The breeze off San Francisco Bay was cold and dank.  James Chalmers still had his laboratory windows well open, with his laboratory hood drawing maximum draft.  Working behind lab coat, gloves, dust mask, and smock cap he was still adequately warm.  Having to weight down the pages of his lab notebook was a trifle inconvenient, but seemed the safer choice.

There came a knock at the door.

“Ah, Mr. Chalmers,” Professor Watership said, “I see you are hard at work, and being very cautious about something.  Your entry on the outside chalkboard — minerals being analyzed: unknown count — is a bit odd. How can you not know how many minerals you’ve been given?”

“Professor Watership! Welcome back from Los Angeles. I hope the train ride was pleasant.”

James Chalmers set down what he was working on and turned to face the Professor.   Watership was a short man, stout, with silver threads in his still-black hair, dressed in a proper three-piece suit with gold watch chain. Watership, Chalmers thought, had always been very supportive of his hard work, not to mention the time consumed by the two new minerals from Prescott, Arizona. Now Watership seemed slightly disturbed, perhaps because it had been a long trip, and perhaps because the chalkboard entry was a bit exotic.

“It was indeed,” Watership answered.

“While you are away,” Chalmers said, “Mr. Karl Eisenhower himself appeared from Prescott with two respectably large steel boxes. They are both full of strange minerals, at least, they are both full of minerals that he said he didn’t recognize. But they were recovered from the Blasted Heath. The two men who went to the center of the heath died on the way out. He warned me that one of them had been subject to a very careful autopsy, and the medical examiners were totally baffled about why he’d died. The best thought was that something in the air or the water or some emanation from the ground had poisoned him. But they’d taken very careful precautions, not as careful as mine now, stayed very little time in the Heath, and still died on the way out.”

“Men paid with their blood to fetch your samples,” Watership said. “I take it Eisenhower didn’t give you a count of how many minerals he had?”

“He said he’d studied a half-dozen on the surface of each tin”, Chalmers answered. “He was very polite about it, said he was very sorry that you weren’t here, but he had to get back to his shop.  He found strange specific gravity and bead tests, and decided he should leave it to our hands. He even took me out to dinner. The next morning he had another meeting, about violet stones like the ones he gave us last time. He didn’t say who the meeting was with.”

“Interesting,” Watership said. “Only a few people in this department know what your analysis of the violet stone has revealed so far. Why would someone else be interested in them?”