“Yes, then you know.” Interest sharpened in the wise old face. “My interest too began with an unfortunate relative, long ago. My sister. My own work has to do with tumors, not with strokes, but the symptoms are often very similar.”
“But it must be very satisfying to help people with that problem.”
“Yes, of course. But you see, when you’re tampering with the brain, whether it’s surgery or drugs, you are tampering with the essential person. The ethical requirements are far stricter than if you’re working with bones, say, or kidneys. You have to be very sure that you’re right.”
“You mean in case your surgery or drugs do other things besides get rid of the problem?”
“Exactly. Most medical treatment is that way, Rick. Dangerous intervention that is done to eliminate something even more dangerous. And it’s important to know exactly what the problems are going to be.”
“But you’ve done so many tests, sir. You must know what you have.”
“Oh, yes, I know. Though not with humans, of course. The drug companies will do more tests yet. But the vandalism is still unfortunate. I hate to lose the information from even one study. The scientist in me always wants to do even more tests.” Dr. Weisen laughed suddenly, clapped Nick on the shoulder. “And I’m not going to finish even the few I’ve done if I don’t get home to work! Thank you, Rick. See you tomorrow.”
“Good night, sir.” Nick watched the black car rumble down the driveway, the last car out of the lot, and realized that Maggie was not the only reason he was here. He had come to admire Dr. Weisen and those joined with him in the search for a deeper understanding of the brain. If he could help remove the problem that now shadowed their work, it would have been time well spent.
He was alone at the lab now. Except for Maggie, off in the woods somewhere, and probably Les and Monica. Damn them. He went back inside and checked his list. He should take a look at the animal rooms again soon; he hadn’t checked since he had changed the cages earlier in his shift. And he had a couple of jobs to do in the microscope room. Do those first. He showered, put on his scrubs, and went into the room. A bit of cleaning up to do too. They were so busy these days, Gib wasn’t able to do it in the daytime. He unplugged the massive cryostat, moved the microscopes from their places, scrubbed and disinfected. Then he rolled the supply cart out, tossing his used scrubs over it as he went through the locker room, and left it by the side loading door for future attention. Next he carefully made the rounds of the animal rooms, smoothly and quietly, to avoid too much disruption. Everything was as it should be; the cats, Barbara Burke’s rats, all the experimental animals in their proper places, and the breeding room animals rustling and lively. The last two sets of Weisen’s rats eyed him suspiciously, the scalloped ears twitching. Some were clearly livelier than others; their tumors slowed them down, and half were getting only a placebo instead of the helpful new drug.
As he came back into the hall he thought he heard tires on the driveway. It was hard to tell with the constant swish of the air in the ventilation system, the low hum of the machine. He hurried into the hall and looked out the glass doors, but the parking lot was vacant under its lights. It was only ten o’clock; Barbara Burke usually stopped by at eleven to tend her rats, so it wouldn’t be her car yet. The lab was still deserted, still all his own.
He turned and walked confidently down the hall to Dr. Weisen’s office and opened the door that had not locked when he and Dr. Weisen left, because he had pressed tape across the strike as he pretended to check the latch behind them. He had brought his flashlight, and keeping the beam low so that it would not bounce out the windows, he searched quickly and methodically. It wouldn’t be on the bookshelves amidst the stacks of journals. He looked in the desk drawers—nothing. The file cabinet, perhaps. Most of the file drawers held animal records; but in the top one was a small box, and in the box were keys. Nick pulled out the pair marked “Old,” closed the drawer, and slipped out into the bright hall again. Nick Houdini, passing through the walls of a locked office. Whee.
Still no sign of cars in the lot. But the woods might have eyes—Les and Monica’s eyes. He wandered out the front door casually, hands in pockets; but everything was still. Or rather, not still, but murmuring with the normal sounds of an early summer night. Whispering leaves, frogs and insects singing, crying aloud for a mate. Well, he certainly could sympathize with that. Feeling a rueful primeval kinship with them, mateless Nick strolled toward the rows of pines overgrown along the front of the old lab.
He waited in the shadow for several minutes, still a bit uneasy about the tires he probably hadn’t heard; but nothing changed. The frogs cried, the wind brushed through the leaves, and far away occasional trucks or cars hummed faintly along the highway before passing behind the ridge and out of earshot. Nick turned to the door, unlocked it with one of Weisen’s keys, and stepped inside.
He was not alone.
An actor spends much time in the dark, waiting in the wings or on a black stage for the lights to come up. Much time dodging silently into position for his next entrance around invisible furniture and masking pieces backstage. He is familiar with the sense of another actor or stagehand lurking in the dark nearby, and with the mysteriously palpable presence of an unseen, unheard, attentive audience. But the sensation he had now was different; familiar, yet not the same as being in the same dark theatre with an audience, not like being in the same dark corner with another actor.
He had moved swiftly and instinctively away from the door, and crouched now against the wall of the hall that ran the length of the building. He waited. Everything was dark except for a dim square straight ahead, a window at the end of the short cross hall that led from front door to service door and looked out onto dark woods. Everything was silent too. There was no ventilation system in here, and the sounds of the woods could not be heard inside. Minutes crawled by. Finally, after a dark eon, he heard again the faint sound that had registered subliminally as he had opened the door. A tiny crackling, far away, at the south end of the building. In another minute, though still barely audible, it had become steadier.
There was no light coming from that direction. Nick debated briefly with himself about coming back later, but he was this far, and getting the keys might never be so easy again. But before tackling the door with the rustling, he needed a better idea of the overall layout. North end first.
Most of the doors in the hall were unlocked, and it was a dull tour. The rooms still contained cage racks similar to the ones in the new lab, but instead of cages they held stacks of supplies—bedding, bags of food pellets, reams of paper and office supplies, slides. At the end of the hall, the door was locked. He tried the second key. He had been very quiet so far, but the key in the lock of this door scratched faintly, and again there was a sudden eerie silence from the south end of the long hall. Nick stepped into the little room hastily and let the door close. There didn’t seem to be a window in this room, but, as always, he kept the flashlight beam low.
This was a small room compared to the others, lined with steel, cool. Small boxes and bottles were on the shelves. Chemicals. Gib had shown him the small storage cabinet in the new lab; these seemed to be more of the same. Disinfectants, Gib had said, anesthetics, medicines. Most of the labels were incomprehensible to Nick; pellets labeled KCN, a canister of MgS04. He recognized one, H2SO4, from high school chemistry class. Sulfuric acid. The little ditty jounced through his head: “We had a little Willy, now Willy is no more, ‘cause what he thought was H20, was H2S04.” Some of the containers had additional labels—ether, alcohol, pentobarbitone. And the boxes at the end were familiar. Paramustine. Dr. Weisen’s drug, the one worth millions, if he was able to finish the tests that proved it worked.
He left the room silently, making sure it was locked, and returned to the entrance. Might as well check out the short back hall by the service entrance. Trash cans by the door, empty. But glancing out the window of the back door, he tensed suddenly.
A
car.
A dark-colored car in the faint moonlight, half-hidden by the brush beside the service drive behind the building.
Again, he waited motionless, back to the wall; again, no sounds interrupted the faint whispering rustle from the end of the building.
Only one room opened into this back hall. He was standing next to its door and tried the knob gently, with a vague thought of taking cover, waiting for whoever it was to make a move or return to the car. But the knob didn’t move. He turned toward it, tried the second key, and stepped in.
Mustiness here, and bulk, and a low dim flickering light. He closed the door behind him. Again, no sign of a window, and no sounds; he risked the flashlight. A furnace room. The big still metal shape hunched in one comer, silent in the warm June night. Next to it, a water heater with its pilot burning. Against the other wall, stacks of old semi-useful objects—ancient folding chairs, a metal sink, old tires, Venetian blinds, several large animal cages of venerable design, rakes and hedge clippers.
Nick switched off the light and thought a moment. This was not a good place for his purposes; with no window, he could not watch the car. And if the person was not here in the old lab, he should get back to the new lab to see what was going on. That surreptitiously parked car did not bode well. First, then, check the south end of the building, the rustle. Then, if no one was there, back to the new lab.
He moved back into the silent black hall, waited again; no new noises. Silently, he crept down the hall toward the faint crackling sound. He located the correct door and tried the knob. Locked. Poised to leap back, he slipped the key into the lock. Again, sudden silence. He turned it quietly, flattened himself cautiously against the door, opened it slowly.
Darkness. Not even the faint luminous rectangles of windows that had been in most of the rooms. No movement. And yet the atmosphere here was alive. Suddenly convinced of what he had suspected, Nick edged around the door, closing it behind him, and switched on the flashlight, low in the breathing silence.
Hundreds of pinpricks of light answered its dim beam. Hundreds of eyes.
The room was filled with rats.
No humans. A quick sweep of the beam proved that. He stepped to the nearest bank of cages. Everything was neat, well kept—clean bedding, food and water. A cage card on every cage. He frowned at the animals inside, puzzled. These animals were all right—slightly unkempt coats, maybe not in the full bloom of health, but doing all right. Still puzzled, he memorized a few cage cards from different parts of the room, then turned back to the door.
The time was a quarter to eleven; Barbara would be arriving soon, and he should be back in the new lab by then. Who was the other person on the grounds? And where? And why had he—or she?—parked in a hidden place? Nick moved quietly to the door, eased through into the black hall again, made sure the door was locked behind him. And dove to the left and across the hall, because now suddenly the sense of another person near him was overwhelming. As he whirled, still in a crouch, to face out into the hall, he heard a soft step by the door where he had been.
The other had heard him too, and Nick dodged again in the nightmare blackness as a weight more sensed than heard or felt hurtled across the hall. Quiet escape was out of the question, then. He’d have to fight. He crouched again, took a second to brace and balance himself as he had been taught by the best stage combat instructor in New York. Then he switched on the flashlight as he tossed it back toward the door of the rat room. Its flight illuminated a stack of paper before it struck the floor and skidded to a stop by the baseboard, beaming crookedly down the hall.
The other had already launched himself across the hall toward the moving brightness when he realized that Nick had not followed the light on the floor. In the dim bounce light from the walls, Nick saw the dark shape begin to check and turn toward him. But his adversary was too late. Nick had had that extra instant to aim accurately at the moving shadow, to throw his two hundred-plus pounds directly at the off-balance opponent. As they fell to the floor together, he went for the throat, for the carotids that his stage fight instructor had taught them always to avoid. The carotids that took oxygen to the brain. It took a second longer than he had expected because his hands closed first on hair, a beard, and for a dread moment he feared that he had attacked Dr. Weisen. But the violent twist of the body revealed strength, youth, and Nick’s hands knotted tight on the other’s neck. Hard, painful blows chopped against him, but he gripped stoically, buried his face against his opponent’s chest to protect it, and counted the seconds. One, two, three. The blows became twitches. Four, five. The body sagged in his hands. Six, seven. Nick eased the head to the floor gently, picked up the still-beaming flashlight, and shone it on the unconscious face. Then he switched off the light and melted away and out the front door again. Come like shadows; so depart.
Tom. It was Tom. Why? What was he doing? How had he gotten in? Nick tried the door behind him; it had locked automatically, as he had thought. Tom must have a key. There had been the stack of paper by the rat room door; had that been Tom’s? What about the rats? Were they his? At least the car behind the building was explained.
Nick wondered if he had been recognized. Probably not. Even if he had been, though, he doubted that Tom would report him. Unless, by some chance, he was working secretly for Weisen. But that would be unlikely; Weisen would trust Gib, or even Les or Martin or Monica, before Tom. So Tom had been just as unauthorized as Nick had been, and not likely to complain that he’d been assaulted in the old lab. Especially if, as Nick suspected, he had no idea of who the assailant was.
He had been circling the lab in the shadow of the trees along the edge of the service drives. Now he came out, casually, from the direction of the ridge to cross the parking lot. It was still deserted. He strolled openly to the front door, whistling, and into the lit corridors of the new lab. No one. He sauntered to Dr. Weisen’s office, opened it, returned the wiped keys to their box in the cabinet, removed his tape from the door strike, and emerged into the hall just in time to hear the receding hum of tires on the asphalt drive. He leaped to the glass of the front door. The dark car, lights still off, was turning out of the driveway. Thank God Tom was okay. That chokehold had made Nick uneasy, no matter how necessary it had been. As Dr. Weisen said, the ethical requirements were a lot stricter when you were tampering with the brain.
Nick went to the washroom, combed his sparse tousled hair, and saw that his shirt was ripped. He went to his room to change.
Had Tom been here in the new lab too? He’d better check all the animal rooms again. Before he could start, though, the front door banged and Barbara’s voice sang out cheerfully, “Anybody home?”
“Hello, Barbara,” called Nick. She didn’t like Miz Burke. He went out to meet her, pleasant and deferential.
“Hi, Rick. How’s it going?”
“Fine, thanks.”
“Well, I’m off to dole out a snack to my little pets. Nice weather tonight. You’ve been out?”
“Yes. I take a walk every now and then.”
“Good. Well, I’ll see you in a little while.” She disappeared into the shower locks. Nick put away the flashlight and started his rounds of the animal rooms from the outside hall.
At the seventh door he switched on the light and froze, appalled, his stomach lurching in protest. He swallowed, switched on the rest of the lights, and looked again.
All the cages were empty, all the doors opened. In the center of the room, in an untidy bleeding heap, were the rats, smashed and mutilated. Dr. Weisen’s rats.
Nick steeled himself, stepped closer, and looked them over swiftly. Forty of them; that would be a whole set of experimental and control animals. Every one with its skull smashed; every one with its back broken and mutilated. Trickles of blood had run down the heap, drying now, but still sticky. Not a lot of blood but sickening enough. No blood in the cages either. These were the same clean cages he had transferred the rats into this afternoon, early in his shift, and they were still f
airly clean.
Nick looked around the room—clean too. He frowned. Then, breaking all the rules Gib had taught him, he slipped through the other door of the animal room and picked up a couple of sterile animal bags from the supply shelves. He returned, put a mangled rat into each bag, and took them out the loading door and hid them among the papers in the dumpster. Finally, with heavy heart, he called Dr. Weisen.
Weisen, arriving hastily dressed and very undapper fifteen minutes later, stared in anguish at the heap of rats.
“Oh, lord.” He seemed to sag. He turned away from them. “I can’t believe it. Not again. Who would do such a thing? Why?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“God. I can’t look at them. Clean them up.” He started for the door.
“You don’t want to inspect them?”
“For fingerprints?” snapped Dr. Weisen.
“I’m sorry, sir.”
“No, Rick. The truth is obvious. Someone is trying to stop the testing of the drug. The animals are useless now. Just clean them up.”
Nick nodded unhappily. The little round man with the white hair looked miserable, as though his hopes had been crushed somewhere in that heap of lifeless animals. But when they heard a shriek from the hall, he followed Nick out.
Barbara Burke, still in her scrubs, was running toward them. “Rick? Oh, Dr. Weisen, thank God you’re here!”
“What’s wrong, Barbara?” Dr. Weisen seemed to be having trouble focusing on her.
“The microscope!”
“What about it?”
“It’s gone, Dr. Weisen! One of the microscopes is gone!”
The old blue eyes sharpened. “It can’t be. Let’s look around.”
But a half-hour’s search later, he leaned back against the wall of the microscope room, staring at the gap in the row of instruments. “I don’t understand. I just don’t understand,” he said, bewildered.
“It was here earlier, when I cleaned up,” said Nick with a puzzled look.
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