“Why did she do that?”
“She’s curious to see the thread he made in her web. Watch.”
Nothing happened for over a minute. Then the female, with less agility, progressed outward to the mating bridge the male had spun. She appeared to be examining it.
“Look at the male, Henry.”
“What’s he doing that for? She’ll see him.”
“That’s the chance he takes. He has to climb back onto the web to persuade her to use his thread.”
When he had toiled up his escape line again, the male, with sedulous care, made a transverse movement over the taut strands to a position an inch or two below the motionless female. She was almost twice his size.
“She can see him now for sure,” said Henry.
The male advanced to the gossamer bridge and tentatively jerked it. The action was repeated five or six times before the female moved. As she came to the bridge, the male drew back, allowing her to drape her legs over it and hang there.
Now there was a heart-stopping clumsiness to the male’s movements, strikingly at variance with the near-balletic preliminaries. With scrambling legs he advanced on her, jabbing repeatedly at her exposed underside. The female remained immobile.
“Is he hurting her?”
“I don’t think so. He’s trying to mate with her. He’s not too good at it.”
“Shouldn’t you get this in your notebook?”
“You’re so right.”
“If he can’t do it, will he quit?”
“He’s no quitter. He’s gone to a lot of trouble to achieve this. Days, maybe weeks, ago he made a small pad of silk and deposited a drop of his sperm on it. He sucked that up into his pedipalps — you see the bits that look like extra legs projecting from his head? Actually, they function more like hands than legs. There, he’s got it right. Now he’s taking a grip on her to place the sperm in her body. When that’s done, he’ll retire and start over, because he has to empty each pedipalp. And when that’s done, he’ll run for his life, because she’s hungry, and if she catches him, she’ll eat him.”
“Mean!”
“It’s her nature, Henry.”
“I should have squashed him with my sneaker.”
Sarah did not argue. She was too taken up with the drama on the web. Her throat was dry with tension.
The female shifted slightly. The male altered its hold.
“What was that?”
She gestured to Henry to keep silent.
“I heard something upstairs. Didn’t you?” He moved to the steps leading to the door.
Sarah looked up from the web, her concentration broken. “What is it?”
“There’s someone up there I can hear them.”
“Your friends? Shout up to them, Henry. See if they’re really there.”
“You don’t know much about kids. If they hear me holler, they’ll know I’m okay. They’ll just laugh and goof off for two more hours. It’s better to keep quiet. Then they could figure I’m dead or something, and come to see.”
“If you say so.”
Footsteps crossed the floor above them, then stopped. A single set of steps, too heavy to be a child’s. Sarah felt Henry’s hand seek hers. She held it gently.
Upstairs, a man’s voice called, “Sarah, are you there?”
Her shoulders stiffened and her hand tightened on the child’s.
“Sarah?”
“Is he calling you, lady?”
She shook her head. “We’d better keep quiet,” she whispered. She had recognized the voice as Don Rigden’s. He must have figured something was wrong when she failed to appear for their meeting at the lab, and come down here to look for her. Wouldn’t he just love this, the big rescue, after warning her the buildings were dangerous? Her seniority, so resolutely defended till now, would crumble to nothing. No, she would not give him the satisfaction of finding her. She would rot here rather than do that. “Just someone it’s safest to ignore,” she told Henry.
“He didn’t sound like a nut.”
She heard her name being called in another section of the building, then the steps receding. She was gripped momentarily by an impulse to call out, but she mastered it. When they had locked her in her room as a child, she had never once cried out to be released. Sometimes she had pressed her teeth into her lower lip until it bled, but she had waited till it occurred to them to unlock the door.
“Hey! Look here.”
She turned her eyes back to the web.
“He’s gone,” said Henry. “The male spider isn’t there. Did she eat him?”
Sarah smiled. “Not so quickly as that. He must have escaped. When he has fertilized the female, he makes a run for it. If he’s quick, he gets away.”
“What’s your name?”
She told him, tricked into a reflex by the unexpectedness of the question.
“You knew that guy upstairs.”
She nodded.
“He came looking for you. Is he your man?”
“Someone I work with, that’s all.”
“Why didn’t you answer him?”
“I had my reasons. This way you can prove to your gang that you survived down here.”
“If they turn up.”
They came late in the afternoon. Sarah heard the voices first, because Henry, by now accustomed to the conditions, had wandered toward the back of the cellar. She had pretended not to notice, thinking maybe he needed to relieve himself. They were into their fifth hour of imprisonment.
The floorboards creaked first. Then she heard the girls’ voices, loaded with recrimination.
“He could be eaten by rats.”
“Or had a fit and died.”
“I said it was a dumb thing to do.”
“You can go down there and look for him, Maxie. You locked the door.”
“Let’s call him.”
Sarah was aware of Henry at her side.
“What should we do, lady — give them a scare?”
“No. I think you should walk calmly up the steps and show them you’re not one bit scared yourself.”
They heard the door unbolted. The light it admitted was dazzling.
“You still down there, Henry? You okay?”
No one was about to descend the stairs to find out.
Henry slipped Sarah’s jacket from his shoulders and handed it back without a word. She put her hand on his shoulder and pressed it in a way that indicated friendship and also steered him toward the stairs.
He whispered, “Aren’t you coming with me, lady?”
“They mustn’t see me. I’ll come up after everyone’s gone.”
He tucked his thumbs into his belt. “Okay, if that’s how you want to play it.”
“Hey! He’s coming up! Jeez, Henry, are you okay?”
“Sure I am. Which one of you jerks can’t count to a hundred? Do I get to be a Demon now?”
“You bet. Hell, you were down there for hours. Weren’t you scared?”
“No.”
“Did you see anything?”
“Just spiders.”
2
One thing you could say for Jerry Berlin: he was no ivory-tower professor. He never missed a chance for publicity. A credit on one of the national TV networks was potentially more valuable than a dozen learned articles in the scientific press. So Bernice, the department secretary, had been given the morning off, and her office had been converted to a dining room. Trout with almonds, Barsac in hand-cut glasses, and a waitress from the caterer would use up most of the hospitality allowance at a sitting. This was a private luncheon not because the cuisine in the senior dining hall was unsatisfactory but because Jerry didn’t want to expose his guest to the opportunism of other departments.
As a first-year research student, Don Rigden was pleased, yet still a little puzzled, to be the third in the party. “One of my newest and most promising graduate students. An original thinker,” Jerry had said, introducing him, but then the professor so monopolized the conversation, chronicling the department’s achievements since 1970, that Don had ventured nothing more original than a request for the vegetable dish.