Professor Warren blinked at him. Then she grunted. “Hah! It fits in. Have to be checked, of course. But idiots have called me wildly imaginative before now. I’d enjoy proving something so wild they couldn’t imagine it!” Then she grunted again. “Mr. Lane, I am a desperate woman, just desperate enough to test this absurd story—which I implicitly believe—in the hope of finding out why there has been an outbreak of artistic temperament among the local specimens of Cathartes aura—buzzards to you, sir! You’ll stay to dinner and tell me what you know.” She raised her voice in a bellow. “Carol!” she roared. “Carol! We’ve got company!”

A door opened at one end of the giant aluminum trailer. A girl appeared carrying a wicker bird cage. Her face was troubled. Lane saw her with a sudden, extraordinary clarity. It was as if, somehow, he saw her and the mountains and the sky and valley with much more than the customary vividness.

Lane had come a long way across the mountains, reviewing his own bafflement on the way. Then he’d had an experience which still made his flesh crawl; he was disturbed because he couldn’t believe what he remembered. But now this girl Carol looked completely as a girl should look, and remote from terror and bewilderment and unease. He felt a surprised gratitude that she was here to remind him that the world was good to live in. He regarded her with an astonished satisfaction.

“Aunt Ann,” she said uncomfortably, “I put Pogo outside in his cage because it’s stuffy in the trailer. Then I looked out and didn’t see him on his perch. I went to see, and he was lying on the bottom. There are feathers all about as if he’d been beating against the bars! He’s dead!”

Professor Warren glanced at Lane with startled eyes.

“Pogo,” she said, “is our canary. Or was.” An instant later she said in a brusque voice: “Too bad! I’ll look him over. Carol, this is Dick Lane. He’s having dinner with us. We’re going to talk biology and dynamic systems and ha’nts and goblins and what the hell happened to the mosquitoes that were so bad when we set up camp here. We may touch on why the old cow died. Mr. Lane, this is my niece, Carol Warren.”