“We scared them off,” Cathy said, pulling back from the monitor screen.
“Maybe,” Harmon conceded. “But they’ll probably come back. As long as the mothers don’t leave their litters there’s a chance they won’t abandon the nest.”
“How long do we leave the setup here?” Nick asked. “We’ve only got the one camera for this.”
“But we do have a second fiber-optic cable,” Harmon reminded him. “We’ll leave this one in place and thread the other through to one of the other nests. The one in the bathroom upstairs will probably be easier than the other one here in the kitchen.”
The professor and his assistants were late leaving the house that evening. It was well after dark. At the door, Mrs. Beloit was still voicing misgivings about the pests in her home.
“Haven’t you come up with any ideas for getting rid of those mice for me?” she asked—a question she had voiced at least a half dozen times that day.
“We’re still working on it,” Griffin assured her—again. “If nothing else, once we’ve got all of them we can, I’ll pay to have an exterminator come and get rid of your problem. But I hope it doesn’t come to that. Your mice may be unique.” He shrugged. “The government might not even let us kill them.”
“You mean I might have to keep them?”
“I don’t know,” Griffin admitted. “If nobody finds more of them in other places, I guess it’s possible. Endangered species.” Have to have the university’s legal department check that out, I guess, he thought.
Cathy was standing apart from the others, arms folded across her chest, looking around nervously. Except for the light coming through the open front door of the Beloit house, the street was dark. There was no streetlight at the near corner. The one at the other end of the block was blocked by trees, casting night-dark shadows across the lawn. When the professor finally started moving toward the van, Cathy moved between him and Nick, almost shouldering her way in.
“I really don’t like being here after dark,” she whispered when they were nearly to the street. “This place is dangerous, even with three of us. Anything could happen.”
“It’s no more dangerous here than on campus,” Harmon replied, also keeping his voice low so that Mrs. Beloit would not hear. She had closed the screen door, but she was standing in the doorway, watching to make certain that the three made it into their van.
“I don’t go out after dark on campus if I don’t absolutely have to,” Cathy said, getting in the van quickly when the professor unlocked the front door. “And then I try to do it with a crowd. I’m still not used to living in the big city.”
Two young men came out of the shadows in the park across the street, then stopped near the far curb and stared as Nick and Harmon got into the vehicle. Griffin watched them out of the corner of his eye, careful not to make eye contact, and he locked his door as soon as he was inside. He quickly turned the key in the ignition. As the van pulled away from the curb, the two young men faded back into the shadows.
5.
The next morning, the telephone was again ringing when Harmon Griffin entered his office. Mrs. Beloit was almost incoherent in her excitement.
“We got one! We got one!” she shouted into the telephone. “One of those mice. In the kitchen. We got one!”
Harmon felt his heart flutter. It sounded almost too good to be true, even after seeing the mice on camera. At first, he couldn’t speak, couldn’t reply. He glanced at his watch, then sucked in a deep breath. “I’ve got a class at nine o’clock,” he said, struggling to keep his voice calm. During rush hour, it might not be possible to make the round-trip in time for the class. “That lets out at 9:50. I’ll leave here then.” His second class was at eleven, but after traffic eased off, he should be able to make it there and back in seventy minutes. And he desperately wanted to get that mouse just as quickly as he could.
Professor Griffin ended up dismissing his first class nearly ten minutes early. He was too excited to concentrate on his lecture, or to stand still. He kept losing his place, repeating sentences, or trailing off into near incoherency. His distraction was obviously affecting his students. This was his large class, the freshman introductory course, seventy-five students. He came close to setting speed records on the drive to Mrs. Beloit’s house, but he did manage the trip without attracting the attention of any police.
“In the kitchen,” Marietta Beloit said as soon as she opened the door. “It’s still alive.”
The mouse was cowering next to an empty glass dish in the trap. It had, at least, eaten. When Griffin and Mrs. Beloit entered the kitchen, the mouse appeared to tense up. It turned its head toward the door, sensing if not actually seeing their approach. Harmon slowed down, moving as silently as he could to the trap. Cautiously, he knelt next to it. He leaned forward, wanting to get as close as he could. The mouse’s unusual snout was curled to the left, along the side of its head and up onto its shoulder. The animal looked up, then back down, and backed into a corner.
“You’re beautiful, mouse,” Harmon whispered. Emotion more than thought was pulsing through him. Irrefutable proof of the animal’s existence. There would be the academic papers, most likely a book. Status. A career made. But there was something else that pulled even more strongly at him.
A new kind of life, something no one else has ever seen alive—just me, Mrs. Beloit, and maybe her children.
“I never thought I’d say this about a mouse, but it is kind of cute,” Marietta said from behind Harmon.
“Right now,” he whispered, pulling back from the trap, “I’d say that it’s the most beautiful creature on four legs on the lace of this Earth.”
“I wouldn’t go that far.”
Harmon got to his feet and chuckled softly. “No, I can see where you might not.” He turned to her. “But that mouse is an unrelieved miracle. It shouldn’t be, but it obviously is.”
“That nose, or snout, or whatever it is, it couldn’t eat anything very big through that,” Marietta said, pointing.
“Probably not,” he agreed. “Those ants seemed to do the trick though.”
“I mean, it couldn’t eat cockroaches or water bugs or anything like that. They wouldn’t fit up that snout, would they?”
“Maybe when they were very young,” he said. “But ants, fleas, lice, ticks, mites, and small spiders. There’s obviously enough for them to eat, even in a clean, well-kept house.”
Mrs. Beloit could not suppress a shudder. “Bugs!”
“The thing is, regular mice and rats carry fleas, lice, ticks, and so forth all the time. It’s the small bugs that infest rodents that cause most of the diseases that mice and rats get blamed for.”
Marietta blinked once. “If it eats all those things, then it shouldn’t have all of them on it, right?”
“A very logical hypothesis,” Harmon said. “One that we’ll have to test when we get this creature to the lab.”
“You going to kill it?”
“No, we’re not going to kill it.” He shook his head, first vigorously, then more slowly. “Probably not,” he amended. “We want more of these mice. With any luck we’ll manage to capture enough to breed enough stock to do all of the necessary testing. Then we can let this one live out its natural span to maybe enjoy its fame as the first of its kind in captivity.”
He glanced at his watch. “I’ve got to get right back to school. Have you got a couple of paper towels—something I can use to cover the trap to keep the mouse out of the sun?”