Laz added shrewdly, “It beats me that Professor Berlin didn’t tell us about you at the outset.” Before Sarah could respond, he called across the room to Saville, “Rick, we’ll need a Sneaky-Peepy. Ed is going to tape a sequence with Sarah, moving through the lab.”
“Terrific!” Saville called back. “The minute we came in, I knew we had to get this lady on film.”
Sarah knew that if she was going to refuse, she had to make it clear now. She was under no obligation to these people. Their attempts at persuasion hadn’t impressed her. They didn’t give a damn about people’s fears. They would come up with any reason they figured would secure her cooperation. The only honest remark had come from Rick Saville. They wanted to use her because she was a girl and it was weird to find a girl working with spiders.
So why did she keep silent and let them set up the equipment?
It was because of Jerry. He had not considered her for this. The automatic choice had been Don. Right: she would show them both that she wouldn’t be bypassed so easily. She had resolved to be more positive. This was the first challenge.
The cameraman asked if they would walk the sequence through before the take, but Laz decided that would spoil the spontaneity. He preferred to let the conversation take place unrehearsed and have the camera record it first time out, even at the sacrifice of some technical smoothness. A few imperfections in the camerawork would underscore the realism. Any serious blemishes could be edited later.
A small battery-operated mike was attached to Sarah’s lab coat and a light meter was held close to her face, and minutes later she was at Ed Cunningham’s shoulder, walking between the benches toward a hand-held camera. In response to his questions she described the fear she had of spiders as a small child, and how she had conquered it by steeling herself to sit and watch a garden spider. She stopped at a case of Argiopidae and pointed one out, showing the subtleties of the orb web, with its structural threads made of a silk different in texture from the viscid spirals on which the prey are caught. She talked animatedly of the versatility of spiders as web builders and hunters.
As they moved forward again, the cameraman backed away from them, holding the lens steady a short distance from Sarah’s face. She felt no nerves. She addressed herself to Cunningham, not to the TV audience, and he skilfully fueled her enthusiasm with his comments and questions.
The film crew worked unobtrusively. Only Rick Saville, whose job it was to see that the cameraman had an uncluttered passage, intermittently caught her eye when he dipped across their path to flatten a cable to the floor.
The one difficult point to negotiate was the end of the bench at the north end of the lab, where they had to turn to come back. An arc lamp was positioned just out of camera view, but close enough to present a hazard to the cameraman’s backward movement. He managed to get around it without mishap, and so did Cunningham and Sarah.
The accident was caused by Rick Saville.
He had guided the cameraman around the end of the bench by standing behind him with a hand on his shoulder. This achieved, he stepped aside to let them pass, then suddenly noticed he was going to be in the shot. He jerked away, without appreciating that the adjacent bench with its glass cabinets of spiders was immediately behind him.
His back thumped the nearest case and sent it sliding across the polished bench top. As it reached the edge and tipped, Cunningham, who was nearest, flung himself across the bench and attempted to stop it. The lid was gone, but he got a grip on one edge of the case and took the weight as it fell, certainly preventing it from smashing. But it was still too heavy to control.
It hit the ground on its side and spiders raced out of it and across the floor.
“Christ, what have I done!” said Saville in panic. His hands went to his face like a frightened child’s.
Sarah moved at full speed around the bench to where the upturned case lay. The glass was cracked but unbroken. “Help me, one of you!”
Cunningham was nearest. Between them, they righted it on the floor and replaced the lid.
Saville lunged out with a foot as a spider ran under a radiator.
“Don’t do that!” ordered Sarah in a spasm of fury. “Can’t you understand they’re terrified? If you can’t help, for God’s sake stand where you are and leave them to me.” She snatched up one of the jars used for transferring the spiders between cases.
“These aren’t poisonous, arc they?” Cunningham asked.
“They won’t harm you.” She brought the jar down over one that had not moved far from the case. “Will you hand me another jar from the bench beside you, Mr. Laz. Everyone please keep perfectly still. The case has seven sections and there was a spider in each. One is still inside. I have just trapped another. And I don’t want the others harmed.”
Laz, in a subdued voice, said, “Keep shooting, Tom.”
Sarah was too concerned for the spiders to care anymore about the film. So long as everyone cooperated by standing still, she stood some chance of recovering the runaways. A Tegenaria atrica is a fast mover. It can cover more than three hundred times its body length in ten seconds. But it is not a stayer. After its dash it is exhausted.
She coaxed the one from under the radiator with a ballpoint pen and covered it with a jar on the second try. By good luck another had run for shelter to the same place and a moment later bolted for freedom across the floor.
Without another jar available, Sarah, on her knees by the radiator, stretched the hem of her lab coat flat across the spider’s path. It ran onto it and upward without hesitating. In a swift movement she covered it with her cupped right hand, drawing it up and across the palm of her left to trap it. Normally she avoided handling them, not from aversion but because their legs were so easily damaged.
She carried it to the case, and Saville backed away as she passed. Cunningham was cool enough to move the lid aside so that she could restore the spider to its compartment. It appeared unhurt.
“Neatly done,” he commented.
“There are three more to catch,” Sarah said.
It took almost fifteen minutes to locate them, but, once found, they were swiftly recaptured.
Rick Saville’s cool returned rapidly after that. “Apologize to the spiders for me, would you? I mean, they must have figured this was some kind of amnesty until you caught them again. But Tom has some beautiful film.”
Twenty minutes’ tension snapped. Sarah turned on Rick and told him she didn’t give two cents about the film. ‘Those spiders were part of an experiment it took months to prepare. Do you suppose now that we caught them it’s just like setting up bowling pins again? Have you given one thought to the damage you did to their webs when you knocked down the case? What use are they now as a control group? People like you shouldn’t be allowed within miles of an experimental lab.”
Saville put up his hand defensively. “Easy, man. I apologize, okay? Don’t let’s escalate this into full-scale war. I want to be friends. If there’s anything I can do—”
Laz said quietly, “There’s one thing you can do, Rick. Knock it off.”
When Don Rigden came in, there was nothing to indicate the emergency of ten minutes before. He glanced at the lamps and said, “You’re set up already?”
Laz, for his own reasons, was saying nothing about the filming that had already taken place. “Waiting for the star, Don,” he said with a bland smile.
As the film crew started to talk with Don about the way they would shoot the sequence, Sarah decided to leave. She wasn’t there to watch how he performed.