“The name itself doesn’t mean anything anymore,” Richard said, still looking uneasily out at the mud-drenched quad. “Like our infirmary. It’s called The Creamery because there used to be a real dairy barn and milk-bottling plant over there. Until 1910 or so there was, anyway. Tradition, Jack. It’s very important. It’s one of the reason I like Thayer.”
Richard looked forlornly out at the muddy campus again.
“One of the reasons I always did, anyway.”
“The Creamery, okay. How come The Depot?”
Richard was slowly warming to the twin ideas of Thayer and Tradition.
“This whole area of Springfield used to be a railhead,” he said. “In fact, in the old days—”
“Which old days are we talking about, Richard?”
“Oh. The eighteen-eighties. Eighteen-nineties. You see . . .”
Richard trailed off. His nearsighted eyes began moving around the common room—looking for more bugs, Jack supposed. There weren’t any . . . at least not yet. But he could already see a few brown patches beginning to form on the walls. The bugs weren’t here yet, but they would be along.
“Come on, Richard,” Jack prompted. “No one used to have to prime you to get you to run your mouth.”
Richard smiled a little. His eyes returned to Jack. “Spring-field was one of the three or four biggest American railheads during the last two decades of the nineteenth century. It was geographically handy to all the points of the compass.” He raised his right hand toward his face, forefinger extended to push his glasses up on his nose in a scholarly gesture, realized they were no longer there, and lowered the hand again, looking a bit embarrassed. “There were main rail routes leaving Springfield for everywhere. This school exists because Andrew Thayer saw the possibilities. He made a fortune in rail shippage. Mostly to the west coast. He was the first one to see the potential in shipping west as well as east.”
A bright light suddenly went on in Jack’s head, bathing all of his thoughts in its harsh glare.
“West coast?” His stomach lurched. He could not yet identify the new shape that bright light had shown him, but the word that leaped into his mind was fiery and utterly clear!
“
“Of course I did.” Richard looked at Jack strangely. “Jack, are you going deaf?”
“No,” Jack said.
“Well, you looked damn funny for a minute.”
Jack knew, utterly
“There were coal-piles and switching yards and roundhouses and boxcar sheds and about a billion miles of tracks and sidings,” Richard was saying. “It covered this whole area where Thayer School is now. If you dig down a few feet under this turf anywhere, you find cinders and pieces of rail and all sorts of stuff. But all that’s left now is that little building. The Depot. Of course it never was a real depot; it’s too small, anyone could see that. It was the main railyard office, where the stationmaster and the rail-boss did their respective things.”
“You know a hell of a lot about it,” Jack said, speaking almost automatically—his head was still filled with that savage new light.
“It’s part of the Thayer tradition,” Richard said simply.
“What’s it used for now?”
“There’s a little theater in there. It’s for Dramatics Club productions, but the Dramatics Club hasn’t been very active over the last couple of years.”
“Do you think it’s locked?”
“Why would anyone lock The Depot?” Richard asked. “Unless you think someone would be interested in stealing a few flats from the 1979 production of
“So we could get in there?”
“I think so, yes. But why—”
Jack pointed to a door just beyond the Ping-Pong tables. “What’s in there?”
“Vending machines. And a coin-op microwave to heat up snacks and frozen dinners. Jack—”
“Come on.”
“Jack, I think my fever’s coming back again.” Richard smiled weakly. “Maybe we should just stay here for a while. We could rack out on the sofas for the night—”
“See those brown patches on the walls?” Jack said grimly, pointing.
“No, not without my glasses, of course not!”
“Well, they’re there. And in about an hour, those white bugs are going to hatch out of—”
“All right,” Richard said hastily.
10
The vending machines stank.
