in some weird Zen position of contemplation. His dead eyes
sparkled. And Dex heard, below the savage growling noises, a
smacking, rending sound. And the crunch of a bone.
Dex ran.
He blundered his way across the lab and out the door and up the
stairs. Halfway up, he fell down, clawed at the risers, got to his
feet, and ran again. He gained the first floor hallway and sprinted
down it, past the closed doors with their frosted-glass panels, past
the bulletin boards. He was chased by his own footfalls. In his ears
he could hear that damned whistling.
He ran right into Charlie Gereson's arms and almost knocked him
over, and he spilled the milk shake Charlie had been drinking all
over both of them.
'Holy hell, what's wrong?' Charlie asked, comic in his extreme
surprise. He was short and compact, wearing cotton chinos and a
white tee shirt. Thick spectacles sat grimly on his nose, meaning
business, proclaiming that they were there for a long haul.
'Charlie,' Dex said, panting harshly. 'My boy... the janitor... the
crate... it whistles... it whistles when it's hungry and it whistles
again when it's full... my boy ... we have to ... campus security ...
we .... We...'
'Slow down, Professor Stanley,' Charlie said. He looked
concerned and a little frightened. You don't expect to be seized by
the senior professor in your department when you had nothing
more aggressive in mind yourself than charting the continued
outmigration of sandflies. 'Slow down, I don't know what you're
talking about.'
Stanley, hardly aware of what he was saying, poured out a garbled
version of what had happened to the janitor. Charlie Gereson
looked more and more confused and doubtful. As upset as he was,
Dex began to realize that Charlie didn't believe a word of it. He
thought, with a new kind of horror, that soon Charlie would ask
him if he had been working too hard, and that when he did, Stanley
would burst into mad cackles of laughter.
But what Charlie said was, 'That's pretty far out, Professor
Stanley.'
'It's true. We've got to get campus security over here. We--'
'No, that's no good. One of them would stick his hand in there,
first thing.' He saw Dex's stricken look and went on. 'If I'm having
trouble swallowing this, what are they going to think?'
'I don't know,' Dex said. 'I... I never thought...'
'They'd think you just came off a helluva toot and were seeing
Tasmanian devils instead of pink elephants,' Charlie Gereson said
cheerfully, and pushed his glasses up on his pug nose. 'Besides,
from what you say, the responsibility has belonged with zo all
along... like for a hundred and forty years.'
'But...' He swallowed, and there was a click in his throat as he
prepared to voice his worst fear. 'But it may be out.'
'I doubt that,' Charlie said, but didn't elaborate. And in that, Dex
saw two things: that Charlie didn't believe a word he had said, and
