"No kidding," said Woods.

"Sure," said Gilmer. "Inside the wooden box was a steel receptacle and that fellow was inside of that. They had pumped out quite a bit of the air, made it a partial vacuum, and packed frozen carbon dioxide around the receptacle. Outside of that, between the box and the ice, was paper and felt to slow up melting. They must have been forced to repack him and change air several times during the trip back.

"Apparently he hadn't had much attention the last few days before they got here, for the oxygen was getting pretty thin, even for him, and the ice was almost gone. I don't imagine he felt any too good. Probably was just a bit sick. Too much carbon dioxide and the temperature uncomfortably warm."

Woods gestured at the glass cage.

"I suppose you got him all fixed up now," he said. "Air conditioned and everything."

Gilmer chuckled.

"Must seem just like home to him." he replied. "In there the atmosphere is thinned down to about one-thousandth Earth standard, with considerable ozone. Don't know whether he needs that, but a good deal of the oxygen on Mars must be in the form of ozone. Surface conditions there are suitable for its production. The temperature is 20 degrees below zero Centigrade. I had to guess at that, because I have no way of knowing from what part of Mars this animal of ours was taken. That would make a difference."

He wrangled the cigar from one corner of his mouth to the other.

"A little private Mars all his own," he stated.

"You found no records at all on the ship?" asked Woods. "Nothing telling anything at all about him?"

Gilmer shook his head and clamped a vicious jaw on the cigar.

"We found the log book," he said, "but it had been deliberately destroyed. Someone soaked it in acid. No chance of getting anything out of it."

The reporter perched on a desk top and drummed his fingers idly on the wood.

"Now just why in hell would they want to do that?" he asked.

"Why in hell did they do a lot of things they did?" Gilmer snarled. "Why did somebody, probably Delvaney, kill Paine and Watson? Why did Delvaney, after he did that, kill himself? What happened to Smith? Why did Cooper die insane, screaming and shrieking as if something had him by the throat? Who scrawled that single word on the box and tried to write more, but couldn't? What stopped him writing more?"

Woods nodded his head toward the glass cage.

"I wonder how much our little friend had to do with it," he speculated.

"You're crazier than a space-bug," Gilmer snapped. "What m blue hell could he have had to do with it? He's just an animal and probably of a pretty low order of intelligence. The way things are on Mars he'd be kept too damn busy just keeping alive to build much brain. Of course, I haven't had much chance to study it yet. Dr. Winters, of Washington, and Dr. Lathrop, of London, will be here next week. We'll try to find out something then."

Woods walked to the window in the laboratory and looked out.

The building stood on top of a hill, with a green lawn sweeping down to a park-like area with fenced off paddock, moat-protected cliff-cages and monkey-islands — the Metropolitan Zoo.

Gilmer took a fresh and fearsome grip on his cigar.

"It proves there's life on Mars," he contradicted. "It doesn't prove a damn thing else."

"You should use a little imagination," chided Woods.

"If I did," snarled Gilmer, "I'd be a newspaperman. I wouldn't be fit for any other job."

Along toward noon, down in the zoo, Pop Anderson, head-keeper of the lionhouse, shook his head dolefully and scratched his chin.

"Them cats have been actin" mighty uneasy," he declared. "Like there was something on their minds. They don't hardly sleep at all. Just prowl around."

Eddie Riggs, reporter for the «Express», clucked sympathetically.

"Maybe they aren't getting the right vitamins, Pop," he suggested.

Pop disagreed.

"It ain't that," he said. "They're gettin" the same feed we always give "em. Plenty raw meat. But they're restless as all git-out. A cat is a lazy critter. Sleeps hours at a stretch and always takin" naps. But they don't do that no more. Cranky. Fightin" among themselves. I had to give Nero a good whoppin" the other day when he tried to beat up Percy. And when I did he made a pass at me — me, who's took care of him since he was a cub."

From across the water-moat Nero snarled menacingly at Pop.

"He's still got it in for me," Pop said. "If he don't quiet down, I'll give him a raw-hidin" he'll remember. There ain't no lion can get gay with me."

He glanced apprehensively at the lion-run.

"I sure hope they calm down," he said. "This is Saturday and there'll be a big crowd this afternoon. Always makes them nervous, a crowd does, and the way they are now there'll be no holdin"

"em."

"Anything else you heard of going on?" Riggs asked. Pop scratched his chin.

"Susan died this morning," he declared.

Susan was a giraffe.

"Didn't know Susan was sick," said Riggs.

"She wasn't," Pop told him. "Just keeled over."

Riggs turned his eyes back to the lion caves. Nero, a big black-maned brute, was balancing himself on the edge of the water ditch, almost as if he were about to leap into the water. Percy and another lion were tusseling, not too good-naturedly.

"Looks like Nero might be thinking of coming over here after you," the reporter suggested.

"Shucks," snorted Pop. "he wouldn't do that. Not Nero. Nor no other lion. Why, them cats hate water worse" n poison."

From the elephant paddock, a mile or more away, came the sudden angry trumpeting of the pachyderms. Then a shrill squeal of elephantine rage.

"Sounds like them elephants was actin" up, too," Pop declared calmly.

Pounding feet thundered around the corner of the walk that circled the cat-cages. A man who had lost his hat, whose eyes were wild with terror, pounded past them. As he ran on he cried:

"An elephant has gone mad! It's coming this way!"

Nero roared. A mountain lion screamed.

A great gray shape, moving swiftly despite its lumbering gait, rounded a clump of bushes and moved out on the smooth green sward of the park. It was the elephant. With trunk reared high, emitting screams of rage, with huge ears flapping, the beast headed for the cat-cages.

Riggs turned and pounded madly toward the administration building. Behind him Pop puffed and panted.

Shrill screams rent the air as early visitors at the zoo scampered for safety.

Animal voices added to the uproar.

The elephant, turning from his original direction, charged through the two acre paddock in which three pairs of wolves were kept, taking fence, trees and brush in his stride.

On the steps of the administration building. Riggs looked back.

Nero, the lion, was dripping water! The water that theoretically should have kept him penned in his cage as securely as steel bars!

A keeper, armed with a rifle, rushed up to Riggs.

"All hell's broken loose," he shouted.

The polar bears had staged a bloody battle, with two of them dead, two dying and the rest so badly mauled that there was little hope they would live. Two buck deer, with locked horns, were fighting to the death. Monkey Island was in an uproar, with half of the little creatures mysteriously dead — dead, the keepers said, of too much excitement. A nervous condition.

"It ain't natural," protested Pop, when they were inside. "Animals don't fight like that."

Riggs was yelling into a telephone.

Outside a rifle roared.

Pop flinched.

"Maybe that's Nero." he groaned. "Nero, that I raised from a cub. Bottle-fed him, I did."

There were traces of tears in the old man's eyes.

It was Nero. But Nero, before he died, had reached out for the man who held the rifle and had killed him with a single vicious blow that crushed his skull.