It was not a bad story, as such things go. But it got practically no laughter. Instead, the professors began swaying, like a roomful of boiled-shirted Eastern ascetics at their prayers, and whispering again.
Dalrymple could put two and two together. He leaned over and hissed into Cook’s ear: “Is there anything wrong with me?”
“Yes, your face has turned green.”
“Green?”
“Bright green. Like grass. Nice young grass.”
“Well, you might like to know that yours is blue.”
Both men felt their faces. There was no doubt; they were masked with coatings of some sort of paint, still wet.
Dalrymple whispered: “What kind of gag is this?”
“I don’t know. Better finish your speech.”
Dalrymple tried. But his thoughts were scattered beyond recovery. He made a few remarks about how glad he was to be there amid the elms and ivy and traditions of old Eli, and sat down. His face looked rougher-hewn than ever. If a joke had been played on him—well, he hadn’t signed any checks yet.
The lieutenant governor of the State of Connecticut was next on the list. Cook shot a question at him. He mumbled: “But if I’m going to turn a funny color when I get up—”
The question of whether his honor should speak was never satisfactorily settled. For at that moment a thing appeared on one end of the speakers’ table. It was a beast the size of a St. Bernard. It looked rather the way a common bat would look if, instead of wings, it had arms with disk-shaped pads on the ends of the fingers. Its eyes were as big around as luncheon plates.
There was commotion. The speaker sitting nearest the thing fell over backward. The lieutenant governor crossed himself. An English zoologist put on his glasses and said: “By Jove, a spectral tarsier! But a bit large, what?”
A natural-sized tarsier would fit in your hand comfortably, and is rather cute if a bit spooky. But a tarsier the size of this one is not the kind of thing one can glance at and then go on reading the adventures of Alley Oop. It breaks one’s train of thought. It disconcerts one. It may give one the screaming meemies.
This tarsier walked gravely down the twenty feet of table. The diners were too busy going away from there to observe that it upset no tumblers and kicked no ashtrays about; that it was, in fact, slightly transparent. At the other end of the table it vanished.
Johnny Black’s curiosity wrestled with his better judgment. His curiosity told him that all these odd happenings had taken place in the presence of Ira Methuen. Therefore, Ira Methuen was at least a promising suspect. “So what?” said his better judgment. “He’s the only man you have a real affection for. If you learned that he was the pixie in the case, you wouldn’t expose him, would you? Better keep your muzzle out of this.”
But in the end his curiosity won, as usual. The wonder was that his better judgment kept on trying.
He got hold of Bruce Inglehart. The young reporter had a reputation for discretion.
Johnny explained: “He gave himserf ze Messuen treatment—you know, ze spinar injection—to see what it would do to a man. Zat was a week ago. Should have worked by now. But he says it had no effec’. Maybe not. But day after ze dose, awr zese sings start happening. Very eraborate jokes. Kind a crazy scientific genius would do. If it’s him, I mus’ stop him before he makes rear troubre. You wirr he’p me?”
“Sure, Johnny. Shake on it.” Johnny extended his paw.
It was two nights later that Durfee Hall caught fire. Yale had been discussing the erasure of this singularly ugly and useless building for forty years. It had been vacant for some time, except for the bursar’s office in the basement.
About ten o’clock an undergraduate noticed little red tongues of flame crawling up the roof. He gave the alarm at once. The New Haven fire department was not to be blamed for the fact that the fire spread as fast as if the building had been soaked in kerosene. By the time they, and about a thousand spectators, had arrived, the whole center of the building was going up with a fine roar and crackle. The assistant bursar bravely dashed into the building and reappeared with an armful of papers, which later turned out to be a pile of quite useless examination forms. The fire department squirted enough water onto the burning section to put out Mount Vesuvius. Some of them climbed ladders at the ends of the building to chop holes in the roof.
The water seemed to have no effect. So the fire department called for some more apparatus, connected up more hoses, and squirted more water. The undergraduates yelled:
“Rah, rah, fire department! Rah, rah, fire! Go get ‘em, department! Hold that line, fire!”
Johnny Black bumped into Bruce Inglehart, who was dodging about in the crowd with a pad and pencil, trying to get information for his New Haven Courier. Inglehart asked Johnny whether he knew anything.
Johnny, in his deliberate manner, said: “I know one sing. Zat is ze firs’ hetress fire I have seen.”
Inglehart looked at Johnny, then at the conflagration. “My gosh!” he said. “We ought to feel the radiation here, oughtn’t we? Heatless fire is right. Another superscientific joke, you suppose?”
“We can rook around,” said Johnny. Turning their backs on the conflagration, they began searching among the shrubbery and railings along Elm Street.
“Woof!” said Johnny. “Come here, Bruce!”
In a patch of shadow stood Professor Ira Methuen and a tripod whereon was mounted a motion-picture projector. It took Johnny a second to distinguish which was which.
Methuen seemed uneasily poised on the verge of flight. He said: “Why, hello, Johnny, why aren’t you asleep? I just found this… uh… this projector—”
Johnny, thinking fast, slapped the projector with his paw. Methuen caught it as it toppled. Its whir ceased. At the same instant the fire went out, vanished utterly. The roar and crackle still came from the place where the fire had been. But there was no fire. There was not even a burned place in the roof, off which gallons of water were still pouring. The fire department looked at one another foolishly.
While Johnny’s and Inglehart’s pupils were still expanding in the sudden darkness, Methuen and his projector vanished. They got a glimpse of him galloping around the College Street comer, lugging the tripod. They ran after him. A few undergraduates ran after Johnny and Inglehart, being moved by the instinct that makes dogs chase automobiles.
They caught sight of Methuen, lost him, and caught sight of him again. Inglehart was not built for running, and Johnny’s eyesight was an affair of limited objectives. Johnny opened up when it became evident that Methuen was heading for the old Phelps mansion, where he, Johnny, and several unmarried instructors lived. Everybody in the house had gone to see the fire. Methuen dashed in the front door three jumps ahead of Johnny and slammed it in the bear’s face.
Johnny padded around in the dark with the idea of attacking a window. But while he was making up his mind, something happened to the front steps under him. They became slicker than the smoothest ice. Down the steps went Johnny, bump-bump-bump.
Johnny picked himself up in no pleasant mood. So this was the sort of treatment he got from the one man—But then, he reflected, if Methuen was really crazy, you couldn’t blame him.
Some of the undergraduates caught up with them. These crowded toward the mansion—until their feet went out from under them as if they were wearing invisible roller skates. They tried to get up, and fell again, sliding down the slight grade of the crown of the road into heaps in the gutter. They retired on hands and knees, their clothes showing large holes.