“Good report,” J-12 said from the pillow. “Sounds like you’ve dropped into a real snakepit, beautiful.”

  “How do you know … why do you think I’m beautiful?” Orison asked.

  “Native optimism,” the voice said. “Good night.” J-12 signed off with a peculiar electronic pop that puzzled Orison for a moment. Then she placed the sound: J-12 had kissed his microphone.

  Orison flung the shoe and the pillow under her bed, and resolved to write Washington for permission to make her future reports by registered mail.

  II

  At ten o’clock the next morning, reading page four of the current Wall Street Journal, Orison was interrupted by the click of a pair of leather heels. The gentleman whose heels had just slammed together was bowing. And she saw with some gratification that he was not wearing earmuffs. “My name,” the stranger said, “is Dink Gerding. I am President of this bank, and wish at this time to welcome you to our little family.”

  “I’m Orison McCall,” she said. A handsome man, she mused. Twenty-eight? So tall. Could he ever be interested in a girl just five-foot-three? Maybe higher heels?

  “We’re pleased with your work, Miss McCall,” Dink Gerd-ing said. He took the chair to the right of her desk.

  “It’s nothing,” Orison said, switching off the microphone.

  “On the contrary, Miss McCall. Your duties are most important,” he said.

  “Reading papers and fairy-tales into this microphone is nothing any reasonably astute sixth-grader couldn’t do as well,” Orison said.

  “You’ll be reading silently before long,” Mr. Gerding said. He smiled, as though this explained everything. “By the way, your official designation is Confidential Secretary. It’s’ me whose confidences you’re to keep secret. If I ever need a letter written, may I stop down here and dictate it?”

  “Please do,” Orison said. This bank president, for all his grace and presence, was obviously as kookie as his bank.

  “Have you ever worked in a bank before, Miss McCall?” Mr. Gerding asked, as though following her train of thought.

  “No, sir,” she said. “Though I’ve been associated with a rather large financial organization.”

  “You may find some of our methods a little strange, but you’ll get used to them,” he said. “Meanwhile, I’d be most grateful if you’d dispense with calling me ‘sir.’ My name is Dink. It is ridiculous, but I’d enjoy your using it.”

  “Dink?” she asked. “And I suppose you’re to call me Orison?”

  “That’s the drill,” he said. “One more question, Orison. Dinner this evening?”

  Direct, she thought. Perhaps that’s why he’s president of a bank, and still so young. “We’ve hardly met,” she said.

  “But we’re on a first-name basis already,” he pointed out. “Dance?”

  “I’d love to,” Orison said, half expecting an orchestra to march, playing, from the elevator.

  “Then I’ll pick you up at seven. Windsor Arms, if I remember your personnel form correctly.” He stood, lean, all bone and muscle, and bowed slightly. West Point? Hardly. His manners were European. Sandhurst, perhaps, or Saint Cyr. Was she supposed to reply with a curtsy? Orison wondered.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  He was a soldier, or had been: the way, when he turned’, his shoulders stayed square. The crisp clicking of his steps, a military metronome, to the elevator. When the door slicked open Orison, staring after Dink, saw that each of the half-dozen men aboard snapped off their hats (but not their ear-muffs) and bowed, the earmuffed operator bowing with them. Small bows, true; just head-and-neck. But not to her. To Dink Gerding.

  Orison finished the Wall Street Journal by early afternoon. A page came up a moment later with fresh reading-matter: a copy of yesterday’s Congressional Record. She launched into the Record, thinking as she read of meeting again this evening that handsome madman, that splendid lunatic, that unlikely bank-president. “You read so well, darling,” someone said across the desk.

  Orison looked up. “Oh, hello,” she said. “I didn’t hear you come up.”

  “I walk ever so lightly,” the woman said, standing hip-shot in front of the desk, “and pounce ever so hard.” She smiled. Opulent, Orison thought. Built like a burlesque queen. No, she thought, I don’t like her. Can’t. Wouldn’t if I could. Never cared for cats.

  “I’m Orison McCall,” she said, and tried to smile back without showing teeth.

  “Delighted,” the visitor said, handing over an undelighted palm. “I’m Auga Vingt. Auga, to my friends.”

  “Won’t you sit down, Miss Vingt?”

  “So kind of you, darling,” Auga Vingt said, “but I shan’t have time to visit. I just wanted to stop and welcome you as a Taft Bank co-worker. One for all, all for one. Yea, team. You know.”

  “Thanks,” Orison said.

  “Common courtesy,” Miss Vingt explained. “Also, darling, I’d like to draw your attention to one little point, Dink Gerding—you know, the shoulders and muscles and crewcut? Well, he’s posted property. Should you throw your starveling charms at my Dink, you’d only get your little eyes scratched out. Word to the wise, n’est-ce pas?”

  “Sorry you have to leave so suddenly,” Orison said, rolling her Wall Street Journal into a club and standing. “Darling.”

  “So remember, Tiny, Dink Gerding is mine. You’re all alone up here. You could get broken nails, fall down the elevator shaft, all sorts of annoyance. Understand me, darling?”

  “You make it very clear,” Orison said. “Now you’d best hurry back to your stanchion, Bossy, before the hay’s all gone.”

  “Isn’t it lovely, the way you and I reached an understanding right off?” Auga asked. “Well, ta-ta.” She turned and walked to the elevator, displaying, Orison thought, a disgraceful amount of ungirdled rhumba motion.

  The elevator stopped to pick up the odious Auga. A passenger, male, stepped off. “Good morning, Mr. Gerding,” Miss Vingt said, bowing.

  “Carry on, Colonel,” the stranger replied. As the elevator door closed, he stepped up to Orison’s desk. “Good morning, Miss McCall,” he said.

  “What is this?” Orison demanded. “Visiting-day at the zoo?” She paused and shook her head. “Excuse me, sir,” she said. “It’s just that. . Vingt thing …”

  “Auga is rather intense,” the new Mr. Gerding said.

  “Yeah, intense,” Orison said. “Like a kidney-stone.”

  “I stopped by to welcome you to the William Howard Taft National Bank and Trust Company family, Miss McCall,” he said. “I’m Kraft Gerding, Dink’s elder brother. I understand you’ve met Dink already.”

  “Yes, sir,” Orison said. The hair of this new Mr. Gerding was cropped even closer than Dink’s. His mustache was gray-tipped, like a patch of frosted furze; and his eyes, like Dink’s, were cobalt blue. The head, Orison mused, would look quite at home in one of Kaiser Bill’s spike-topped Pickelhauben; but the ears were in evidence, and seemed normal. Mr. Kraft Gerding bowed—what continental manners these bankers had!—and Orison half expected him to free her hand from the rolled-up paper she still clutched and plant a kiss on it.

  Instead, Kraft Gerding smiled a smile as frosty as his mustache and said, “I understand that my younger brother has been talking with you, Miss McCall. Quite proper, I know. But I must warn you against mixing business with pleasure.”

  Orison jumped up, tossing the paper into her wastebasket. “I quit!” she shouted. “You can take this crazy bank … into bankruptcy, for all I care. I’m not going to perch up here, target for every uncaged idiot in finance, and listen to another word.”

  “Dearest lady, my humblest pardon,” Kraft Gerding said, bowing again, a bit lower. “Your work is splendid; your presence is Taft Bank’s most charming asset; my only wish is to serve and protect you. To this end, dear lady, I feel it my duty to warn you against my brother. A word to the wise …”

  “N’est-ce pas?” Orison said. “Well, buster, here’s a word to the foolish. Get lost.”

  Kraft Gerding bowed and flashed his gelid smile. “Until we meet again?”

  “I’ll hold my breath,” Orison promised. “The elevator is just behind you. Push a button, will you? And bon voyage.”

  Kraft Gerding called the elevator, marched aboard, favored Orison with a cold, quick bow, then disappeared into the mysterious heights above fifth floor.

  First the unspeakable Auga Vingt, then the obnoxious Kraft Gerding. Surely, Orison thought, recovering the Wall Street Journal from her wastebasket and smoothing it, no one would convert a major Midwestern bank into a lunatic asylum. How else, though, could the behavior of the Earmuffs be explained? Could madmen run a bank? Why not, she thought. History is rich in examples of madmen running nations, banks and all. She began again to read the paper into the microphone. If she finished early enough, she might get a chance to prowl those Off-Limits upper floors.

  Half an hour further into the paper, Orison jumped, startled by the sudden buzz of her telephone. She picked it up. “ Wanji e-Kal, Datto. Dink ger-Dink d’summa.”

  Orison scribbled down this intelligence in bemused Gregg before replying, “I’m a local girl. Try me in English.”

  “Oh. Hi, Miss McCall,” the voice said. “Guess I goofed. I’m in a kinda clutch. This is Wanji. I got a kite for Mr. Dink Gerding. If you see him, tell him the escudo green is pale. Got that, doll?”

  “Yes, Mr. Wanji. I’ll tell Mr. Gerding.” Orison clicked the phone down. What now, Mata Hari? she asked herself. What was the curious language Mr. Wanji had used? She’d have to report the message to Washington by tonight’s pillow, and let the polyglots of Treasury Intelligence puzzle it out. Meanwhile, she thought, scooting her chair back from her desk, she had a vague excuse to prowl the upper floors. The Earmuffs could only fire her.

  Orison folded the paper and put it in the “Out” basket. Someone would be here in a moment with something new to read. She’d best get going. The elevator? No. The operators had surely been instructed to keep her off the upstairs floors.

  But the building had a stairway.

  III

  The door on the sixth floor was locked. Orison went on up the stairs to seven. The glass of the door there was painted black on the inside, and the landing was cellar-dark. Orison closed her eyes for a moment. There was a curious sound. The buzzing of a million bees, barely within the fringes of her hearing. Somehow, a very pleasant sound.

  She opened her eyes and tried the knob. The door opened.

  Orison was blinded by the lights, brilliant as noonday sun. The room extended through the entire seventh floor, its windows boarded shut, its ceiling a mass of fluorescent lamps. Set about the floor were galvanized steel tanks, rectangular and a little bigger than bathtubs. Orison counted the rows of tanks. Twelve rows, nine tiers. One hundred and eight tanks. She walked closer. The tubs were laced together by strands of angel-hair, delicate white lattices scintillating with pink. She walked to the nearest of the tubs and looked in. It was half full of a greenish fluid, seething with tiny pink bubbles. For a moment Orison thought she saw Benjamin Franklin winking up at her from the liquid. Then she screamed.

  The pink bubbles, the tiny flesh-colored flecks glinting light from the spun-sugar bridges between the tanks, were spiders. Millions upon millions of spiders, each the size of a mustard-seed; crawling, leaping, swinging, spinning webs, seething in the hundred tanks. Orison put her hands over her ears and screamed again, backing toward the stairway door.

  Into a pair of arms.

  “I had hoped you’d be happy here, Miss McCall,” Kraft Gerding said. Orison struggled to release herself. She broke free only to have her wrists seized by two Earmuffs that had appeared with the elder Gerding. “It seems that our Pandora doesn’t care for spiders,” he said. “Really, Miss McCall, our little pets are quite harmless. Were we to toss you into one of these tanks …” Orison struggled against her two sumo-sized captors, whose combined weights exceeded hers by some quarter-ton, without doing more than lifting her feet from the floor. “… your flesh would be unharmed, though they spun and darted all around you. Our Microfabridae are petrovorous, Miss McCall. Of course, once they discovered your teeth, and through them a skeleton of calcium, a delicacy they find most toothsome, you’d be filleted within minutes.”

  “Elder Compassion wouldn’t like your harming the girl, Sire,” one of the earmuffed sumo-wrestlers protested.

  “Elder Compassion has no rank,” Kraft Gerding said. “Miss McCall, you must tell me what you were doing here, or I’ll toss you to the spiders.”

  “Dink … Dink!” Orison shouted.

  “My beloved younger brother is otherwise engaged than in the rescue of damsels in distress,” Kraft said. “Someone, after all, has to mind the bank.”

  “I came to bring a message to Dink,” Orison said. “Let me go, you acromegalic apes!”

  “The message?” Kraft Gerding demanded.

  “Something about escudo green. Put me down!”

  Suddenly she was dropped. Her mountainous keepers were on the floor as though struck by lightning, their arms throw’ll out before them, their faces abject against the floor. Kraft Gerding was slowly lowering himself to one knee. Dink had entered the spider-room. Without questions, he strode between the shiko-ing Earmuffs and put his arms around Orison.

  “They can’t harm you,” he said. She turned to press her face against his chest. “You’re all right, child. Breathe deep, swallow, and turn your brain back on. All right, now?”

  “All right,” she said, still trembling. “They were going to throw me to the spiders.”

  “Kraft told you that?” Dink Gerding released her and turned to the kneeling man. “Stand up, Elder Brother.”

  Dink brought his right fist up from hip-level, crashing it into Kraft’s jaw. Kraft Gerding joined the Earmuffs on the floor.

  “If you’d care to stand again, Elder Brother, you may attempt to recover your dignity without regard for the difference in our rank.” Kraft struggled to one knee and remained kneeling, gazing up at Dink through half-closed eyes. “No? Then get out of here, all of you. Samma!"

  Kraft Gerding arose, stared for a moment at Dink and Orison, then, with the merest hint of a bow, led his two giant Earmuffs to the elevator.

  “I wish you hadn’t come up here, Orison,” Dink said. “Why did you do it?”

  “Have you read the story of Bluebeard?” Orison asked. She stood close to Dink, keeping her eyes on the nearest spider-tank. “I had to see what it was you kept up here so secretly, what it was that I was forbidden to see. My excuse was to have been that I was looking for you, to deliver a message from Mr. Wanji. He said I was to tell you that the escudo green is pale.”

  “You’re too curious, and Wanji is too careless,” Dink said. “Now, what is this thing you have about spiders?”

  “I’ve always been terrified of them,” Orison said. “When I was a little girl, I had to stay upstairs all day one Sunday because there was a spider hanging from his thread in the stairway. I waited until Dad came home and took it down with a broom. Even then, I didn’t have appetite for supper.” •’

  “Strange,” Dink said. He walked over to the nearest tank and plucked one of the tiny pink creatures from a web-bridge. “This is no spider, Orison,” he said.

  She backed away from Dink Gerding and the minuscule creature he cupped in the palm of his hand. “These are Microfabridae, more nearly related to shellfish than to spiders,” he said. “They’re stone-and-metal eaters. They literally couldn’t harm a fly. Look at it, Orison.” He extended his palm. Orison forced herself to look. The little creature, flesh-colored against his flesh, was nearly invisible, scuttling around the bowl of his hand. “Pretty little fellow, isn’t he?” Dink asked. “Here. You hold him.”

  “I’d rather not,” she protested.

  “I’d be happier if you did,” Dink said.

  Orison extended her hand as into a furnace. Dink brushed the Microfabridus from his palm to hers. It felt crisp and hard, like a legged grain of sand. Dink took a magnifier from his pocket and unfolded it, to hold it over Orison’s palm.

  “He’s like a baby crawdad,” Orison said.

  “A sort of crustacean,” Dink agreed. “We use them in a commercial process we’re developing. That’s why we keep this floor closed off and secret. We don’t have a patent on the use of Microfabridae, you see.”

  “What do they do?” Orison asked.

  “That’s still a secret,” Dink said, smiling. “I can’t tell even you that, not yet, even though you’re my most confidential secretary.”

  “What’s he doing now?” Orison asked, watching the Microfabridus, perched up on the rear four of his six microscopic legs, scratching against her high-school class-ring with his tiny chelae.

  “They like gold,” Dink explained, peering across her shoulder, comfortably close. “They’re attracted to it by a chemical tropism, as children are attracted to candy. Toss him back into his tank, Orison. We’d better get you down where you belong.”

  Orison brushed the midget crustacean off her finger into the nearest tank, where he joined the busy boil of his fellows. She felt her ring. It was pitted where the Microfabridus had been nibbling. “Strange, using crawdads in a bank,” she said. She stood silent for a moment. “I thought I heard music,” she said. “I heard it when I came in. Something like the sighing of wind in winter trees.”

  “That’s the hymn of the Microfabridae,” Dink said. “They all sing together while they work, a chorus of some twenty million voices.” He took her arm. “If you listen very carefully, you’ll find the song these little workers sing the most beautiful music in the world.”

  Orison closed her eyes, leaning back into Dink’s arms, listening to the music that seemed on the outermost edge of her hearing. Wildness, storm and danger were its theme, counter-pointed by promises of peace and harbor. She heard the wash of giant waves in the song, the crash of breakers against granite, cold and insatiable. And behind this, the quiet of sheltered tide-pools, the soft lub of sea-arms landlocked. “It’s an ancient song,” Dink said. “The Microfabridae have been singing it for a million years.” He released her, and opened a wood-covered wooden box. He scooped up a cupful of the sand inside. “Hold out your hands,” he told Orison. He filled them with the sand. “Throw our singers some supper for their song,” he said.