It took Roger a moment only to realize the enormous danger that was behind the loss of those inoculated rats.
When Doctor Ryder had been allotted space in which to conduct his experiments to see if he could perfect a cure for a horribly deadly spinal affliction, he had decided to experiment, first, on animals.
Such experiments had been gotten under way the night before.
The rats, inoculated, were carriers of the deadly germs. If some ignorant person had taken them, and the public was not warned to be careful, anything might happen!
One of Grover’s constantly repeated axioms about laboratory work was:
“Do the first thing first!”
All life, the scientific student always had insisted, was like the chemical compounds they handled. No matter what the problem might be, no matter how it looked, it could be analyzed the way compounds would be analyzed, the elements could be isolated, and the base—the guide to the whole condition—could be known. Sodium, a metal, very unstable, combined with chlorine, a gas, turned into sodium chloride, and that was a salt—common table salt, in fact. Yet the restrainer used in photography, a dissolved salt, was sodium bromide, another gas and the metal, and to find out what a compound held, one had to separate all parts by test and find the base or original element.
But first, one must do the first thing—and in this situation Roger knew that the first thing was to get busy on the telephone.
White rats had been inoculated with dangerous germs. A bite from such an animal was ten times more terrible than that of a plain rat, poisonous though that would be. Therefore, if those inoculated animals were now missing, Grover, up where their cage had been, would know it already; but the public, exposed to possible contamination, must be warned.
Roger plugged in the upstairs telephone so that the policeman could reach his headquarters and start a widespread search of all cars on the roads, all suspicious people carrying sacks or other possible packages or cases that could hide the rats. The Health Department and news and radio agencies must be asked to broadcast public warnings. And the owner of the rats, Doctor Ryder, should be called.