Resonance

  ***

  "Excuse me, sir," I said to the fat security guard sitting behind the desk reading a magazine.

  "Yeah?" He wasn't interested, he wasn't not interested. It was just an interruption of his reading to him.

  "We were on our way back to Willett from the library"—luckily I knew the campus layout and had planned how to make this plausible—"and we saw two suspicious-looking guys on the path—the path that runs past the bell tower to the president's house."

  The guard sighed. "Suspicious how?"

  "They weren't students," Shep said earnestly.

  "How do you know?"

  "Too old," I answered, and added immediately, "and they weren't, they didn't look like grad students or faculty."

  "What did they do?" he asked. He didn't seem very receptive. This wasn't going nearly as well as I'd expected, and it was taking too long.

  "They just didn't, didn't look right." I knew it was lame even while I was saying it.

  "Sir." Shep broke in and once again proved he could act. "Sir, there are two of us, and there were two of them, and they didn't say anything or do anything, but sir, I was terrified of them. I've never been so scared in my life. That's why we came straight over here. Sir, you really need to check them out." Shep even looked scared. I was nodding and doing my best to look scared too.

  "Okay," grunted the guard finally. He picked up a walkie-talkie.

  "Thank you, sir," said Shep fervently. "We'll go on back to our dorm now. Thank you."