When the lights and noises faded down the track into darkness and silence, I had a momentary childish wish to be on the train, headed for Chicago and points west. Then anger came back and took hold of me again, and I started towards McKinley Hall to meet Alec Judd. He knew more about the Schneiders than I did. Perhaps he would know why they had lied to me about Ruth and tried to kill me. Even if they knew that Alec was suspicious of them, they had no way of knowing that he had told me about it unless they could read minds. So far as they knew, and so far as I knew myself, I was perfectly harmless. But I began to feel less harmless as the night wore on. Walking through the dark streets to the university, I thought of a way of checking on Dr. Schneider’s story about Ruth. The clock on the university tower rang the quarter-hour as I crossed the campus. If I was lucky I could find out right away. I let myself into McKinley Hall with my faculty pass-key. The basement corridor was as quiet and black as the inside of a sealed pyramid.
