to worry about him. He fumbled down the corridor, lighting matches, trying to find electric switches.
At night all halls are haunted. Even in the smirkingly new McGurk Building there had been a bookkeeper who committed suicide. As Martin groped he was shakily conscious of feet padding behind him, of shapes which leered from doorways and insolently vanished, of ancient bodiless horrors, and when he found the switch he rejoiced in the blessing and security of sudden light that recreated the world.
At the Institute telephone switchboard he plugged in wherever it seemed reasonable. Once he thought he was talking to Leora, but it proved to be a voice, sexless and intolerant, which said "Nummer pleeeeeze" with a taut alertness impossible to any one so indolent as Leora. Once it was a voice which slobbered, "Is this Sarah?" then, "I don't want you! Ring off, will yuh!" Once a girl pleaded, "Honestly, Billy, I did try to get there but the boss came in at five and he said—"
As for the rest it was only a burring; the sound of seven million people hungry for sleep or love or money.
He observed, "Oh, rats, I guess Lee'll have gone to bed by now," and felt his way back to the laboratory.
A detective, hunting the murderer of bacteria, he stood with his head back, scratching his chin, scratching his memory for like cases of microörganisms committing suicide or being slain without perceptible cause. He rushed up-stairs to the library, consulted the American and English authorities and, laboriously, the French and German. He found nothing.
He worried lest there might, somehow, have been no living staphylococci in the pus which he had used for seeding the broth—none there to die. At a hectic run, not stopping for lights, bumping corners and sliding on the too perfect tile floor, he skidded down the stairs and galloped through the corridors to his room. He found the remains of the original pus, made a smear on a glass slide, and stained it with gentian-violet, nervously dribbling out one drop of the gorgeous dye. He sprang to the microscope. As he bent over the brass tube and focused the objective, into the gray-lavender circular field of vision rose to existence the grape-like clusters of staphylococcus germs, purple dots against the blank plane.
"Staph in it, all right!' he shouted.
Then he forgot Leora, war, night, weariness, success, everything, as he charged into preparations for an experiment, his
