Woods walked to the window in the laboratory and looked out.
The building stood on top of a hill, with a green lawn sweeping down to a park-like area with fenced off paddock, moat-protected cliff-cages and monkey-islands — the Metropolitan Zoo.
Gilmer took a fresh and fearsome grip on his cigar.
'It proves there's life on Mars,' he contradicted. 'It doesn't prove a damn thing else.'
'You should use a little imagination,' chided Woods.
'If I did,' snarled Gilmer, 'I'd be a newspaperman. I wouldn't be fit for any other job.'
Along toward noon, down in the zoo, Pop Anderson, head-keeper of the lionhouse, shook his head dolefully and scratched his chin.
'Them cats have been actin' mighty uneasy,' he declared. 'Like there was something on their minds. They don't hardly sleep at all. Just prowl around.'
Eddie Riggs, reporter for the Express, clucked sympathetically.
'Maybe they aren't getting the right vitamins, Pop,' he suggested.
Pop disagreed.
'It ain't that,' he said. 'They're gettin' the same feed we always give 'em. Plenty raw meat. But they're restless as all git-out. A cat is a lazy critter. Sleeps hours at a stretch and always takin' naps. But they don't do that no more. Cranky. Fightin' among themselves. I had to give Nero a good whoppin' the other day when he tried to beat up Percy. And when I did he made a pass at me — me, who's took care of him since he was a cub.'
From across the water-moat Nero snarled menacingly at Pop.
'He's still got it in for me,' Pop said. 'If he don't quiet down, I'll give him a raw-hidin' he'll remember. There ain't no lion can get gay with me.'
He glanced apprehensively at the lion-run.
'I sure hope they calm down,' he said. 'This is Saturday and there'll be a big crowd this afternoon. Always makes them nervous, a crowd does, and the way they are now there'll be no holdin' 'em.'
'Anything else you heard of going on?' Riggs asked. Pop scratched his chin.
'Susan died this morning,' he declared.
Susan was a giraffe.
'Didn't know Susan was sick,' said Riggs.
'She wasn't,' Pop told him. 'Just keeled over.'
Riggs turned his eyes back to the lion caves. Nero, a big black-maned brute, was balancing himself on the edge of the water ditch, almost as if he were about to leap into the water. Percy and another lion were tusseling, not too good-naturedly.
'Looks like Nero might be thinking of coming over here after you,' the reporter suggested.
'Shucks,' snorted Pop. 'he wouldn't do that. Not Nero. Nor no other lion. Why, them cats hate water worse'n poison.'
From the elephant paddock, a mile or more away, came the sudden angry trumpeting of the pachyderms. Then a shrill squeal of elephantine rage.
'Sounds like them elephants was actin' up, too,' Pop declared calmly.
Pounding feet thundered around the corner of the walk that circled the cat-cages. A man who had lost his hat, whose eyes were wild with terror, pounded past them. As he ran on he cried:
'An elephant has gone mad! It's coming this way!'
Nero roared. A mountain lion screamed.
A great gray shape, moving swiftly despite its lumbering gait, rounded a clump of bushes and moved out on the smooth green sward of the park. It was the elephant. With trunk reared high, emitting screams of rage, with huge ears flapping, the beast headed for the cat-cages.
Riggs turned and pounded madly toward the administration building. Behind him Pop puffed and panted.
Shrill screams rent the air as early visitors at the zoo scampered for safety.
Animal voices added to the uproar.
The elephant, turning from his original direction, charged through the two acre paddock in which three pairs of wolves were kept, taking fence, trees and brush in his stride.
On the steps of the administration building. Riggs looked back.
Nero, the lion, was dripping water! The water that theoretically should have kept him penned in his cage as securely as steel bars!
A keeper, armed with a rifle, rushed up to Riggs.
'All hell's broken loose,' he shouted.
The polar bears had staged a bloody battle, with two of them dead, two dying and the rest so badly mauled that there was little hope they would live. Two buck deer, with locked horns, were fighting to the death. Monkey Island was in an uproar, with half of the little creatures mysteriously dead — dead, the keepers said, of too much excitement. A nervous condition.
'It ain't natural,' protested Pop, when they were inside. 'Animals don't fight like that.'
Riggs was yelling into a telephone.
Outside a rifle roared.
Pop flinched.
'Maybe that's Nero.' he groaned. 'Nero, that I raised from a cub. Bottle-fed him, I did.'
There were traces of tears in the old man's eyes.
It was Nero. But Nero, before he died, had reached out for the man who held the rifle and had killed him with a single vicious blow that crushed his skull.
Later that day, in his office, Doctor Gilmer smote the newspaper that lay open on his desk.
'You see that?' he asked Jack Woods.
The reporter nodded grimly. 'I see it. I wrote it. I worked on it all afternoon. Wild animals turned loose in the city. Ravening animals. Mad with the lust to kill. Hospitals full of dying people. Morgues with ripped humanity. I saw an elephant trample a man into the earth before the police shot the beast. The whole zoo gone mad. Like a jungle nightmare.'
He wiped his forehead with his coat sleeve and lit a cigarette with shaking fingers.
'I can stand most anything,' he said, 'but this was the acme of something or other. It was pretty horrible, Doc. I felt sorry for the animals, too,' he said. 'Poor devils. They weren't themselves. It was a pity to have to kill so many of them.'
Doc leaned across the table. 'Why did you come here?' he asked.
Woods nodded toward the glass cage that held the Martian animal. 'I got to thinking,' he said. 'The shambles down there today reminded me of something else — '
He paused and looked squarely at Gilmer.
'It reminded me of what we found in the Hello Mars IV.'
'Why?' snapped Gilmer.
'The men on board the ship were insane,' declared Woods. 'Only insane men would do the things they did. And Cooper died a maniac. How he held onto his reason long enough to bring the ship to a landing is more than I know.'
Gilmer took the mangled cigar out of his mouth and concentrated on picking off the worst of the frayed edge. He tucked it carefully back into the corner of his jaw.
'You figured those animals were insane today?'
Woods nodded.
'And for no reason,' he added.
'So you up and suspicioned the Martian animal,' said Gilmer. 'Just how in blue hell do you think that defenseless little Fur-Ball over there could make men and animals go insane?'
'Listen,' said Woods, 'don't act that way, Doc. You're on the trail of something. You broke a poker date tonight to stay here at the laboratory. You had two tanks of carbon monoxide sent up. You were shut in here all afternoon. You borrowed some stuff from Appleman down in the sound laboratory. It all adds up to something. Better tell me.'
'Damn you,' said Gilmer, 'you'd find out anyway even if I kept mum.'
He sat down and put his feet on the desk. He threw the wrecked and battered cigar into the waste-paper basket, took a fresh one out of a box, gave it a few preliminary chews and lit it.
'Tonight,' said Gilmer, 'I am going to stage an execution. I feel badly about it, but probably it is an act of mercy.'