“Happy to know you, sir.”
“Flight Lieutenant Marlowe,” Peter Marlowe said as he also shook hands and sat down in the shade.
Vexley waited nervously till they were seated and absently pressed his thumb into the back of his hand, counting the seconds till the indentation in the skin slowly filled. Pellagra had its compensations, he thought. And thinking of skin and bone reminded him of whales and his pop-eye brightened. “Well, today I was going to talk about whales. Do you know about whales? — Ah,” he said ecstatically as the King brought out a pack of Kooas and offered him one. The King passed the pack around the whole class.
The four students accepted the cigarettes and moved to give the King and Peter Marlowe more space. They wondered what the hell the King was doing there, but they didn’t really care — he’d given them a real tailor-made cigarette.
Vexley started to continue his lecture on whales. He loved whales. He loved them to distraction.
“Whales are without a doubt the highest form that nature has aspired to,” he said, very pleased with the resonance of his voice. He noticed the King’s frown. “Did you have a question?” he asked eagerly.
“Well, yes. Whales are interesting, but what about rats?”
“I beg your pardon,” Vexley said politely.
“Very interesting what you were saying about whales, sir,” the King said. “I was just wondering about rats, that’s all.”
“What about rats?”
“I was just wondering if you knew anything about them,” the King said. He had a lot to do and didn’t want to screw around.
“What he means,” Peter Marlowe said quickly, “is that if whales are almost human in their reflexes, isn’t that true of rats, too?”
Vexley shook his head and said distastefully, “Rodents are entirely different. Now about whales…”
“How are they different?” asked the King.
“I cover the rodents in the spring seminar,” Vexley said testily. “Disgusting beasts. Nothing about them to like. Nothing. Now you take the sulphur-bottom whale,” Vexley hastily launched off again. “Ah, now there’s the giant of all whales. Over a hundred feet long and it can weigh as much as a hundred and fifty tons. The biggest creature alive — that has ever lived — on earth. The most powerful animal in existence. And its mating habits,” Vexley added quickly, for he knew that a discussion of the sex life always kept the class awake.
“Its mating is marvelous. The male begins his titillation by blowing glorious clouds of spray. He pounds the water with his tail near the female, who waits with patient lust on the ocean’s surface. Then he will dive deep and soar up, out of the water, huge, vast, enormous, and crash back with thundering flukes, churning the water into foam, pounding at the surface.” He dropped his voice sensuously. “Then he slides up to the female and starts tickling her with his flippers …”
In spite of his anxiety about rats, even the King began to listen attentively.
“Then he will break off the seduction and dive again, leaving the female panting on the surface — leaving her perhaps for good.” Vexley made a dramatic pause. “But no. He doesn’t leave her. He disappears for perhaps an hour, into the depths of the ocean, gathering strength, and then he soars up once more and bursts clear of the water and falls like a clap of thunder in a monstrous cloud of spray. He whirls over and over onto his mate, hugging her tight with both flippers and has his mighty will of her to exhaustion.”
Vexley was exhausted, too, at the magnificence of the spectacle of mating giants. Ah, to be so lucky as to witness it, to be there, an insignificant human …
He rushed on: “Mating takes place about July, in warm waters. The baby weighs five tons at birth and is about thirty feet long.” His laugh was practiced. “Think of that.” There were polite smiles, and then Vexley came in with the clincher, always good for a deep chuckle. “And if you think of that and the size of the calf, just think about the whale’s jolly old John Thomas, what?” Again there were courteous smiles — the regular members had heard the story many times.
Vexley went on to describe how the calf is nursed for seven months by the mother, who supplies the calf with milk from two monstrous teats toward the ass end of her underside. “As you can no doubt imagine,” he said ecstatically, “prolonged suckling underwater has its problems.”
“Do rats suckle their young?” The King jumped in quickly.
“Yes,” the squadron leader said miserably. “Now about ambergris…”
The King sighed, beaten, and listened to Vexley expound about ambergris and sperm whales and toothed whales and white whales and goose-beaked whales and pygmy whales and beaked whales and narwhales and killer whales and humpback whales and bottle-nosed whales and whalebone whales and gray whales and right whales and finally bowhead whales. By this time all the class except Peter Marlowe and the King had left. When Vexley had finished, the King said simply:
“I want to know about rats.”
Vexley groaned. “Rats?”
“Have a cigarette,” said the King benignly.
CHAPTER TEN
“All right, you guys, sort yourselves out,” the King said. He waited until there was quiet in the hut and the lookout at the doorway was in position. “We got problems.”
“Grey?” asked Max.
“No. It’s about our farm.” The King turned to Peter Marlowe, who was sitting on the edge of a bed. “You tell ’em, Peter.”
“Well,” began Peter Marlowe, “it seems that rats — ”
“Tell ’em it from the beginning.”
“All of it?”
“Sure. Spread the knowledge, then we can all figure angles.”
“All right. Well, we found Vexley. He told us, quote: ‘The Rattus norvegicus, or Norwegian rat — sometimes called the Mus decumanus — ’”
“What sort of talk is that?” Max asked.
“Latin, for Chrissake. Any fool knows that,” Tex said.
“You know Latin, Tex?” Max gaped at him.
“Hell no, but those crazy names’re always Latin — ”
“For Chrissake, you guys,” the King said. “You want to know or don’t you?” Then he nodded for Peter Marlowe to continue.
“Well, anyway, Vexley described them in detail, hairy, no hair on the tail, weight up to four pounds, the usual is about two pounds in this part of the world. Rats mate promiscuously at any time — ”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“The male’ll screw any female irrespective,” the King said impatiently, “and there ain’t no season.”
“Just like us, you mean?” Jones said agreeably.
“Yes. I suppose so,” said Peter Marlowe. “Anyway, the male rat will mate at any season and the female can have up to twelve litters per year, around twelve per litter, but perhaps as many as fourteen. The young are born blind and helpless twenty-two days after — contact.” He picked the word delicately. “The young open their eyes after fourteen to seventeen days and become sexually mature in two months. They cease breeding at about two years and are old at three years.”
“Holy cow!” Max said delightedly in the awed silence. “We sure as hell’ve problems. Why, if the young’ll breed in two months, and we get twelve — say for round figures ten a litter — figure it for yourself. Say we get ten young on Day One. Another ten on Day Thirty. By Day Sixty the first five pair’ve bred, and we get fifty. Day Ninety we got another five pairs breeding and another fifty. Day One-twenty, we got two-fifty plus another fifty and another fifty and a new batch of two-fifty. For Chrissake, that makes six-fifty in five months. The next month we got near six thousand five hundred — ”