there's a date. Eighteen thirty-four."
That changed things. Stanley looked at his watch and decided he
could spare half all hour.
In spite of the humid August heat outside, the smooth tile-faced
throat of the stairway was almost cold. Above them, yellow frosted
globes cast a dim and thoughtful light. The stair levels had once
been red, but in the centers they shaded to a dead black where the
feet of years had worn away layer after layer of resurfacing. The
silence was smooth and nearly perfect.
The janitor reached the bottom first and pointed under the
staircase. "Under here," he said.
Dex joined him in staring into a shadowy, triangular cavity under
the wide staircase. He felt a small tremor of disgust as he saw
where the janitor had brushed away a gossamer veil of cobwebs.
He supposed it was possible that the man had found something a
little older than postwar records under there, now that he acutally
looked at the space. But 1834?
"Just a second," the janitor said, and left momentarily. Left alone,
Dex hunkered down and peered in. He could make out nothing but
a deeper patch of shadow in there. Then the janitor returned with a
hefty four-cell flashlight. "This'll show it up."
"What were you doing under there anyway?" Dex asked.
The janitor grinned. "I was only standin here tryin to decide if I
should buff that second-floor hallway first or wash the lab
windows. I couldn't make up my mind, so I flipped a quarter. Only
I dropped it and it rolled under there." He pointed to the shadowy,
triangular cave. "I prob'ly would have let it go, except that was my
only quarter for the Coke machine. So I got my flash and knocked
down the cobwebs, and when I crawled under to get it, I saw that
crate. Here, have a look."
The janitor shone his light into the hole. Motes of disturbed dust
preened and swayed lazily in the beam. The light struck the far
wall in a spotlight circle, rose to the zigzag undersides of the stairs
briefly, picking out an ancient cobweb in which long-dead bugs
hung mumified, and then the light dropped and centered on a crate
about five feet long and two-and-a-half wide. It was perhaps three
feet deep. As the janitor had said, it was no knocked-together affair
made out of scrap-boards. It was neatly constructed of a smooth,
dark heavy wood. A coffin, Dexter thought uneasily. It looks like a
child's coffin.
The dark color of the wood showed only a fan-shaped swipe on the
side. The rest of the crate was the uniform dull gray of dust.
Something was written on the side-stenciled there.
Dex squinted but couldn't read it. He fumbled his glasses out of his
breast pocket and still couldn't. Part of what had been stenciled on
was obscured by the dust--not four inches of it, by any means, but
an extraordinarily thick coating, all the same.
Not wanting to crawl and dirty his pants, Dex duck-walked under
the stairway, stifling a sudden and amazingly strong feeling of
claustrophobia. The spit dried in his mouth and was replaced by a
dry, woolly taste, like an old mitten. He thought of the generations
of students trooping up and down these stairs, all male until 1888,
then in coeducational platoons, carrying their books and papers and
anatomical drawings, their bright faces and clear eyes, each of
them convinced that a useful and exciting future lay ahead ... and
here, below their feet, the spider spun his eternal snare for the fly
and the trundling beetle, and here this crate sat impassively,
gathering dust, waiting...
A tendril of spidersilk brushed across his forehead and he swept it
away with a small cry of loathing and an uncharacteristic inner
cringe.
"Not very nice under there, is it?" the janitor asked
sympathetically, holding his light centered on the crate. "God, I
hate tight places."
Dex didn't reply. He had reached the crate. He looked at the letters
that were stenciled there and then brushed the dust away from
them. It rose in a cloud, intensifying that mitten taste, making him
cough dryly. The dust hung in the beam of the janitor's light like
old magic, and Dex Stanley read what some long-dead chief of
lading had stenciled on this crate.
SHIP TO HORLICKS UNIVERSITY, the top line read. VIA
JULIA CARPENTER, read the middle line. The third line read
simply: ARCTIC EXPEDITION.
Below that, someone had written in heavy black charcoal strokes:
JUNE 19, 1834. That was the one line the janitor's hand-swipe had
completely cleared.
ARCTIC EXPEDITION, Dex read again. His heart began to
thump. "So what do you think?" the janitor's voice floated in.
Dex grabbed one end and lifted it. Heavy. As he let it settle back
with a mild thud, something shifted inside--he did not hear it but
felt it through the palms of his hands, as if whatever it was had
moved of its own volition. Stupid, of course. It had been an almost
liquid feel, as if something not quite jelled had moved sluggishly.
ARCTIC EXPEDITION.
Dex felt the excitement of an antiques collector happening upon a
neglected armoire with a twenty-five dollar price tag in the back
room of some hick-town junk shop ... an armoire that just might be
a Chippendale. "Help me get it out," he called to the janitor.
Working bent over to keep from slamming their heads on the
underside of the stairway, sliding the crate along, they got it out
and then picked it up by the bottom. Dex had gotten his pants dirty
after all, and there were cobwebs in his hair.
As they carried it into the old-fashioned, train-terminal-sized lab,
Dex felt that sensation of shift inside the crate again, and he could
see by the expression on the janitor's face that he had felt it as well.
They set it on one of the formica-topped lab tables. The next one
over was littered with Charlie Gereson's stuff--notebooks, graph
paper, contour maps, a Texas Instruments calculator.
The janitor stood back, wiping his hands on his double-pocket gray
shirt, breathing hard. "Some heavy mother," he said. "That bastard
must weigh two hunnert pounds. You okay, Perfesser Stanley?"
Dex barely heard him. He was looking at the end of the box, where
there was vet another series of stencils:
PAELLA/SANTIAGO/SAN FRANCISCO/CHICAGO/NEW
YORK/HORLICKS
"Perfesser--"
"Paella," Dex muttered, and then said it again, slightly louder. He
was seized with an unbelieving kind of excitement that was held in
check only by the thought that it might be some sort of hoax.
"Paella!"
"Paella, Dex?" Henry Northrup asked. The moon had risen in the
sky, turning silver.
"Paella is a very small island south of Tierra del Fuego," Dex said.
"Perhaps the smallest island ever inhabited by the race of man. A
number of Easter Island-type monoliths were found there just after
World War II. Not very interesting compared to their bigger
brothers, but every bit as mysterious. The natives of Paella and
Tierra del Fuego were Stone-Age people. Christian missionaries
killed them with kindness."
"I beg your pardon?"
"It's extremely cold down there. Summer temperatures rarely range
above the mid-forties. The missionaries gave them blankets, partly
so they would be warm, mostly to cover their sinful nakedness.
The blankets were crawling with fleas, and the natives of both
islands were wiped out by European diseases for which they had
developed no immunities. Mostly by smallpox."
Dex drank. The Scotch had lent his cheeks some color, but it was