Page 35 - Psychoceramics and the Test of Fire

Archaeontogeny

It took a few days for a couple of apparently unrelated incidents to
become linked and make the wire services. Six Runyoke graduate
students had disappeared on the same day. They’d withdrawn their
savings, sold all their possessions and left unseen for parts unknown.
At the same time a series of break-ins occurred at sporting goods
stores near the campus. The stolen goods included camping and
survival gear. Burglar alarm systems had been defeated, disarmed,
destroyed—but not crudely. The thieves left no clues to their identity.
The police at first suspected inside jobs, but could not tie the
employees of the disparate establishments to any of the crimes, much
less to all of them. Their next working hypothesis, after the detectives
overcame their initial resistance to connecting the thefts with the
missing persons, was that a highly-skilled gang had forced the
Runyoke students to cash out in the process of kidnapping them, had
then committed the robberies to supply a wilderness hideout, and
were holding their hostages for ransom somewhere in the nearest
national forest. Coincidence could not run rampant forever in the
Runyoke police department.
The authorities were, according to informed sources, waiting for
demands to be transmitted either to Runyoke administrators or the
students’ families. At the same time a search was being mounted, on
land and in the air, on the assumption that a group numbering
approximately a dozen people would leave a trail rather easy to
follow. I had a bad feeling about this news, and again was grateful to
Al Magnus for insisting that his ad hoc hoaxers immediately fold up
their tent and literally leave town once the job was done.
Suddenly I itched to find out the real story, the one that had to
involve Dr. Eugene Cutter and his miraculously-funded experiment.
It developed slowly, once the plodding gumshoes realized the
supposed kidnap victims were all volunteer test subjects for the
archaeontogeny study. Unwilling to give up their latest version of
events, the police first interrogated everyone connected with the
project, including the professor: perhaps an accomplice was sheltered
within the cloistered world of the social sciences department,
someone with a grudge or a share in the ransom money. That line of
inquiry led to another blank wall. Finally, after a week had passed
without word from either the pursued or their pursuers, and with the
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