"Level Four. Upstairs, quick!"

They spiraled hurriedly up from Level One, noting with irritation that the doors to the stair-wells made more noise than the stairs themselves. The men's bathroom door--the closest--made the most noise of all. After a suitable period of skulking--including one abortive escape mission cut short by a door slamming right around the corner--quiet returned and they cautiously worked their way back downstairs.

* * *

Earlier in the day, in a fit of self-dramatization, they had arranged for two friends to show up at midnight at the Gate on Mass Ave and look for them in the third-level window. Because of the delay in the men's room, Jack and Jill barely made it to Carrel # 232 in time. The original contacts had brought along three more, and the entire group was waving and jumping up and down and pointing. But just as Jack and Jill flipped on the individual carrel light to improve the view, a woman walked through the Mass Ave gate directly towards the library. With natural curiosity she glanced up, saw the lit window and the silhouettes, paused for a moment, and then walked into Widener through the back door. She was, of course, the midnight janitor.

"Now we've blown it."

"She must have seen us. Let's get outta here."

Turning off the light, they ducked down the stairs and reconnoitered Level Two, whose quiet emboldened them to go back to the window. From the window directly below their original one (Carrel # 252), they switched on another light and boldly hailed their friends. The outside group looked horrified and pointed upward. The gesture became abruptly comprehensible with the sound of footsteps and the rhythmic "Click-click...click-click" of light switches being flicked in succession by someone passing directly overhead.

Jack and Jill turned their light off and tiptoed around the corner to Jack's home base on the same floor, Carrel # 164. (They learned later that the gang of five, seeing most of the lights in the building on and guards prowling, had given them up for lost.)

Carrel # 164 was conveniently snuggled behind the Baltic and Finnish Literature at the end of a dead-end hallway, which was dark. Jack and Jill figured they couldn't do much better without giving themselves away on the stairs again. They chose a couple of desks hallway along the corridor Jack pretended to be asleep while Jill tried to fit in the windowsill She was just deciding that it wouldn't work, that it made more sense to look "naturally" asleep, when the footsteps approached briskly. The woman janitor who had seen them in the window was coming along the corridor, turning on lights as she walked.

She passed Jack without seeing him and turned on the light in Jill's carrel. Jill was caught standing stupidly, trying desperately to look sleepy. The woman looked at her, said "Oh--sorry to bother you," and left, turning the lights off behind her.

Several minutes later, against all odds, she really seemed to have gone away. "Jill," said Jack through the barrier.

"Yeah?"

"What the hell just happened?"

"Search me."

When it became obvious that no full-scale chase was in progress, they decided to stay put and gamble on the janitor's not retracing her own steps. For the next 45 minutes they sat motionless and listened while their janitor and one other clanked around Levels One and Two with their cleaning equipment. At 12:55 Jill's nerves gave out and she hid under her desk. At 1:15 the clanking became so insistent that neither of them could take it any more Betting on another rumor they'd heard, that the tunnel to Pusey Library stayed open all night, they risked the stairs again and headed all the way down--from One. to A. to B. to C. to D.