He didn’t even say a great deal in the elevator going up to his office. When we got into the office he went to the liquor cabinet and got out the makings.
“Scotch for you, Parker,” he remembered. “How about you, Joy?”
“The same for me,” she said.
He fixed the drinks and handed them to us. But he didn’t go back of his desk and sit down. Instead he sat down on one of the other chairs with us. Probably he was trying to let us know that he was not the boss but just another member of the staff. There were times when he went to ridiculous lengths to point out his humility, and there were other times, of course, when he had no humility at all.
He had something that he wanted to talk with me about, but he was having trouble getting around to it. I didn’t help him any. I sat there, working on the drink, and let him go about it the best way that he could. I wondered just how much he knew or whether he had the slightest idea of what Was going on.
And suddenly I knew that the verdict had not necessarily been heart attack and that the Old Man had swung a lot of Weight, and the reason that he’d gone to bat for us was because he knew, or thought, I had something and that maybe it Was big enough for him to save my neck.
“Quite a day,” he said.
I agreed it had been.
He said something about the stupidity of police and I made agreeing noises.
Finally he got around to it. “Parker,” he said, “you have got your hooks into some thing big.”
“Could be,” I told him. “I don’t know what it is.”
“Big enough, maybe, for someone to try to kill you.”
“Someone did,” I said.
“You can come clean with me,” he told me. “If it’s something that has to be kept under cover, I can help you keep it there.”
“This is something I can’t tell you yet,” I said. “For if I did, you’d think that I was crazy. You wouldn’t believe a word of it. It’s something I have to have more proof on before I can tell anyone.”
He made his face go startled. “As big as that,” he said.
“That big,” I agreed.
I wanted to tell him. I wanted to talk to someone about it. I wanted to share the worry and the terror of it, but with someone who was willing to believe it and who would be equally as willing to have at least a try at doing something that could be effective.
“Boss,” I said, “can you suspend all disbelief? Can you tell me that you’d be ready to at least accept as possible anything I told you?”
“Try me,” he said.
“Damn it, that’s not good enough.”
“Well, all right, then, I will.”
“What if I should tell you that aliens from some distant star are here on Earth and are buying up the Earth?”
His voice turned cold. He thought I was kidding him.
He said: “I’d say that you were crazy.”
I got up and put the glass down on the desk top.
“I was afraid of that,” I said. “It’s what I had expected.”
Joy had risen, too. “Come on, Parker,” she said. “There’s no use staying here.”
The Old Man yelled at me: “But, Parker, that’s not it. You were kidding me.”
“The hell I was,” I said.
We went out the door and down the corridor. I thought that maybe he’d come to the door and call us back, but he didn’t. I caught a glimpse of him as we turned to go down the stairs, not waiting for the elevator, and he still was sitting in his chair,
Staring after us, as if he were trying to decide whether to be sore at us, or whether it might not be best to fire us, or whether, after all, there might have been something in the thing I’d told him. He looked small and far away. It was as if I were looking at him through binoculars turned the wrong way around.
We went down three flights of stairs to reach the lobby. I don’t know why we didn’t take the elevator. Neither of us, apparently, even thought about it. Maybe we just wanted to get out of there the quickest way there was.
We went outside and it was raining. Not much of a rain, just the beginning of a rain, cold and miserable.
We walked over to the car and stood beside it, not getting in just yet, standing there undecided and confused, not knowing what to do.
I was thinking of what had been in the closet back in the apartment (not that I actually knew what had been in there) and what had happened to the car out in the parking lot. I knew that Joy must be thinking about the things that had prowled around the house and might still be prowling there—that, whether they were or not, would keep on prowling from this time forward in her imagination.
She moved over closer and stood tight against me and I put an arm around her, without saying anything, there in the rainy dark, and held her even closer, thinking bow we were like two lost and frightened children, huddling in the rain. And afraid of the dark. For the first time in our lives, afraid of the dark.
“Look, Parker,” said Joy.
She was holding out a hand, with the palm cupped upward, and there was something in the palm, something she had been carrying in a tight-clenched fist.
I bent to look at it, and in the faint light cast by the streetlamp at the end of the block I saw it was a key.
“It was sticking in the lock on Carleton’s laboratory door,” she said. “I slipped it out when no one was looking. That stupid detective closed the door without ever thinking of the key. He was so sore at you that he never thought about it. You asking him if he wanted a statement from the dog.”
“Good work,” I said, and caught her face between my hands and kissed her. Although, even now, I can’t imagine why I Was so elated at finding we had the laboratory key. It was simply, I guess, that it was a final outwitting of authority, that in a rather grim and terrible game we had won a trick.
“Let’s have a look,” she said.
I opened the door and ushered her into the car, then walked around it and got I on the other side. I found the key and thrust it in the lock and turned it to start the motor, and even as the engine coughed and caught I tried to jerk it from the lock, realizing even as I did that it was too late.
But nothing happened. The motor purred and there was nothing wrong. There had been no bomb.
I sat there, sweating.
“What’s the matter, Parker?”
“Nothing,” I said. I put the machine in gear and moved out from the curb. And I remembered those other times I had started up the car, out at the Belmont house, in front of the biology building (twice on that one), again in front of the police station, never thinking of the danger—so maybe it was safe. Maybe the bowling balls never tried something a second time if it failed the first.
I swung into a side street to cut over to University Avenue.
“Maybe it’s a wild-goose chase,” said Joy. “Maybe the front door will be locked.”
“It wasn’t when we left,” I said.
“But the janitor might have locked it.”
He hadn’t, though.
We went through the door and climbed the stairs as quietly as we could.
We came to Stirling’s door and Joy banded me the key. I fumbled a little but finally got the key inserted and turned it, pushing the door open.
We walked inside and I closed the door, listening to the latch click shut.
A tiny flame burned on the laboratory bench—a small alcohol lamp that I was sure had not been lit before. And beside the bench, perched upon a stool, was a strangely twisted figure.
“Good evening, friends,” he said. There was no mistaking the clear, cultivated intonations of that voice.
It was Atwood sitting on the stool.
We stood and stared at him and he tittered at us. He probably meant it to be a chuckle, but it came out as a titter.
“If I look a little strange,” he told us, “it’s because not all of me is here. Some of me got home.”
Now that we could see him better, our eyes becoming accustomed to the feeble light, it was apparent that he was twisted and lopsided and that he was somewhat smaller than a man should be. One arm was shorter than the other and his body was far too thin and his face was twisted out of shape. And yet his clothing fit him, as if it had been tailored to fit his twisted shape.