They looked. A young girl, slender and poised, was crossing the parking lot in old Levi’s, very tight, and a form-fitting top.
Down. “Hoo. That one is sweet and tough,” said Williams. Up.
“You take girls like that,” Hall went on. “They don’t have any sense of shame. Man, somebody’s got to teach her a lesson.”
“I’m not sure I follow you,” said Joe.
Down. Williams rolled over onto his back. “Gimme some of that Dr. Pepper.”
Hall cackled and took the bottle over to Williams. He knelt and whispered something. Williams nodded, then drained the bottle and lay back, gazing dreamily through the low trees by the pergola. “Somebody gimme my shirt an’ gun.” He sang a few notes to himself. “You know what we need around here?” he asked. “Bows an’ arrows. That’s what we had in ’Nam. Pick a sentry out of a tree at a hundred yards. Whoosh. Simple as that. Don’t make no noise.”
The girl was disappearing from sight.
“What time’s it getting to be?” asked Joe. He reached for his walkie-talkie. “We’d better check in with the command post.”
“No reason to hurry,” said Hall.
Williams rolled over onto his belly. Up. He started counting again. Down.
Up.
Down.
“Hey, you can knock it off,” Hall said to him. “She’s gone.”
They all had a good laugh over that.
Lissa walking across the grass: what were they laughing about?
Beyond the glimmering parking lot she glanced over her shoulder at the pergola, blurry without her glasses, bouncing behind her with each step. She shrugged and went on.
She looked down. She slipped her shoes off and felt the warm grass, following her feet past the Library and the new Student Union, staying on the shade. At the far side of the campus she climbed the cool steps to the lab.
“Knock-knock?”
She slid around the open door.
The stink from the tiered cages was overpowering; she knew at once that it would be too much for her.
She heard someone clear his throat.
She held her breath, tucked in her top, and walked forward between the skittering enclosures.
“Oh!”
An electric buzz rattled the cages.
The rats scrambled over one another, hundreds and hundreds of rats. She almost screamed. The buzzing stopped. The rats subsided.
A hand, cold and clammy as sweating brass, touched her neck. She stiffened. It seemed to be trying to press her straight down into the floor.
“Ah, but you’re not Sherrie, are you.” It was a statement. “Apologies.”
She was released. She turned. She saw a moist left hand recently relieved of its rubber glove; as she faced it, an acrid fume sliced up her nostrils. Formaldehyde.
She stumbled back. “W’ll, hi, Eliot. I was looking for Sharon.” She rubbed at her watering eyes. “I was on my way to your apartment, but I thought I’d stop by here first.” She looked up into his pallid, implacable face. And shuddered. “You haven’t seen her?”
“Afraid not, Lissa.”
He simply observed her, waiting.
She wanted out, but she said, “Well, what are you up to in here, anyway? I never saw all these—these mice the last time I was here.”
He snapped off his right glove and moved to the sink, applied talc. He pocketed his pale hands in his white coat and leaned against a supply cabinet.
“A low voltage is discharged through the bottom of each cage,” said Eliot, “every two minutes, twenty-four hours a day. At various stages I remove typical specimens and dissect the adrenal cortex, the thymus, the spleen, the lymph nodes, and so forth, and of course the stomach. There is a definite syndrome, you know.”
Are you for real? she wondered, drifting to the window. Below, a fat, greasy-looking mama’s boy with horn-rimmed glasses gazed up at the window. She had seen him hanging around a number of times lately. Too many times. She stepped away from the window.
“The adrenal cortex,” continued Eliot conversationally, “is always enlarged. All the lymphatic structures are shrunken. And there are deep ulcers, usually, in the stomach and upper gut.”
He’s not kidding, she thought. She looked outside again. The young man was gone. She felt relieved. “What do you call it?” she said, almost reflexly.
“A stress rig,” said Eliot. Cheerfully, she thought. Then, “Sherrie’s probably back at the House by now. Be careful going home, will you? I know I don’t need to remind you.” When she did not say anything, “About what happened to the others. It was a combination, a choke hold from behind, forearm across the throat, under the chin, one arm in a hammerlock. Fractures of the larynx, internal hemorrhaging. And this vertebra, this one right here, at the base of the neck. That’s what finished them. He had to lift them off their feet. Here.” He reached out to show her.
Suddenly, jarringly, the cages buzzed.
Let me out of here! She felt sick.
“Well, I’ll see you later, Eliot.” She did not wait for an answer.
Outside and down the stairs, a breeze was coming in with the dusk. Its really summer, she thought. She wanted desperately to be at the beach. She could almost smell the Sea % Ski basting her skin. A bird sang high on a telephone wire. O let there always be summers, she thought. A hundred, a thousand of them. That was what she wanted. She wanted there to be a thousand summers.
Joe trod blankly along University Drive. Off duty at last, he was on his way back to the campus, where his wife would be waiting.
“How long has this been happening?” he asked, a little dazed.
“Ed Withers’s been paying off Hall to keep him quiet ever since, Lord, seven-eight months,” said old John, strolling with his hands behind his back, his voice low as a moribund bulldog’s. “Anyway, Joey”—he had never called him that before—“I figured you ought to know. What I mean to get across is, try to keep to yourself as much as you can while you’re here. They’re a kind of—oh, they’re a bunch of what you would call motivated young officers. Highly motivated.”
“What I can’t understand,” Joe persisted, “is why everyone is keeping his mouth shut.”
Old John averted his eyes and took an unexpected number of steps to answer. He fingered his handcuffs nervously; they glinted in the day’s dying rays of sunlight. “Job’s a job, you know what I mean,” muttered old John.
Joe turned those words over and over as they came to Portola Place.
What in the world did that have to do with it? He stopped at the curb. “What does that have to do with it?” he asked.
But old John was trekking on down Portola Place. He continued to keep an eye on Joe, however. Joe saw him put a hand behind his ear.
“Nothing,” Joe shouted. Nothing at all. “See you Friday.”
He shook his head. Even here, he thought. He took a too-deep breath of the lukewarm air, squinting as the setting sun peeped its staring red eye from between the buildings. He started walking again. He lowered his head and watched his feet move, crossing the street at a fast clip.
So Hall’s wife was getting pumped by the Chief of Security. And Chief Withers was being—was there a less melodramatic word for it?—blackmailed by Hall. With a promotion thrown in. Joe throttled a bitter laugh. He wondered whether Halls wife knew that end of it. And whether she was smugly enjoying the benefits with her husband. What the hell, what the hell, what the hell, Joe thought aimlessly. And heard a rustling in the bushes.
‘Where’s the cook?”