Smitty got through the inner door and into the lab itself. A vast room with a high ceiling and many windows, blazing now with light from the switch Lila had clicked on a moment ago.
Smitty’s china-blue eyes bulged.
Lila was doing a kind of fantastic dance near the center of the room on the cement floor, stamping, swaying, starting to run, stopping again to stamp some more.
She had gone crazy from the strain of grief, Smitty decided sympathetically. Coming up here among her father’s things had revived the memories of him before fate overtook him, and she’d been unable to stand it. He ran toward her, to put a calming hand on her shoulder.
And then he began to dance, himself!
If the girl’s dance was fantastic, Smitty’s was like something out of a circus book. The trained elephant, dancing to fast music. It seemed as if even the solid-concrete floor was shaking under his weight, though this was, no doubt, imagination.
The reason for the dancing was fanged terror at their feet!
A dozen little tailless forms raged around them, darting in whenever possible, using sharp little teeth on shrinking flesh.
Lila’s stockings were ripped in several places, and crimson showed on the whiteness of her ankles. In a moment Smitty was in worse shape because he couldn’t move his three hundred pounds as agilely as Lila could move.
And the damnedest thing was the species of attacking animals. They were guinea pigs!
Common, ordinary guinea pigs, pets of laboratories, as mild an animal as ever lived. Usually a guinea pig is no match even for a determined wren; they aren’t built for fighting anything. And here were a dozen or more of the ordinarily harmless things doing real damage to two humans. Smitty felt like yelling, himself.
It was high time something was done before their ankles got slashed to cat’s meat. And it would take too long to stamp on them one by one, the way they were flashing around.
“Hold your breath!” Smitty yelled to the girl.
Then he hastily dropped a flashing little thing, like a glass marble, which he had taken from a lower vest pocket.
But the thing wasn’t a marble. It was a thin-shelled glass capsule. In it was a volatile, colorless gas invented by MacMurdie in his drugstore laboratory. The gas could knock any living thing cold in less than three seconds.
It knocked the guinea pigs cold in about one second. They fell in midmotion, sliding along the floor, still in the direction of the two humans they had been insane enough to attack.
Which was an indiscretion. She got a whiff of gas.
“Hang it, I
Lila only looked at him and gasped for breath. The one little whiff was going to make it imperative for her to lie down somewhere for ten or fifteen minutes. Smitty pulled out a little nose clip, then went back into the laboratory and opened the windows. The air cleared.
“What in the world kind of guinea pigs does your father raise?” he said, when Lila had recuperated.
She shook her head wonderingly.
“Just the ordinary kind,” she said. “They weren’t like that the last time I saw them.”
Smitty thought a moment.
“Didn’t Packer, your servant, say he thought your father had injected something into those pigs just before he vanished?” he asked.
Lila nodded, equally thoughtful.
“It must be,” Smitty said slowly, “that the behavior of those crazy little things has something to do with what your father was working on when he left here.” He sighed. “I’ll bet we never see a crazier thing than that.”
The giant was wrong. They were to see a crazier thing in a very short time.
The gas had gone out the opened windows when the two went back into the laboratory. But it hadn’t cleared in time for the luckless guinea pigs. They were dead. Mac’s gas was powerful stuff.
Smitty shoved the little bodies under a table with his toe as unobtrusively as he could. But he needn’t have worried about sparing Lila’s feelings. She wasn’t looking at him at all. She was staring around the great room in dismay. And in a moment Smitty joined her.
The dismay was well warranted.
Everything in that fine shop had been smashed. Delicate instruments lay in shards on the floor. There were iridescent patches of glass, the remains of test tubes and beakers. The lab had had the finest of everything, tens of thousainds of dollars’ worth of instruments. And all was damaged beyond repair. Smitty, a scientist himself, groaned when he saw the havoc.
“Poor Dad,” murmured Lila forlornly. “I’m glad he isn’t here to see this.”
There was movement in a far corner. Instantly, Smitty crouched, ready to leap. Then the maker of the movement walked out on satin paws, and Smitty grinned sheepishly at himself.
It was a cat, gray and white, purring loudly.
“Mathilda!” exclaimed Lila. “Didn’t Packer put you out when he left?”
