Dex ran.
80
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 zoology 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 that 81
nothing he could say would dissuade Charlie from going back down there.
Henry Northrup glanced at his watch. They had been sitting in the study for a little over an hour; Wilma wouldn't be back for another two.
Plenty of time. Unlike Charlie Gereson, he had passed no judgment at all on the factual basis of Dex's story. But he had known Dex for a longer time than young Gereson had, and he didn't believe his friend exhibited the signs of a man who has suddenly developed a psychosis.
What he exhibited was a kind of bug-eyed fear, no more or less than you'd expect to see a man who has had an extremely close call with...well, just an extremely close call.
'He went down, Dex?'
'Yes. He did.'
'You went with him?'
'Yes.'
Henry shifted position a little. 'I can understand why he didn't want to get campus security until he had checked the situation himself. But Dex, you knew you were telling the flat-out truth, even if he didn't. Why didn't you call?'
'You believe me?' Dex asked. His voice trembled. 'You believe me, don't you, Henry?'
Henry considered briefly. The story was mad, no question about that.
The implication that there could be something in that box big enough and lively enough to kill a man after some one hundred and forty years was mad. He didn't believe it. But this was Dex...and he didn't disbelieve it either.
'Yes,' he said.
'Thank God for that,' Dex said. He groped for his drink. 'Thank God for that, Henry.'
'It doesn't answer the question, though. Why didn't you call the campus cops?'
'I thought...as much as I did think... that it might not want to come out of the crate, into the bright light. It must have lived in the dark for so long...so very long...and...grotesque as this sounds...I thought it might be pot- bound, or something. I thought...well, he'll see it...he'll see the rate...the janitor's body...he'll see the blood...and then we'd call security.
You see?' Stanley's eyes pleaded with him to see, and Henry did. He thought that, considering the fact that it had been a snap judgment in a pressure situation, that Dex had thought quite clearly. The blood. When the young graduate student saw the blood, he would have been happy to call in the cops.
