water and falls like a clap of thunder in a monstrous cloud of spray. He whirls over and over on to 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 towards 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 10
'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 —'
'Jesus, we got us a gold mine!' Miller said, scratching furiously.
'The hell we have,' the King said. 'Not without some figuring. Number one, we can't put 'em all together. They're cannibals. That means we got to separate the males and females except when we're mating them.
Another thing they'll fight among themselves, all the time. So that means separating males from males and females from females.'
'So we separate them. What's so tough about that?'
