  During Grover’s absence at the hospital, the staff began to arrive. Until the secretary should come to handle the switchboard Doctor Ryder volunteered to be monitor on calls, being extremely anxious concerning the condition of the assaulted star-reader, as were the rest. Roger, as Toby Smith with a heavy suitcase arrived, turned over the few requisitions for stock to his willing assistant. He wanted very much to fill up the list of sounds he had begun in the office before going to Tibet. “Suits me fine,” Toby agreed, “I got a lot more of Doctor Ryder’s what he calls compounds, that he is going to use to medicate the rats he is going to replace.” The members of the staff, trained under the phlegmatic, scientific methods of Grover, took very little time to discuss conditions. The routine work of scientific research had to proceed. They made it do so. Each took up his task. Mr. Zendt, with his new investigations, and the electricians and other staff men, left the matter that had no bearing on their results in the hands of those most interested. Potts, while Roger located his “sound” list, speculated about the situation. “That Ellison come out on top in the chemistry retroactivities,” he began, and when Roger had substituted “reactions,” he proceeded: “But are you so sure, Rog’?” “Well, the way Grover works, I am not sure and I am not un-sure. I’m going to dig to the heart of truth. Now, with our clues, we have a lot of circumstantial evidence-clues; and we have a heap of visible clues; but I think the audible ones will tell most, just as Grover does.” “Circumstantial evidence? Such as what?” “People being at certain places. Here, maybe, when something happened. And like Mister Ellison arriving just when we least expected.” “Then, what about visible ones?” “The animals on a film taken in a room with no animals in it. The actions of people, if we could only read them. The picture in the office, last night, with a man’s back turned, Astrovox scared, and the smoke.” “The others—the vocational clues——” “Do you mean ‘vocal’?” “Uh-hum. Them I know most of. But there’s ol—olle—something about a factory——” “Olfactory? Clues coming from smells? I think you’ve got something. The powder smell, for one.” “And now, how will we coagulate ’em?” He was fond of that word, erroneously used, before—but to him a discovery. “I don’t know,” Roger admitted, “there must be some link.” He suggested that inasmuch as the man in the office shot had worn gloves, as revealed on his outspread hands, no finger prints had been left when he had inadvertently pressed the desk button. “But there might be clues on the floor, if they haven’t been tracked up too much,” Roger suggested. “You do some micro-photography while I revise my list.” The list he located in their office file, behind the registrations he had previously looked up to find the clue, as it had seemed, that Zendt, with Australian experiences, must know about kangaroos, while Ellison—there he cropped up again! could know, from India work, about the ape they had seen in the film of the upper room. Looking over his list, in the light of what had happened, Roger was inclined to drop out the seemingly unimportant fact that the case had begun when both the fire and the protective system alarms had rung. He felt that it had no discernible connection with his mystery, being so easily accounted for by the fact that an ape and a kangaroo had evidently gamboled around in the studio, setting off alarms unwittingly. Still, half-hesitant, he left it in, but re-wrote his list, so as to put what seemed important in order, rather than try to follow the succession of historical order, as he had done before. His list, thus revised and added to, ran this way:
Those, as far as he could recall, were his sound-clues. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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