"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."