“Are you coming to bed now?” said Lila. “It’s getting on toward one o’clock in the morning.”
“I’ll be in soon,” said Morel, as if he had scarcely heard her.
“Packer has some milk and a sandwich ready for you,” said Lila, “though you ought not to eat just before going to bed.”
“I’ll be in in a minute,” Morel repeated.
Lila saw that he hardly knew what he was saying. He was already back in his scientific universe, staring at the evil-looking red liquid in the small vial.
She turned slowly and went back to the four-room living quarters in the corner of the building. Morel studied the red stuff, then picked it up together with a small hypodermic needle and walked back toward the guinea pigs.
Time passed, the night deepened. The howl of the wolves gradually died out and there was such silence as is only found in thick woods just before dawn.
Then Morel’s head jerked up, and his light-blue eyes narrowed.
He thought he had heard a sound in the clearing outside that had nothing to do with wolves or other children of nature.
A sound hinting at human origin!
Now, this was impossible. That high fence, with its deadly charge of electricity, saw to that. There was a gate, but the gate was closed; and, when it was closed, it completed the electrical circuit so that it was no easier to climb than the fence itself.
Morel shook his head and turned back to his work. Rather, he started to turn. Then he listened again. And this time he could have sworn he heard a sound at one of the floor-to-ceiling windows, as if someone out there were trying to look in.
The windows were opaque, frosted glass with wire through them. No one could look in. But that sound—
Morel laid down his work and padded to the door of the lab. His feet, clad in slippers, shuffled a little on the cement floor, and the sound rose to the ceiling and whispered there like disturbed bats.
He went out into the night.
The stars were fading a little as the black of dawn came over the world. Nothing stirred; nothing moved. Morel was smiling at his own imagination, now. But he started conscientiously to make the round of the fence.
He started at the gate and worked back.
There was the drawn-out howl of a wolf. Then, right in the clearing, it seemed, there was an answering howl!
Lila, tossing wakefully in her bed, heard that second howl and shivered. She got up to go and see if her father couldn’t be pried from his work.
Packer, the elderly servant who took care of father and daughter when they came to the Maine laboratory, padded into the room. He was a kindly, fatherly looking person whose lips were always set in a slight smile. In fact, even now, they smiled just a little, though eyes and expression were grave and did not at all match the small curve of his lips. Lila hastily put a robe over her night clothes.
“Did you hear that?” he whispered.
“You mean the wolf’s howl, so close?” Lila said. She felt like shivering, and Packer’s ghostly whisper added to the feeling, which annoyed her. So she spoke in a deliberately loud tone.
“Yes,” said Packer, still whispering. “It sounded as if the beast were right outside the building. And Mr. Morel isn’t in the laboratory. I just looked.”
“Dad’s not out there?” Lila said hastily. “Oh, but he must be!”
She went to the lab, herself. Its ghostly emptiness confronted her. Complete emptiness. The man with the blue eyes and the gray-blond hair was not at any of the workbenches.
“He… he must have gone out to walk around for a minute in the fresh air,” Lila faltered. “Packer, put on the lights.”
The servant clicked a switch. The great windows became pale-white jewels as floodlights outside lit up the clearing. Lila stepped out. Packer slid back out of sight.
Every pebble, every blade of grass, showed up in that pitiless light. You could have seen a field mouse scurry over the close-clipped lawn.
But there was no movement anywhere; no sound.
Lila drew the robe closer around her bare white throat.
“Dad,” she called.
There was no answer. She half ran and half walked around the laboratory building.
“Dad!”
No answer. And the gate was locked and could be opened from within the house only.
Morel had stepped into a clearing from which no man could go, and into which no man could climb. He stepped into it and disappeared!
There had been the far howl of a wolf, then one so close that it seemed in the clearing itself — and that was all.
If only Lila Morel had had something to work on! But she hadn’t.
A man walks along a city street, we’ll say. That man gets to a certain spot, and then just vanishes into thin air. How would you trace him?
That was Lila’s problem.
In the twenty hours that had passed since her father’s disappearance in the Maine laboratory, she had gotten over the feeling that there was something supernatural about it. She had decided there was a natural explanation. There simply
