small cut he'd gotten in the lab a couple of days before. He hadn't
realized until then that his hands were shaking. He emptied half the
glass and the Scotch boomed in his stomach, first hot, then
spreading a steadylng warmth.
"Sit down, man," Northrup said.
Dex sat, and drank again. Now it was a lot better. He looked at
Northrup, who was looking levelly back over the rim of his own
glass. Dex looked away, out at the bloody orb of moon sitting over
the rim of the horizon, over the university, which was supposed to
be the seat of rationality, the forebrain of the body politic. How did
that jibe with the matter of the crate? With the screams? With the
blood?
"Men are dead?" Northrup said at last.
"Are you sure they're dead?"
"Yes. The bodies are gone now. At least, I think they are. Even the
bones... the teeth... but the blood... the blood, you know..."
"No, I don't know anything. You've got to start at the beginning."
Stanley took another drink and set his glass down. "Of course I
do," he said. "Yes. It begins just where it ends. With the crate. The
janitor found the crate..."
Dexter Stanley had come into Amberson Hall, sometimes called
the Old Zoology Building, that afternoon at three o'clock. It was a
blaringly hot day, and the campus looked listless and dead, in spite
of the twirling sprinklers in front of the fraternity houses and the
Old Front dorms.
The Old Front went back to the turn of the century, but Amberson
Hall was much older than that. It was one of the oldest buildings
on a university campus that had celebrated its tricentennial two
years previous. It was a tall brick building, shackled with ivy that
seemed to spring out of the earth like green, clutching hands. Its
narrow windows were more like gun slits than real windows, and
Amberson seemed to frown at the newer buildings with their glass
walls and curvy, unorthodox shapes.
The new zoology building, Cather Hall, had been completed eight
months before, and the process of transition would probably go on
for another eighteen months. No one was completely sure what
would happen to Amberson then. If the bond issue to build the new
gym found favor with the voters, it would probably be demolished.
He paused a moment to watch two young men throwing a Frisbee
back and forth. A dog ran back and forth between them, glumly
chasing the spinning disc. Abruptly the mutt gave up and flopped
in the shade of a poplar. A VW with a NO NUKES sticker on the
back deck trundled slowly past, heading for the Upper Circle.
Nothing else moved. A week before, the final summer session had
ended and the campus lay still and fallow, dead ore on summer's
anvil.
Dex had a number of files to pick up, part of the seemingly endless
process of moving from Amberson to Cather. The old building
seemed spectrally empty. His footfalls echoed back dreamily as he
walked past closed doors with frosted glass panels, past bulletin
boards with their yellowing notices and toward his office at the end
of the first-floor corridor. The cloying smell of fresh paint hung in
the air.
He was almost to his door, and jingling his keys in his pocket,
when the janitor popped out of Room 6, the big lecture hall,
startling him.
He grunted, then smiled a little shamefacedly, the way people will
when they've gotten a mild zap. "You got me that time," he told the
janitor.
The janitor smiled and twiddled the gigantic key ring clipped to his
belt. "Sorry, Perfesser Stanley," he said. "I was hopin' it was you.
Charlie said you'd be in this afternoon."
"Charlie Gereson is still here?" Dex frowned. Gereson was a grad
student who was doing an involved--and possibly very important--
paper on negative environmental factors in long-term animal
migration. It was a subject that could have a strong impact on area
farming practices and pest control. But Gereson was pulling almost
fifty hours a week in the gigantic (and antiquated) basement lab.
The new lab complex in Cather would have been exponentially
better suited to his purposes, but the new labs would not be fully
equipped for another two to four months... if then.
"Think he went over the Union for a burger," the janitor said. "I
told him myself to quit a while and go get something to eat. He's
been here since nine this morning. Told him myself. Said he ought
to get some food. A man don't live on love alone."
The janitor smiled, a little tentatively, and Dex smiled back. The
janitor was right; Gereson was embarked upon a labor of love. Dex
had seen too many squadrons of students just grunting along and
making grades not to appreciate that... and not to worry about
Charlie Gereson's health and well-being from time to time.
"I would have told him, if he hadn't been so busy," the janitor said,
and offered his tentative little smile again. "Also, I kinda wanted to
show you myself."
"What's that?" Dex asked. He felt a little impatient. It was chess
night with Henry; he wanted to get this taken care of and still have
time for a leisurely meal at the Hancock House.
"Well, maybe it's nothin," the janitor said. "But... well, this buildin
is some old, and we keep turnin things up, don't we?"
Dex knew. It was like moving out of a house that has been lived in
for generations. Halley, the bright young assistant professor who
had been here for three years now, had found half a dozen antique
clips with small brass balls on the ends. She'd had no idea what the
clips, which looked a little bit like spring-loaded wishbones, could
be. Dex had been able to tell her. Not so many years after the Civil
War, those clips had been used to hold the heads of white mice,
who were then operated on without anesthetic. Young Halley, with
her Berkeley education and her bright spill of Farrah Fawcett-
Majors golden hair, had looked quite revolted. "No anti-
vivisectionists in those days," Dex had told her jovially. "At least
not around here." And Halley had responded with a blank look that
probably disguised disgust or maybe even loathing. Dex had put
his foot in it again. He had a positive talent for that, it seemed.
They had found sixty boxes of The American Zoologist in a
crawlspace, and the attic had been a maze of old equipment and
mouldering reports. Some of the impedimenta no one--not even
Dexter Stanley--could identify.
In the closet of the old animal pens at the back of the building,
Professor Viney had found a complicated gerbil-run with exquisite
glass panels. It had been accepted for display at the Musuem of
Natural Science in Washington.
But the finds had been tapering off this summer, and Dex thought
Amberson Hall had given up the last of its secrets."What have you
found?" he asked the janitor.
"A crate. I found it tucked right under the basement stairs. I didn't
open it. It's been nailed shut, anyway."
Stanly couldn't believe that anything very interesting could have
escaped notice for long, just by being tucked under the stairs. Tens
of thousands of people went up and down them every week during
the academic year. Most likely the janitor's crate was full of
department records dating back twenty-five years. Or even more
prosaic, a box of National Geographics.
"I hardly think--"
"It's a real crate," the janitor broke in earnestly. "I mean, my father
was a carpenter, and this crate is built tile way he was buildin 'em
back in the twenties. And he learned from his father."
"I really doubt if--"
"Also, it's got about four inches of dust on it. I wiped some off and