  Since Astrovox would be away for a good while and his experiments could hardly be picked up by anyone else, Roger was told to arrange a temporary home for the rabbits, squirrels and mice and rats he had been experimenting on; and a nearby pet shop agreed to house them. In assembling their cages, Roger noticed several of the mice showing symptoms of being very nearly done for. “What do you suppose is wrong?” he asked Doctor Ryder, who was clearing aside some of the absent man’s apparatus in order to set up his cages again. He expected a fresh litter of white rats for his medical experiments. “There was a fire, wasn’t there?” “You think the smoke overcame them, Doctor?” “Exactly, Roger.” He wrote down some stimulating combinations of medicinal chemicals to try on them. The bio-chemist, Zendt, also took an interest. “Of course, if the lamps are already turned off,” he said, “it is that the smoke overcame them. That little fellow is particularly bad.” He indicated a tiny mouse of the sort used in the experiments, lying almost as if in a coma. Roger, with his quick sympathy, and with Toby eagerly obeying orders, improvised a makeshift “oxygen tent” and since it would be in the way in the room already crowded with the cages and plant-beds, he took the small stimulator with its tiny occupant into the dark-room where he could attend to it and watch the mouse’s reaction and response while he developed some plates taken by the staff the afternoon before. The mouse, Roger saw with pleasure, gave signs of reviving. So quickly it recuperated that he put it back into a cage, but kept it near him in the dark-room while he saw, on the developing plates, slow images emerge. The pictures, photographs of crystal formations, he finished, making wet-contact prints. These he took to Mr. Zendt. Others, of the old astrologer’s, he put aside to print later. They would not be needed for some time. Coming back, Roger observed that his tiny patient was apparently much better. He dissembled the oxygen apparatus, and was about to take it to his stock-room, to the section where spare apparatus was stored, when he had a visitor. Mr. Clark, his Tibetan traveling companion, the well-to-do jeweler, came in through the light-trap, with a cheerful greeting. “How are you doing?” he inquired, “and what is the latest quotation on Tibetan’s, common.” His stock-market joke made Roger grin. “Glad you didn’t say ‘Tibetan’s, preferred.’” he answered. “As far as I know, they certainly are not preferred. The quotation is lower-than-minus. No sale.” He was wondering what might be the object of the call. Not a visit for love he was sure. “I hear there was almost a tragedy here,” the rich gem expert was getting to the point, Roger surmised. “Yes, sir.” He was not going to give information. “Poor old star-gazer. He should have seen his fate coming. If his star-reading could warn him, why didn’t he take care?” “I don’t know. He had said something about Neptune and Saturn in opposition and Mars opposed to Uranus, with the world between the opposite planets, pulled this way and that, if I understand him. Maybe he was trying to take care of himself, but he always says we are put into this world to have certain experiences. We cannot escape them, and what the stars’ forces did to influence our cells in brain and body at birth, he thinks, indicates what sort of experiences we will have.” Roger, seldom over-talkative, was willing to expand this idea. Not that he wholly grasped what it meant. Nor was he “sold” on the star philosophy. But it diverted Mr. Clark from whatever plan he had come there to try, Roger thought; and if he was right about it, Clark would come back to his subject and would thus show Roger what it was. “Astrovox often said,” he hurried on with the topic, “we cannot avoid our Destiny, escape experiences. But we have what he called Free Will to decide how we will meet them.” “A very sound philosophy, Roger. But——” “Now he’s going to give himself away,” decided Roger. “But—where have you put The Eye of Om?” Roger, petrified by amazement, could only stare, in the dim, ruby dark-room light. “I?——” “Yes. Eye of Om. You really took it, of course.” “Mr. Clark!” Roger drew himself to his full height in sudden anger at the challenge, the accusation. “Well, how else could it have happened? You know, for you saw, when the prongs in the Buddha’s forehead socket were loosened, I took out the old gem and put in a new one—the one we had brought. And when you sent Potts back, do you imagine I am idiot enough to believe that he knew one stone from another, or that he found the one I chucked away into a regular abyss, there in the Himalayas?” He scowled. “You went there. You saw the real stone put in. You sent Potts to—shall I say the real word? No—to bring it—that’s close and not quite so evil-sounding as the fact. Anyway, Roger, do you think we don’t how loyal Potts is to you? He would tell any sort of story, just to protect you.” “Say, you go and tell Grover that.” Roger was boiling. Clark, scanning his working face, calmly chuckled. “Your films will be overdone, or whatever happens if you forget them.” Roger, reminded, hastily extracted from trays the plates of an experiment with chemical diffusion, and got them into hypo. “I shan’t bother Grover. We discussed it and he suggested coming to you. As long as this way doesn’t elicit the information, perhaps there will be other methods. You know what taking the gem means to those Tibetans?” Roger, fuming, smarting under the unjust accusation, refused to reply. Turning on his heel, Mr. Clark left. Roger washed his negatives, made his prints. To his surprise his pet, the tiny mouse, began to run about, to show unmistakable signs of animation—or was it of excitement? Roger studied him. The tiny animal was racing around its cage. Memory of the fact that such mice on submarines indicated the presence of leaks from battery or engine of undetected gases such as sulphuric acid gas came. He wondered if his dark-room held such a menace to respiration. He decided to take the mouse to the outer air and observe its reaction. To his dismay, the inner door of the light trap did not respond. He was wedged or otherwise fastened in. And the mouse was certainly exhibiting signs of uneasiness. |
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