A CREEPING THING!
It took Roger a moment only to realize the enormous danger that was
behind the loss of those inoculated rats.
When Doctor Ryder had been allotted space in which to conduct his
experiments to see if he could perfect a cure for a horribly deadly
spinal affliction, he had decided to experiment, first, on animals.
Such experiments had been gotten under way the night before.
The rats, inoculated, were carriers of the deadly germs. If some
ignorant person had taken them, and the public was not warned to be
careful, anything might happen!
One of Grover's constantly repeated axioms about laboratory work was:
"Do the first thing first!"
All life, the scientific student always had insisted, was like the
chemical compounds they handled. No matter what the problem might be, no
matter how it looked, it could be analyzed the way compounds would be
analyzed, the elements could be isolated, and the base--the guide to the
whole condition--could be known. Sodium, a metal, very unstable,
combined with chlorine, a gas, turned into sodium chloride, and that was
a salt--common table salt, in fact. Yet the restrainer used in
photography, a dissolved salt, was sodium bromide, another gas and the
metal, and to find out what a compound held, one had to separate all
parts by test and find the base or original element.
But first, one must do the first thing--and in this situation Roger knew
that the first thing was to get busy on the telephone.
White rats had been inoculated with dangerous germs. A bite from such an
animal was ten times more terrible than that of a plain rat, poisonous
though that would be. Therefore, if those inoculated animals were now
missing, Grover, up where their cage had been, would know it already;
but the public, exposed to possible contamination, must be warned.
Roger plugged in the upstairs telephone so that the policeman could
reach his headquarters and start a widespread search of all cars on the
roads, all suspicious people carrying sacks or other possible packages
or cases that could hide the rats. The Health Department and news and
radio agencies must be asked to broadcast public warnings. And the owner
of the rats, Doctor Ryder, should be called.
Therefore, when Roger went upstairs, his report made his cousin nod
approvingly. Roger had done all he could to avert danger if the rats had
been taken ignorantly by some idiot who might let one or more escape and
spread disease germs.
With his story told, Potts was busy doing what Grover had ordered as one
way to secure clues: a motion picture camera using non-flam film,
flashbulbs of the latest type, tripod for time exposing, and both
wide-angle and micrometric lenses, to give large views of big spaces or
vastly magnified details of practically invisible things, formed the kit
that the handy man worked with.
Because he had used his wit Grover had no orders for Roger as the
firemen, police and officers departed.
Nothing could be done until Potts developed his "takes" so they could be
run in the laboratory screening-room.
Grover, in his small, private "thinking den," would want to be left to
think out and separate all the mysteries, so that he could get to the
heart of the affair and thus decide what to do about it.
Alone, wide-awake, with the dawn just beginning to lighten the skylight
in the roof over his stock-room, Roger stood thinking.
He knew that if the small, partitioned space set aside for Doctor Ryder
had held clues, Grover would have told him.
The germs supposed to have been injected into rats the night before
could not have produced much effect that past night. The doctor had not
felt that he had to observe, personally, as he would have done later.
Instead, automatic "observers" had been set up.
Inside the empty cage, a dictagraph microphone showed, fixed to the
glass inside the cage top. That, Roger knew, led to a device like the
seismograph which registers earthquake tremors. Its purpose was to show,
by the vibration of a pen across a moving tape, when the rats developed
any unusual excitement or stress, which was not expected but was
provided for in that way.
A camera of the moving picture type, but set to snap one take at minute
intervals, would check also; and if the seismograph got to zig-zagging
sharply, it would make contact on one side with a relay, and throw on
the "continuous" mechanism of the marvelous camera.
To discover by calculating how much of the tape had been unreeled when
something had stopped it, was easy; and in that way Roger knew the time
that the mechanism had stopped, although he did not dare fix that as the
time the rats had vanished, because the tape had started at five in the
afternoon, and had unreeled to the point to show that it had stopped at
four in the morning; but the alarm had not sounded until half an hour or
so later.
The tape showed excited swerves of the recording stylus, but not
apparently enough to start the continuous takes, because Grover had left
the magazine as it was until Potts should be ready to develop all prints
at one time.
With his snapshots and time exposures of wide-angles of windows, doors,
floors, air-conditioning intake, exhaust, cellar openings and floors,
and his micrometric detail close-ups of parts of all these, Potts went
to the dark-room adjoining Roger's stock-room. The film he had taken
would fill all tanks, so he left the other till later.
The authorities had been warned; and nothing more could be done.
Roger, as the sun rose, telephoned for light breakfast to be sent from a
nearby restaurant, taking Potts his share in the dark-room.
As he ate, Roger tried to bring some sense into the baffling set of
conditions:
The white rats, in their cage, with the observation apparatus and chart
with notations, should have been recognized by anybody who could see and
who could read, as dangerous to handle, much more to remove.
With the protecting system set, it should have been impossible to enter,
at all, and more impossible to get out.
Yet the rats had not by any magic been evaporated into thin air.
Furthermore, Roger mused, why had the fluoroscope and X-ray machinery
been put into operation?
The entire situation seemed to be too bizarre to be true: more than all
the rest, the mad story of Potts that he had felt a hand as "big as a
ham," hit him before he had lost his senses!
Nothing fitted anything else.
Doctor Ryder, arriving, was as much a contrast to cold, unexcited Grover
as could be imagined. He sputtered his fears for the public, his dismay
that this should have brought discredit on the laboratory that had been
known to safeguard its precious data.
Roger, watching the pudgy, stout little germ experimenter who excitedly
mixed wild theories with wilder plans of procedure, thought to himself
that if anybody or anything would upset his cousin, the man's emotional
excitement would be the thing.
Grover was not stirred out of his quiet manner.
The staff began to arrive. They had all seen in newspapers or had heard
by radio the warnings and the brief story of the lost rats.
Mr. Millman, the electrical engineer, asked immediately of Dr. Ryder:
"Have you any enemies?"
The experimenter thought that he might have antagonists among the
scientists who disagreed with his theories; but they would not be men
who would endanger the public for so small a revenge as could come from
criticism of his laxness in not watching his experiment more closely.
Mr. Ellison, the laboratory's electrical research specialist who worked
with Mr. Millman, agreed; and so did the bio-chemist, Mr. Zendt; the
analytical chemist, Mr. Hope, and Grover.
They were discussing the many contradictory and unexplainable points
when Potts called, from the darkroom:
"Hi, Rog'--come quick!"
As soon as his eyes were accustomed to the dull rosy glow after he
passed the light-trap, Roger saw Tip clipping non-flam film positives to
drying drums.
"What have you got, Tip?"
"Look!"
Potts snapped a strip in place in a vision tunnel: Roger applied his eye
to the lens, and saw, enlarged on the viewing-plate, what appeared to be
the edge of a cellar step. With side-lighting, magnified ridges and
depressions in dust looked like a range of hills and vales.
"It was a snake!"
"A--did you say 'snake'?" Roger gasped, "How do you get that?"
Potts changed films under Roger's gaze; an enlarged wide-angle of
several steps was before his eyes, and the snake-slide of some body that
had dragged across just the step-edges, and had made no track of hand or
foot on the level of the steps showed!
"It certainly looks like something that creeps, Tip."
"Well, a snake creeps. A snake! What else?"