Nimh, but at a marketplace on the edge of a big city. It was called the Farmers’ Market, a great square of a place with a roof over part of it and no walls to speak of. There early every morning the farmers arrived from all over the surrounding countryside, with trucks full of tomatoes, corn, cabbages, potatoes, eggs, chickens, hams, food for the city. One part of it was reserved for the fishermen who brought crabs and oysters and bass and flounders. It was a fine place, noisy and full of smells.
We lived near this market — my father, my mother, my nine sisters and brothers and I — underground in a big pipe that had once been part of a storm sewer, but was no longer used. There were hundreds of other rats in the neighbourhood. It was a rough life, but not so hard as you might think, because of the market.
Every evening at five o’clock the farmers and the fishermen would close up their stalls, pack their trucks, and go home. At night, hours later, the cleaning men would arrive with brooms and hoses. But in between, the market was ours. The food the farmers left behind! Peas and beans that fell from the trucks, tomatoes and potatoes, pieces of meat and fish trimmed as waste — they lay on the pavements and in the gutters; they filled great bins that were supposed to be covered but seldom were. There was always ten times more than we could eat, and so there was never any need for fighting over it
.
Fighting? Quite the contrary, the marketplace was a perfect place for playing, and so we did, the young rats at least, as soon as we had finished eating. There were empty boxes for hide-and-seek, there were walls to climb, tin cans to roll, and pieces of twine to tie and swing on. There was even, in the middle of the square, a fountain to swim in when the weather was hot. Then, at the first clang of the cleaning men in the distance, one of the older rats would sound a warning, and everyone would pick up as much food as he could carry home. All of us kept a reserve supply, because some days — Sundays and holidays — the market would be closed, and we were never quite sure when this would happen.
When I went to the market, it was usually with two companions, my elder brother Gerald and a friend of ours named Jenner. These were my two closest friends; we liked the same games, the same jokes, the same topics of conversation — even the same kinds of food. I particularly admired Jenner, who was extremely quick and intelligent.
One evening in early autumn Jenner and I set out for the marketplace. It must have been September, for the leaves were just turning yellow and some children were throwing a football in a vacant lot. Gerald had to stay at home that night; he had caught a cold, and since the air was chilly, my mother thought he should not go out. So Jenner and I went without him. I remember we promised to bring him back some of his favourite food, beef liver, if we could find any.
We took our usual route to the market, not along the streets but through the narrow alleys between the buildings, mostly commercial warehouses and garages, that bordered the square. As we walked, we were joined by more rats; at that time of day they converged on the marketplace from all directions. When we reached the square, I noticed that there was a white truck of an odd, square shape parked on the street bordering it, perhaps a hundred yards away. I say I noticed it — I did not pay any particular attention to it, for trucks were common enough in that part of town; but if I had, I would have noticed that printed on each side of it were four small letters: NIMH. I would not have known what they were, of course, for at that time neither I nor any of the other rats knew how to read.
Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH Page 7