There was more, too—a whole lot more—that they could trip us up on. There was the phone call Joy had made to Stirling. If the cops really got down to business and in earnest, they’d soon know about that call. And there was every likelihood that whoever had stepped out of his house up in Joy’s neighborhood to see about the uproar would have seen the car parked in front of her house and how it had zoomed off down the street, with the accelerator pressed against the floor.
Maybe, I told myself, we should have told Liggett a bit more than we had. Or been a bit more frank in our answers to him. For if he wanted to trip us up, he could trip us up but good.
But if we had, if we’d told him a quarter of the truth, it was a cinch that they’d keep us cooped up for hours down at headquarters while they sneered at the things we told them or tried to rationalize it all into good, solid, modern explanations.
It still might happen, I told myself—all of it might happen— but so long as we could hold it off, we still had a chance that something might pop up that would forestall it.
When I had opened the box of rifle cartridges, some of them had fallen to the floor. Stirling had picked them up. But had he given them to me or had he put them in his pocket or had he laid them on the bench? I tried to remember, but for the life of me I couldn’t. If the police had found those cartridges, then they could tie up the rifle in my car with this laboratory, and that would be something else to contribute to their tangle of suspicion.
If there were only time, I thought, I could explain it all. But there wasn’t time, and the explanation, in itself, would trigger a rat race of investigation and of questions and of skepticism that would gum up everything. When I came to explain what was going on, it had to be to something other than a room full of police.
There was no hope, I knew, that I could untangle all the mess myself. But I did have to find someone who could. And the police, most emphatically, were not the ones to do it.
I stood there, looking around the laboratory, looking for the bag. But there was something else, just for a moment there was something else. Out of the corner of my eye I caught the motion and the image—the furtive, sneaking sense of motion in the sink, the distinct impression that for an instant an outsize, black angleworm had thrust a questing head above the edge of the sink and then withdrawn it
“Well, shall we go?” said Liggett.
“Certainly,” I agreed.
I took Joy’s arm and she was shivering—not so you could notice, but when I took her arm I could feel the shiver.
“Easy, gal,” I said. “The lieutenant here just wants a statement.”
“From the both of you,” he said.
“And from the dog?” I asked.
He was sore. I could see that he was sore. I should have kept my mouth shut.
We started for the door. When we got to it, Joe said “You’re sure, Parker, there’s nothing you want me to tell the Old Man?”
I swung around to face him and the lieutenant. I smiled at both of them.
“Not a thing,” I said.
Then we went out the door, with Joe following us and the detective following him. The detective closed the door and I heard the latch snap shut.
“You two can drive downtown,” said Liggett. “To headquarters. I’ll follow in my car.”
“Thanks,” I said.
We went down the stairs and out through the front door and down the steps to the sidewalk.
“The Dog,” Joy whispered to me.
“I’ll shut him up,” I said.
I had to. For a time he could be no more than a happy, bumbling dog. Things were bad enough without him shooting off his face.
But we needn’t have worried.
The back seat was empty. There was no sign of the Dog.
XXIV
The lieutenant escorted us to a room not much larger than a cubbyhole and left us there.
“Be back in just a minute,” he said.
The room had a small table and a few uncomfortable ^chairs. It was colorless and chilly and it had a dark, dank smell to it.
Joy looked at me and I could see that she was scared but doing a good job of trying not to be.
“Now what?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I told her. Then I said: “I’m sorry I got you into this.”
“But we’ve done nothing wrong,” she said.
And that was the hell of it. We had done nothing wrong and yet here we were, into it clear up to our necks, and with valid explanations for everything that had happened, but explanations that no one would believe.
“I could use a drink,” said Joy.
I could have, too, but I didn’t say so.
We sat there and the seconds dragged their feet and there was npthing we could say and it was miserable.
I sat hunched in a chair and thought about Carleton Stirling and what a swell guy he had been and how I would miss dropping in on him over at the lab and watching him work and listening to him talk.
Joy must have been thinking about the same thing, for she asked: “Do you think that someone killed him?”
“Not someone,” I said. “Something.”
For I was positive that it had been the thing or things I’d carried to him in the sheet of plastic that had done him in. I had walked into the laboratory, carrying death for one of my best friends.
“You’re blaming yourself,” said Joy. “Don’t blame yourself. There was no way you could know.”
And, of course, there wasn’t, but that didn’t help too much.
The door opened and the Old Man walked in. There was no one with him.
“Come along,” he said. “It’s all straightened out No one wants to see you.”
We got up and walked over to the door.
I looked at him, a little puzzled.
He laughed, a short, chuckling laugh. “I pulled no strings,” he said. “Not a mite of influence. I flung no weight around.”
“Well, then?”
“The medical examiner,” he said. “The verdict’s heart attack.”
“There was nothing wrong with Stirling’s heart,” I said.
“Well, there was nothing else. And they had to put down something.”
“Let’s go someplace else,” said Joy. “This place gets me down.”
“Come up to the office,” the Old Man said to me, “and get outside a drink. There is a thing or two I want to talk with you about. You want to come along, Joy, or are you anxious to get home?”
Joy shivered. “I’ll come along,” she said.
I knew what was the trouble. She didn’t want to go back to that house and hear things in the yard—hear them prowling there even if there weren’t any.
“You take Joy,” I said to the Old Man. “I will drive her car.”
We went outside and we didn’t talk too much. I expected the Old Man would ask me about my car blowing up and perhaps a lot of other things, but he barely said a word.
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 something 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 how 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 in 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 handed 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.
XXV
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.
“And another thing,” I said. “You haven’t got your model.”
I fished around in my topcoat pocket and found the tiny doll I’d picked up off the floor of the basement room in the Belmont house.
“Far be it from me,” I said, “to make it tough on you.”
I tossed the doll toward him and he lifted the shortened arm and, despite the feeble light, caught it unerringly. And as he caught it, during that second when it touched his fingers, it melted into him—as if his body, or bis hand, had been a mouth that had sucked it in.
His face became symmetrical and his arms became the same length and the lopsided quality went entirely out of him. But his clothing was a bad fit now and the short sleeve of his jacket was halfway up his arm. He still was smaller, much smaller
than I had remembered him.
“Thanks,” he said. “It helps. One doesn’t have to concentrate so hard to hold his shape.”
The sleeve was growing down his arm; you could see it grow. And the rest of his clothes were changing, too, so that they would fit him.
“The clothes are a bother, though,” he said conversationally.
“That’s why you had racks of them in the downtown office.”
He looked a little startled; then he said: “Yes, you were there, of course. It had slipped my mind. I must say, Mr. Graves, that you surely get around.”
“It’s my business,” I told him.
“And the other with you?”
“I am sorry,” I said. “I should have introduced you. Miss Kane, Mr. Atwood.”
Atwood stared at her. “If you don’t mind my saying so,” he said, “it occurs to me that you people have the damnedest reproductive setup I have ever seen.” “We like it,” Joy said.
“But so cumbersome,” he said. “Or, rather, made so cumbersome and so intricate by the social customs and the concepts of morality you have woven round it. I suppose that otherwise it is perfectly all right.”
I said: “You wouldn’t know, of course.” “Mr. Graves,” he said, “you must understand that while we ape your bodies, we need not necessarily subscribe to all the activity connected with those bodies.”
“Our bodies,” I said, “and perhaps some other things. Like bombs placed in a car.
“Oh yes,” he said. “Such simple things as that.” “And traps set before a door?”
“Another simple thing. Not intricate, you know. Complex things are very much beyond us.”
“But why the trap?” I asked him. “You tipped your hand on that one. I didn’t know about you. I didn’t even dream there were such things as you. If there had been no trap—” “You’d still have known,” he said. “You were the one who could have put two and two together. You see, we knew about you. We knew you, perhaps, a good deal better than you knew yourself. We knew what you could do, what .you most probably would do. And we know, as well, a little of the happenings immediately ahead. Sometimes we do, not always. There are certain factors—”