"Now, now, sweetheart," he said soothingly, "let's get this straight. They fired a lab boy today. They found four of our rats in his home. He told some idiotic story of having 'found' them, with the others missing, running loose on the street that night, but of course he stole them. He must have sold the rest of them to other kids; they're working on that now." Norah blew her nose and wiped her eyes. She had regained her usual calm. "Philip Vinson," she said coldly, "are you accusing me of lying, or just of being crazy? I'm neither. I saw and heard those rats. They're here _now_. What's more, I guess I know where that oatmeal went, and the eggs and bacon too, and the cheese. I'm--I'm a hostage! "I don't suppose," she added sarcastically, "that your SK540 was one of the ones they found in the boy's home?" "No, it wasn't," he acknowledged uneasily. A nasty little icy trickle stole down his spine. "All right, Norah, I give in. You take the poker and I'll take the hammer, and we'll search this house from cellar to attic." "You won't find them," said Norah bitterly. "SK540's too smart. They'll stay inside the walls and keep quiet." "Then we'll find the holes they went through and rout them out." They didn't, of course. There wasn't a sign of a rathole, or of a rat. They got through dinner and the evening somehow. Norah put all the food not in cans inside the old-fashioned icebox which took the place of a refrigerator. Philip thought he was too disturbed to be able to sleep, but he did, and Norah, exhausted, was asleep as soon as her head touched the pillow. His last doubt of his wife's sanity vanished when, the next morning, they found the icebox door open and half the food gone. * * * * * "That settles it!" Philip announced. "Come on, Norah, put your coat on. You're coming with me to the lab and we'll report what's happened. They'll find those creatures if they have to tear the house apart to do it. That boy must have been telling the truth." "You couldn't keep me away," Norah responded. "I'll never spend another minute alone in this house while those dreadful things are in it." But of course when they got to the front door, there they were, circling them, their teeth bared. The same with the back door and all the first floor windows. "That's SK540 all right, leading them," Philip whispered through clenched jaws. He could smash them all, he supposed, in time, with what weapons he had. But he worked in the laboratory. He knew their value to science, especially SK540's. Rats couldn't talk, he knew, and they couldn't understand human speech. Nevertheless, some kind of communication might establish itself. SK540's eyes were too intelligent not to believe that he was getting the gist of talk directed to him. "This is utterly ridiculous," Philip grated. "If you won't let us out, how can we keep bringing food into the house for you? We'll all starve, you and we together."