Anima-figure — and after you’ve spent an adult lifetime at Miskatonic, you discover you’ve developed a rather different understanding from the herd’s of the distinction between the imaginary and the real. Come along now.”
We had entered the faculty lounge in the interim and he led me across its oak-paneled precincts to a large bay window where eight leather-upholstered easy chairs were set in a circle along with smoking stands and a table with cups, glasses, brandy decanter, and a blue- warmed urn of coffee. I looked around with a deep shiver of awe and feeling of personal unworthiness at the five elderly scholars and scientists, professors emeritus all, already seated at this figurative modern Round Table of high-minded battlers against worse than ogres and dragons — cosmic evil in all its monstrous manifestations. There was Upham of Mathematics, in whose class poor Walter Gilman had expounded his astounding theories of hyperspace; Francis Morgan of Medicine and Comparative Anatomy, now the sole living survivor of the brave trio who had slain the Dunwich Horror on that dank September morning back in ’28; Nathaniel Peaslee of Economics and Psychology, who had endured the dreadful underground journey Down Under in ’35; his son Wingate of Psychology, who had been with him on that Australian expedition; and William Dyer of Geology who had been there too and four years before that undergone the horrendous adventure at the Mountains of Madness.
Save for Peaslee pere, Dyer was the oldest present — well through his ninth decade — but it was he who, assuming a sort of informal chairmanship, now said to me sharply but warmly, “Sit down, sit down, youngster! I don’t blame you for your hesitation. We call this Emeritus Alcove. Heaven pity the mere assistant professor who takes a chair without invitation! See here, what will you drink? Coffee, you say? — well, that’s a prudent decision, but sometimes we need the other when our talk gets a little too far outside, if you take my meaning. But we’re always glad to see intelligent friendly visitors from the ordinary ‘outside’ — Ha-ha!”
“If only to straighten out their misconceptions about Miskatonic,” Wingate Peaslee put in a bit sourly. “They’re forever inquiring if we offer courses in Comparative Witchcraft and so on. For your information, I’d sooner teach a course in Comparative Mass-Murder with Mein Kampf as the text than help anyone meddle with that stuff!”
“Particularly if one considers the sort of students we get today,” Upham chimed, a bit wistfully.
“Of course, of course, Wingate,” Wilmarth said soothingly to young Peaslee. “And we all know that the course in medieval metaphysics Asenath Waite took here was a completely innocent academic offering, free of arcane matters.” This time he withheld his chuckle, but I sensed it was there.
Francis Morgan said, “I too have my problems discouraging sensationalism. For instance, I had to disappoint M.I.T. when they asked me for a sketch of the physiology of anatomy of the Ancient Ones, to be used in the course they give in the designing of structures and machines for ‘imaginary’ — Gad! — extra-terrestrial beings. Engineers are a callous breed — and in any case the Ancient Ones are not merely extra-terrestrial, but extra-cosmic. I’ve also had to limit access to the skeleton of Brown Jenkin, though that has given rise to a rumor that it is a file-and- brown-ochre fake like the Piltdown skull.”
“Don’t fret, Francis,” Dyer told him. “I’ve had to turn down many similar requests re the antarctic Old Ones.” He looked at me with his wonderfully bright wise old eyes, wrinkle-bedded. “You know, Miskatonic joined in the Antarctic activities of the Geophysical Year chiefly to keep exploration away from the Mountains of Madness, though the remaining Old Ones seem to be doing a pretty good job of that on their own account — hypnotic broadcasts of some type, I fancy. But that is quite all right because (This is strictly confidential!) the antarctic Old Ones appear to be on our side, even if their Shoggoths aren’t. They’re good fellows, as I’ve always maintained. Scientists to the last! Men!”
“Yes,” Morgan agreed, “those barrel-bodied star-headed monstrosities better deserve the name than some of the specimens of genus homo scattered about the globe these days.”
“Or some of our student body,” Upham put in dolefully.
Dyer said, “And Wilmarth has been put to it to head off inquiries about the Plutonians in the Vermont hills and keep their existence secret with their help. How about that, Albert — are the crab-like space- flyers cooperating?”
“Oh yes, in their fashion,” my conductor confirmed shortly with another of his unpleasant chuckles, this time fully uttered.
“More coffee?” Dyer asked me thoughtfully, and I passed him my cup and saucer which I had set rather awkwardly on my cardboard box atop my lap, simply because I didn’t want to forget the box.
Old Nathaniel Peaslee lifted his brandy glass to his wrinkle-netted lips with tremulous but efficient fingers and spoke for the first time since my arrival. “We all have our secrets… and we work to see them kept,” he whispered with a little whistle in his voice — imperfect dentures, perhaps. “Let the young spacemen at Woomera… fire their rockets over our old diggins, I say… and blow the sand more thickly there. It is better so.”
Looking at Dyer, I ventured to ask, “I suppose you get inquiries from the Federal Government and the military forces, too. They might be more difficult to handle, I’d think.”
“I’m glad you brought that up,” he informed me eagerly. “I wanted to tell you about — ”
But at that moment Ellery of Physics came striding briskly across the lounge, working his lips a little and with an angry frown creasing his forehead. This, I reminded myself, was the man who had analyzed an arm of a statuette figuring in the Witch-House case and discovered in it platinum, iron, tellurium, along with three unclassifiable heavy elements. He dropped into the empty chair and said, “Give me that decanter, Nate.”
“A rough day at the Lab?” Upham inquired.
Ellery mollified his feelings with a generous sip of the ardent fluid and then nodded his head emphatically. “Cal Tech wanted another sample of the metal figurine Gilman brought back from dreamland. They’re still botching their efforts to identify the transuranic metals in it. I had to give ’em a flat ‘No!’ — I told ’em we were working on the same project ourselves and closer to success. Thing’d be gone in a week if they had their way — sampled down to nothing! Californians! On the good side of the record, Libby wants to carbon-date some of the material from our museum — the Witch-House bones in particular — and I’ve told him ‘Go ahead.’ ”
Dyer said to him, “As chief of the Nuclear Lab, Ellery, perhaps you’ll give our young visitor a sketch of what we might call Miska- tonic’s atomic history.”
Ellery grunted but threw me a smile of sorts. “I don’t see why not,” he said, “though it’s chiefly a history of two decades of warfare with officialdom. I should emphasize at the beginning, young man, that we’re dashed lucky the Nuclear Laboratory is entirely financed by the Nathaniel Derby Pickman Foundation — ”
“With some help from the Alumni Fund,” Upham put in.
“Yes,” Dyer told me. “We are very proud that Miskatonic has not accepted one penny of Federal Assistance, or State for that matter. We are still in every sense of the words an independent private institution.”
“ — otherwise I don’t know how we’d have held off the busybodies,” Ellery swept on. “It began back in the earliest days when the Manhattan Project was still the Metallurgical Laboratory of the University of Chicago. Some big-wig had been reading the stories of the Young Gentleman of Providence and he sent a party to fetch the remains of the meteorite that fell here in ’82 with its unknown radioactives. They were quite crestfallen when they discovered that the impact-site lay under the deepest part of the reservoir! They sent down two divers but both were lost and that was the end of that.”
“Oh well, they probably didn’t miss much,” Upham said. “Wasn’t the meteorite supposed to have evanesced totally? Besides we’ve all been drinking the Arkham water from the Blasted Heath Reservoir half our lifetimes.”
“Yes, we have,” Wilmarth put in and this time I found myself hating him for the unpleasant knowingness of his chuckle.
“Well, it apparently has not affected our longevity… as yet,” old Peaslee put in with a whistling little laugh.
“Since that date,” Ellery continued, “there hasn’t a month passed without Washington requesting or demanding specimens from our museum — mostly the art objects with unknown metals or radioactive elements in them, of course — and records from our science department and secret interviews with our scholars and so on. They even wanted the
“Which they would have,” Wilmarth put in sotto voce.
“But they’ve never laid a finger on it!” Dyer asserted with a fierceness that almost startled me. “Nor on the Widener copy either! — I saw to that.” The grim tone of his voice made me forbear to ask him how. He continued solemnly, “Although it grieves me to say it, there are those in high places at Washington and in the Pentagon who
