“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 Necronomiconl — got the idea they’d discover in it terror-weapons worse than the H-bomb and the intercontinental ballistic missile.”
“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 are no more to be trusted with that accursed book than Wilbur Whateley. Even though the Russians are after it too, it must remain our sole responsibility. Merciful Creator, yes!”
“I’d rather have seen Wilbur get it,” Wingate Peaslee put in gruffly.
“You wouldn’t say that, Win,” Francis Morgan interposed judiciously, “if you’d seen Wilbur after the library dog tore him — or of course his brother on Sentinel Hill. Gad!” He shook his head and sighed a bit tiredly. One or two of the others echoed him. With a faint preliminary grinding of its mechanism, a grandfather clock across the lounge slowly struck twelve.
“Gentlemen,” I said, setting my coffee cup aside and standing up with my cardboard box, “you have entertained me in unparalleled fashion, but now it is — ”
“ — midnight and we all dissipate into violet and green vapors?” Wilmarth chuckled.
“No,” I told him. “I was going to say that now it is September 15th and that I have in mind a short expedition, only so far as the Burying Ground behind the new Administration Building. I have here a wreath and I propose to lay it on the grave of Dr. Henry Armitage.”
“The anniversary of his laying of the Dunwich Horror in 1928,” Wilmarth exclaimed contritely. “A thoughtful remembrance. I’ll go with you. You’ll come too, Francis, of course? You had a hand in that deed.”
Morgan slowly shook his head. “No, if you don’t mind,” he said. “My contribution was less than nothing. I thought a big-game rifle would be sufficient to knock over the beast. Gad!”
The others courteously begged off on one pretext or another and so it was only Wilmarth and I who wandered down Lich Street, now become a college walk for that block, between Administration and Pickman Lab, as a gibbous moon rose over French Hill, past whose base the lights of a few cars still whirled ghostily along the new freeway.
I could have wished for a few more companions or a less sinister one than Wilmarth had struck me this morning. I couldn’t help remembering how he had once been deceived by a monster masking as the scholarly Vermont recluse Henry Akeley, and how ironic and terrible it would be, if through him the same trick should be worked on another.
Nevertheless, I took advantage of the opportunity to ask him boldly, “Professor Wilmarth, your brush with the Plutonian beings occurred September 12th, 1928, almost exactly at the same time as the Dunwich affair. In fact, the very night you fled Akeley’s farmhouse, Wilbur’s brother was loose and ravening. Has there ever been any hint of an explanation of that monstrous coincidence?”
Wilmarth waited some seconds before replying and this time — Thank God! — there was no chuckle. In fact, his voice was quiet and without trace of levity as he at last replied, “Yes, of course there has been. I think I can risk telling you that I have kept in rather closer touch with the Plutonians or Yuggothians than perhaps even old Dyer guesses. I’ve had to! Besides, like Danforth’s and Dyer’s antarctic Old Ones, the Plutonians are not such utterly evil beings when one really gets to know them. Though they will always inspire my ex- tremest awe!