The military, acting with their usual belated but firm ineffectuality, again essayed the problem of the Word itself. Unveiling a new weapon—a rocket adapted for air-to-air combat, with a warhead of a secret explosive—the Army launched squadrons of fighters and bombers to the attack. A great cannonade over the city began near five o'clock. It was futile: the blasts disrupted edges and fringes of the letters in the sky but they mended themselves as fast as they were tattered. Army Ordinance then tried its supersecret, twenty-four-inch rockets. Careless fusing caused one of these to explode at a low level, destroying the upper stories of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Building—but subsequent accurate salvos of the tremendous weapon merely caused the letters to undulate.
Shortly after six o'clock the Navy, carrying out a suggestion of Cardinal Bleatbier, tried a new tactic—the interposition of a smoke screen between the abomination and the desolated city. The idea was greeted by officers with enthusiasm. The effect of it was not. For, after some fifty Navy planes had laid a great, brown carpet underneath the Wordand above the buildings, there came new and hitherto unobserved eddyings of the air and the Navy smoke was drawn into the writing on the heavens—not only fortifying and clarifying what it had been intended to obscure but also giving the letters a phosphorescent glow which became visible as soon as twilight descended.
That night, as electricity began to fail in the city, the surviving people undertook to leave en masse. They had no stomach for another day such as they had passed through. An additional factor urged them on. During the years of the Atomic Age they had been living—like people of every city—with keen, increasing queasiness. It is not conducive to urban content to know that any of a dozen foreign governments can, or potentially can, blot out you and yours in an eye-twinkling. Indeed, for many years, people had been trickling away from cities everywhere—either openly giving their reason or offering some excuse.
Finally, from the very onslaught of B Day, there had poured forth a succession of orders setting up various official hierocracies for the emergency—deputy police, wardens, and so on, along with the rationing of gasoline, restrictions on subway use, abrogation of power supply, and other such matters. Americans are not a patient people and of all Americans, New Yorkers are the most impatient. Unlike Britains, Russians, and Europeans, they had never accepted the brash contempt of the public exhibited continually both by government and industry after World War II. Nor had they become reconciled to bureaucratic rule. They had resented the multiplication of authorized agents and official personnel. Hence, not being schooled to such vicissitudes at the time of B Day, they lost their tempers. They left town. By midnight, the tunnels, bridges, and ferries could no longer be held open for the evacuation of casualties. By three in the morning, every bridge and every tunnel and every boat was swarming with one-way, antlike movement as NewYorkers abandoned New York. All the next day the human tide welled into metropolitan environs.
The contagion spread to other cities as words began to form above them and in some instances even before their skies developed a C or a J or a P or an A or the like. Terror begat terror. Various metropolises were soon without electricity, water, food, gasoline, and so on. Fires began to rage in them. In no time, Cleveland, Detroit, Birmingham, Boston, Los Angeles, and other centers were in a condition like that of cities over which a powerful enemy has gained absolute control of the air.
There is, of course, no general record of the total effect of this exodus. Towns, villages, hamlets, and lone farms were unprepared to house or to feed the scores of millions who descended upon them—rich refugees in limousines piled high with canned foods and guns—slum masses in rags and on foot, with nothing but fear and hunger to drive them ahead. Here and there some man of feudal abilities organized bands of the fugitives and these forcibly evacuated whole communities, taking possession of them—only to be driven out by bands better armed and more ruthless. Theft and violence became the national way of life; and murder—murder that took the lives of millions—the means to obtain a meal or a woman or a bauble in some as yet unsmashed village store window. City people had become the sworn enemies of country people—and vice versa. The Hindus and Mussulmans of India on the days after its liberation were more kindly disposed to one another than these—and dealt more mercifully.
So it went—fire, blood and turmoil, death, epidemic and ruin.
Only Russia maintained, for a little while, the mask of order. No obscenity in its skies was able to break the disciplined ranks of the proletariat. But this calm—this grimly enforced maintenance of socialІ decorum—was ultimately shattered. On the 3rd of September, while the Kremlin exulted over the downfall of each and every empire and democracy, there appeared, almost experimentally, over the city of Kiev the phrase:
јІЕНИН ДИСИВД
No mere exposure of lewd words could faze the Soviets; but the hideous violation of the proprieties represented by the simple statement that "Lenin deceived" sent consternation whistling from the Baltic to theҪИ Black Sea. The next day, the sky of Moscow reported that Stalin had lied methodically; and the day after that, the people of Ordzhonikidze were informed that the Kremlin feasted, the party guzzled, the people starved. Russia rose against its government and Politburo heads were carried from city to city on stakes. Exodus followed. From the hot wheatfields of the Ukraine to the cool timberlands of Siberia, the panoply of death began.
Last to enjoy the fruits of organized society, perhaps, were the atomic scientists and their families at Los Alamos. These persons, impounded by a series of fences and protected by guards trained not only to mistrust rumor, but to bear silently all knowledge of however weird a nature, and to shoot without asking questions, were protected through the precedents and methodologies of what is called security. The town and its laboratories were stocked with food and water against possible air attack and resultant isolation by radiation. Hence the planetary debacle, while it became known to the scientists, did not greatly affect the local status quo. The guards were ordered to destroy such bands of wandering refugees as made their way across the deserts to the vicinity. This was done.
Meantime, the scientists took measures to study and if possible to arrest the universal disintegration of humanity.
It is the custom of journalists (and it is the habit in fiction) to depict scientists as impractical, dreamy men, absent-minded, innocent, and not competent to deal with simple situations—men forever in need, like infants, of overseers. Nothing could possibly be further from the truth. Indeed, it may fairly be said that, had the people of the world understood this fallacy about scientists, they might themselves have been more scientific—which is to say aware—and so prevented their catastrophe. Actually, it was known—known statistically—even before World War II, that scientists as a group were possessed of an all-round superiority over their fellows. They were not merely precocious, but like the precocious everywhere, they had on the average larger physiques, more strength and endurance, quicker reflexes, greater athletic ability, and better looks than common Homo sapiens. However, although this fact had been published a thousand times and proved in a hundred ways, the people preferred to cling to the myth that scientists were inept in all but their métier—naïve, absent-minded, and rather foolish.
That but affords another index of the general foolishness.
New York's tragedy convinced the farsighted physicists, chemists, biologists, and others at Los Alamos that the nation and possibly the world would be swept with unprecedented panic. The steps anent local guards which have been already described were immediately taken. Under Xerxes Cohn, the scientists organized research parties; in fifteen planes, they took off to study the situation at first hand. Within forty-eight hours they had assembled a full report of events in a dozen urban areas and of the gory melee in progress everywhere in the countryside. (They had, naturally, all the information available on the Words from Calk's first account in the Chicago papers, through Cummings's initial survey, to the latest military data—as well as reports of many greatsavants made before their own flights from various cities of the earth.)
These data were now screened, and evaluated. Charts were prepared. A discussion meeting was held in the hall for top-secret conferences. Various papers were read, including the following:
Tead's Hypothesisthat energy, in whatever form, has a sort of subnuclear consciousness and will power and that the watery masses which made up clouds, revolted by the wretched spectacle of humanity, had taken up word-spelling as a form of rebuke, i.e., as Nature talking to human nature.
Schilch's Theorythat there were no words and that the whole grisly phenomenon was the result of mass autohypnosis. This proposition (which might valuably have been given further investigation) was discarded by the scientists for empirical reasons: they, themselves, they felt, could not be hypnotized and certainly their instruments could not be. (It will be noted that there was no discussion of the possibility that the scientists could be so hypnotized as uniformly to misread their instruments.)
Boden's Proposalthat the human unconscious mind actually formed the Words by telekinesis. To defend this (another idea worthy of deeper scrutiny) he cited J.B. Rhine—and was laughed off the rostrum.
Jetefti'sremarkably eruditeDemonstration—following studies of cosmic radiation around various Words—studies of ionization, of stratospheric air currents, of polarization, of the uninterruptibility of streams of neutrons, gamma rays, alpha particles, electrons, photons, and other forms of radiation with which the Words had been surrounded, of the Heaviside Layer, etc., etc.—that no external (i.e., interplanetary) agency or intelligence hadprojectedthe Words on city skies.
Poglief's Discussionof God which concluded, "Religious Fundamentalism has been the recourse of millions, as mightbe expected. These persons hold either that God has permitted the Devil thus to rebuke humanity, which may be a sound moral observation but which is not good physics; or else that the Words represent the imminence of the Day of Judgment and the approach of the Opening of the Gates of Paradise. This latter theory, gentlemen, is not, I feel, borne out by the specific nature of the abundant tokens."
Hearty laughter greeted this conclusion. And again—the opportunity to consider the nature of God, a third valuable occasion, was missed.
Ultimately, it was decided that
(a) No direct harm whatever had come from the Words
(b) Thus the disaster was of psychological occasion, up to the present time
(c) Wherefore Los Alamos should immure itself as a fort against all threat from the ravening masses, until
(1) they calmed down (unlikely for years)(2) they all perished (not probable)(3) a manageable remnant remained (most likely)
(1) they calmed down (unlikely for years)
(2) they all perished (not probable)
(3) a manageable remnant remained (most likely)
(d) In which last case Los Alamos could be the nucleus of a new and spreading social culture, factual and scientific in nature, which would gradually recapture and restrain humanity with a view
(z) to establish a true freedom(y) to abolish racialism(x) to end wars(w) to limit birth to numbers the planet's resources could maintain indefinitely(v) by the use of genetics and eugenics to raise constantly all levels of health and intelligence(u) and thus to bring about the halcyon world which had been within the very grasp of the stupid species when they had all but destroyed themselves.
(z) to establish a true freedom
(y) to abolish racialism
(x) to end wars
(w) to limit birth to numbers the planet's resources could maintain indefinitely
(v) by the use of genetics and eugenics to raise constantly all levels of health and intelligence
(u) and thus to bring about the halcyon world which had been within the very grasp of the stupid species when they had all but destroyed themselves.
So propitious was this program that a banquet to celebrate its inauguration was called for that night. The entirecommunity, dressed in its best, assembled in a mood of new hope to dine from trestle tables in an airplane hangar.
It was during this festival, while postprandial brandies were being served, that Xerxes Cohn stepped outdoors to take a breath of the thin, poignant night air of New Mexico and, perhaps, to turn a covertly exultant face upon the raw landscape; after all, through persons like himself, man would triumph despite man's folly and its cost. He stepped into the gloom, then, and because he was an astrophysicist as well as a nuclear expert, he turned his eyes to the familiar constellations. His stocky body grew stiff. There, in the region of Ursa Minor, glowed a hitherto unknown star—a nova of approximately the third magnitude. At once he called into the laughter-filled area behind him, "Oh, Tead! Schilch! Boden! Come on out! We've got a sign, too—a nova."
People—including those summoned—began to join the great man and murmur with a sort of primitive awe. As they looked, the light from yet another new star—reaching the planet earth after years of journeying at its absolute speed—burst before their gaze. The sign was doubled in the heavens—and, soon enough, trebled. It was Jetefti—the Italian-Czech—whose keen imagination caused him first to whisper, "I say, Xerx, it couldn't be—?"
Silence fell everywhere. More novae flashed into being. And there could no longer remain a doubt amongst even the most skeptical of this enlightened residue of the race. The stars had set forth an unimaginably vast initial of their own, an
F
13
The phone split my sleep. I was unready for the sound, or any sound, ripping open my peaceful bivouac—bayoneting dreams and my poor respite.
I grabbed in the dark. "Yeahhhh?"
"Can I come up?"
"For God's sakes, Paul, what time is it?"
"She's gone!"
"Okay, okay. Where—?"
"Downstairs!"
I found the light. Four-fifteen. Went to the door and propped it open with a chair. Turned on the shower and stepped into it—letting the multiple streams rattle against my sleepy skull and sweep away the salty acids on my body.
The door slammed. Paul stuck his head around the curtain. "I can't find her!"
"For God's sakes, it's not that hot! She won't melt! Go get yourself some whisky. Or would you rather have coffee?"
"Christ. What do I care?" His brow was fissured. Sweat had soaked his unshaved face—which he had wiped with hands increasingly grimed by junketing about the city all night. He looked like a hung-over mechanic.
"You need a bath, yourself," I said, stepping out.
"You don't understand! I've got to find her! Before she does anything desperate."
"Look, Paul. If she's going to pull one, on the spur—it's pulled. If it's not done now—she won't hurry about it." I daubed myself with a towel; perspiration came immediately where the water had just been. It was muggier than Miami before a hurricane. "Don't get the idea that because it's your first, it's her primary emotional crisis, either! Marcia's been through a lot!" I opened the hot-water tap, let it run, and filled a tumbler. I went into the living room, took a jar of powdered coffee from the desk pigeonhole where I kept it, dumped in a couple of spoonfuls, went back, and stirred with my toothbrush handle. Then I took acouple of lumps of sugar from a horde I'd been accumulating at the Astolat's expense, plunked them in, and stirred more. I drank about half of the hot coffee and lit a cigarette.
Paul had followed every step of this gambit. I felt a little less like a roused-up mummy with the coffee inside me, so I said, "I'm sorry as all hell, cooky. Tell me about it."
"You did it!" His eyes despised me for a moment. Then tears came. "I guess I should have known enough not to bring her around to see you."
"What did I do?"
"Made her self-conscious. Made her think it wasn't ever going to work out for us. She said that when you looked at her it made her feel like a tart."
It had gone the other way around: when she'd looked at me, she'd felt—not like a tart, necessarily—but not like a faithful wife, either. And I was being blamed for that. I skipped the point. "You two kids retired in good order."
"That's what I thought. We got about a block away before she blew up."
"I'm sorry."
He tossed himself into a chair. He slipped down his tie and stared at me. "What in helldidyou do?"
"Nothing."
"It wasn't—a pleasant—lunch. If all those idiotic things hadn't got us laughing—then paralyzed—"
"Go on. She blew up?"
"Sure. She said about a thousand crazy things—things like never being able to go around with me where people knew—because she realized she'd always see them knowing—and thinking. I had to get back to the lab. We've got the pile set at—we've got stuff cooking. I managed to calm her down enough so she promised to go home and get dinner. But when I got there—" He held out a note:
Paul, dear—For people like us, it should always be quick, clean, permanent, and no hard feelings. I love you—that's why. M.
Paul, dear—For people like us, it should always be quick, clean, permanent, and no hard feelings. I love you—that's why. M.
"Sounds like—going away. Nothing more drastic."
"Drastic enough! And she can't get away with that! I won't let her! We'd have made it."
"What did you do? Bloodhound around the city?"
"Went to her old apartment, first. Then—to the people who'd been her friends. Routing them out. Bribing doormen to let me knock and wake them up. Finally—when I ran out of ideas—I went to Hattie Blaine's. Good God—what a hideous place!"
I skipped that one, too. It was no time to argue that Hat's, while it had a few dim facets of one sort or another, was in my opinion (or had been, anyhow)—rather enchanting. A kindlier spot than many a hearth or any city street.
"What did Hat say?"
"Ye gods! She talked. She talked the grimmest bunch of obscene sophistries I ever heard in my life! She tried to get me drunk! She even tried to get one of the girls to—entertain me!"
"It never passed through your cold, reasoning, scientific cranium that perhaps she was trying to be decent to you?"
"Decent!"
"Did she know where Marcia was?"
"If she did—she wasn't saying. She said she had no idea on earth. Hadn't heard from her for months. Or seen her—naturally. I begged her—beseeched her—to give me any useful address. Any name. Any scrap of a suggestion—"
I picked up the phone. After ringing me, the Astolat switchboard operator had fallen back to sleep and I listened to the buzz for a long while before she plugged in—irritably. The number I gave wasn't in the book. But Hattie wouldn't be asleep—yet. Not unless she'd changed.
Viola answered and Hattie came on in a moment. "Hello, Phil. What's cooking? You and Gwen quarrel?"
Since waking, I hadn't thought about Gwen—or Yvonne. The question startled me. "Nope," I said. "Gwen, incidentally, has—has gone out for a bit with a friend of mine. Nice gal, Gwen. It's about my nephew, Paul."
"Oh. Is he there?"
"Yeah."
"Phil, that lad's in very bad shape."
"Yeah."
"I'm serious. I know men. He's apt to do—anything!"
"Yeah. Maybe so. Look. You don't have any ideas about Marcia—that you'd give me, but not him?"
"Too many!"
"I don't understand."
"I couldn't very well give Paul the names and addresses of all the boys who have liked her, could I? In the shape he's in—he'd rout out God Almighty, or run a one-man posse through hell."
"Yeah."
"Phil. He shouldn't see her now—even if I knew where she was—and I haven't a single good idea about that. Just—lots of possibilities. I don't know what she'd do—I doubt if she'd do anything violent—but she has a right to be wherever she wants, hasn't she?"
"Of course. I just thought—if you did have any hunches—he's sitting here chewing the rug—"
Hattie sighed. "Old enough to do better! Maybe he's a great physicist—but, believe me, he's in kindergarten on women! I tried to tell him so—gently. But he just sat there looking wilder than a priest trapped in the ladies' can! If I hear anything tomorrow, Phil, I'll give you a ring. If I were you—I'd slip Paul a Mickey Finn, or something, to cool him down."
I thanked her.
She told me she was glad I liked Gwen and I said again that I thought Gwen was a good deal of damsel and I hung up.
"Nothing?" Paul had been on his chair-edge.
I shook my head. "Hattie's calm about it—and she really knows the girl."
"Really knows Marcia? That bat-faced old strumpet? The hell she does!"
"Okay," I said. "Okay."
"Who's Gwen?"
"One of her girls. She was down here earlier. She's gone."
He jumped up and came over to the sofa where I sat with the phone. "Fine thing! I thought you said you were here working—not cheating!"
"A slight relapse, say. What of it?"
"Relapse!" His voice was thin and high. His fists were doubled. His face streamed as if he were shoveling in a boiler room. "Sweet guy, you are! Oh—you've got a good brain! Even talent! But all you do is whore around with your brains and your god-damned talent! And yourself! You look at a woman—you justlookat her—and you make her feel like a slut! You've got a wife that's too good for a good guy—and a thousand times too good for you! So what? A weekend off—and you louse the place up with a chippy—! Somebody tries to dig a decent, lovely girl out of a bad spot—and you come along and roll your dirty eyes on her—!"
I said, "Look, Paul. If you're going to rage around at people for keeping tarts in their homes, start with your own, will you?"
He swung but he didn't follow hard and I ducked it.
So he began to sob, then—back in his chair.
I went to the bathroom, broke out a clean tumbler, dumped in the contents of three of the sodium amytal capsules Tom had prescribed for me, added water, swished it around, slogged back to the sitting room, poured in three fingers of whisky, and handed it to him. He took a deep, lunging breath and drank the whole business.
He sobbed a while longer.
Then, in a low, self-pitying voice, he began a rhapsody, or maybe threnody, on Marcia. The drink hit him, and the pills; he grew detailed and intimate; finally he said he'd lie down for an hour before going on with the search.
It was getting light by that time.
PART FOUR
Rondo
Rondo
1
Paul's "hour"of sleep would last, I felt certain, for the best part of the morning.
I went into my bedroom and looked at him. He had taken off his shirt and his shoes. He lay on his back with his mouth open, his lips nursing the air, his brow creased with wrinkles set there by a life of concentration—and distorted now with sorrow and pain. He was sweating like the inside of a still: the drops welled and ran on his face and his hairy chest and his ribs. Even his feet were bright-sprinkled. As I looked at him he stirred; a murmurous sound of protest and despair came out of the poor guy—a sound tragic and pitiful and weird, for there was nothing human about it. Hurt animals make such noises. Ridiculous—but I remembered how a young man could feel about a girl.
I would like to say that I dressed, girded my spirit, and took some step on Paul's behalf—or even that I sat down at my table with grim and relentless character and put the milk-cart morning to good account by knifing further excess from my serial.
Such was not the case.
I lay on my sitting room couch with the purpose of gathering my forces for both efforts—but I met with failure.
My head ached. Vague pains beset my body—squirtingabout mysteriously from neck to gut to ankle and back again by way of knee and pelvis and teeth. My tongue burned—dry and yet sticky—inflamed and evil-tasting to itself—the tongue of us millions who sedulously obey the cigarette advertising. (And just possibly the throat of some of us, too, I thought wincingly.) Idiot infantilism, scalding oral eros, obsession, compulsion, tobacco! I smoked on defiantly, wretchedly. The jiffy coffee lay in my stomach like a solid and the heat of it ran from my pores.
I stared at my body—the wens and scars and indurations and red blots—the warts and excrescences and moles—the minor tumors that are our common response to age and attrition—the crinkling paper of my skin—the sun-tan that reflected from a mirror like youth itself but that, at chin-length, lost its satin and was seen to be marched and counter-marched with freckles and a rash of prickly heat. I surveyed the expanded, slack viscera beneath an irreducible fat that slid when I turned, like a hot-water bottle under my flabby epidermis. I noticed the cord inside my bent elbow, standing out like an old man's now, and poorly covered with a crêpy mantle that lacked elasticity—the time-shrunk backs of my hands—my toes, warped out of alignment, marked and marred with the miles and with the leather boxes we wear—their nails, turned in, split, chitinous—small, magenta lace of erupted capillaries—shine and scale on my shins—myself: waxwork—worn battlefield—warrant of decay, incipient cadaver.
I did not need to see my face.
Fatigue dwelt in me always, now. Oh—(barring such incidents in a single one of these tired cells as neoplasm, of course)—I would have exhibited my inordinate energy, my vitality, my apparent arrestation of age for another ten years or twenty or thirty—I might have been an agile old man, supple and good at games (with suitable allowance for the years) whose eyes never clouded, whose hair never fell, diving off tall dolphins to amuse my grandchildren and dancinggracefully with Ricky to the applause of other septagenarians and the infinite boredom of teen-agers. But I was old already—scribbled with the nasty information of years, apprised of slinking hurts, debilities, transient toxicities and nauseas that would increase and increase and increase—or would have done so except for that one, rambunctious cell.
Who wants to be old?
What man, in his so-called prime, fails to note his coming scenery—the bandaged varicosities, the braces, the cut bunions, the scarification and bloodless horn, the smells and tastes of himself, the thickening spectacles, the hearing aids, the pills and petit prostheses, the gouty overpall, the migraine and vertigo, rheum, sour burp, dyspnoeia, heart-kick, cracking, and the myriad painful impediments of urination, defecation, respiration, transpiration, the organic wheeze, the gradual invasion of death?
He wants to be old who accepts it.
But we, the people of the United States of America, have rejected it in toto: there must be some way to keep grandpa a gamin and mom nubile; meantime, let us pretend there is a way.
Millions for senescence and not one cent for sense.
So, okay, I said, it is happening to me with the short and sweet just around the corner and a good thing too, perhaps.
Or a bad thing.
A thing, I realized, of no import.
Nowis a sufficient tomorrow for all my yesterdays—if I will see to the circumstance in person.
This summary was a current that carried away the incubus of that early morning and left me sound asleep on the divan.
When I woke up I saw by my watch—which slid on its gold band when I moved my thin, saturate wrist—that it had passed nine o'clock. I budged and yawned and swam upinto the room. I felt better—the other side of age having somewhat returned during the nap.
Paul still lay on his back, mouthing and snoring and sweating.
Room service brought cold orange juice and good, hot coffee with a civilized cup to drink from.
I needed assistance—which is to say, Paul needed it. A friend. An attorney. I could hardly spend the whole day with him unless there was no alternative. Yet certainly he should not be alone with his callow impetuosity. And certainly his young colleagues would be too inept for a proper handling of all the potential dilemmas. He needed a Danaos—he had always needed one, a wise older slave to manage his love affairs—a shrewd promoter. Lacking such a companion he had invested the meaningless savings of youth's passion in one whore. Profligate, comical, and a disaster.
I considered Johann Brink.
Women, he would say, do not exist in the laboratory.
When you switch on the cyclotron, you switch off She.
It was too damned bad theyhadn'ttaken women along in there with the atoms—flame inspiratrice, man's soul. They might have discovered more concerning the nature of the velocity of light and the behavior of particles and even the essence of packing fractions than they'd learned by the castrate inspection of their micros and macros and milles.
Which other set of barbarian priests was it who emasculated themselves before accepting Holy Orders?
I couldn't remember.
Brink the mental giant and pigmy person would be as much help here as a handful of ice cubes against a forest fire.
I dialed Dave Berne.
His man Veto answered.
"This is Phil Wylie."
"Just a minute."
"Hello, you toothless cobra! What the hell are you doing in town? Waiting for the women to faint?"
"Some of us," I said, "don't have to wait."
He roared. "No kidding! What gives? God, isn't it hot? If I had a human head, I could shrink it right here on my terrace—and it's only nine-twenty,A.M.!"
"Dave, I got trouble."
I told him about Paul.
"I have a ten-thirty conference with some movie moguls," he said when I finished, "so I'll be right over."
He was there in less than a half hour.
David Abraham Lincoln Berne is the most interesting man I know—a statement which covers quite a few interesting men.
A lawyer.
A lawyer, furthermore, whose principal employ is with the movie companies.
He was not always a lawyer....
Dave was born over a delicatessen, in Madison, Wisconsin, of serious minded, musically gifted, orthodox Jewish parents in the winter of 1906, the fourth child of eight, and no culls in the lot. As soon—he says—as he could pound with his porringer, they gave him a violin. But—again, according to him—he swiftly saw that he was going to be only a semiprodigy, so he turned to other fields. He did well in school. One of his playmates, a Milwaukee realtor nowadays, who liked Dave in spite of his personal limitations, long ago told me about that—and succinctly: "Some of those bastard Jews are born with a high school education!"
Dave finished at fifteen—and took an extra year to grow in, working nights at the delicatessen and reading, for entertainment, philosophy.
He has a remarkable memory. He might not be able to recall his laundry mark when he was in Virginia. But no one who knows him well would bet even on that.
A compact guy who—because he is loose-jointed—seems anything but solid. Indeed, his flexibility is such that he could probably learn a yogin's basic postures in one sitting.
Everybody liked him in Madison.
This was not true in Virginia.
He majored in psychology and went out for football. He'd played on his high school team. The backfield coach was impressed equally by the length of his accurate passes and the fact that he mastered the signals in one night's concentrated study. Letter-perfect and reflex-fast. But a pair of racially pure Nordic behemoths from Minnesota, sent proudly to the team by scouting old grads, decided that, although they had nothing personal against the yid, no yid would call their signals. In Dave's first game they managed to break both his legs.
Dave got the idea. He let his uniform hang there, the next year—when he'd got off crutches.
He made the newspaper—but not the fraternity he'd set his heart on.
He madesumma cum laude.
He went next to Pennsylvania—tutoring, tending furnaces, minding babies, mowing lawns, as usual—and took both an M.A. and a Ph.D. in psychology. He got a job teaching it to pre-med students in Iowa. His thesis on "Formulations of Subjective Sexuality in Man" almost landed him the thing he wanted—a psycho-sociological research position with a big foundation. They wrote him, however, that they felt certain group attitudes (outrageous, but there they are!) would prejudice his fact-gathering efforts.
A Gentile took over the project.
Several of America's brilliant young men in psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis are former students of Dave.
A Dr. Wiswell was put over him in Iowa.
That was when he began to read law.
He took the New York Bar exams in 1935 and went to work for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer that year.
During the war, he was commissioned a captain in the Medical Corps and sent (by a General Muller, a Regular Army doctor who thought Hitler a great man and psychiatry bunk) to Alaska, to study the effects upon mental stamina of cold, isolation, and monotony.
For the first time in his life, and after twenty months of Alaska, Dave pulled strings in his own behalf.
He was assisting the OSS—a major, then—in figuring out methods of hastening the deterioration of Nazi morale—when they came through the Bulge. Dave stayed at a forward subheadquarters to manage the tourniquet on his colonel's bomb-shattered leg.
Hurrying German troops took the colonel prisoner and shot Dave four times, on sight.
Some of Patton's men found him, still alive, in a cellar, three days later. Two of his toes had to be amputated because they'd frozen. He limps when he's weary—but he's still a handball champ.
The Nazis didn't take care of his colonel's tourniquet and the colonel died. Dave has a Purple Heart, plain—but nothing else to bespeak what, in a Gentile, might possibly have been regarded as courage beyond the line of duty.
He had, you will recall, reluctantly decided that there would always be a Dr. Wiswell over him, in the field of psychology. He had also come to the reluctant conclusion that a Jew without money in America was like an unarmed man in a city of quick-draw experts. So he had studied law.
Problems to which he put the lever of his mind usually yielded. The problem of money was one such. He is a completely honest man; he no longer saw any objection to applying his honesty, and talents, in places where money was abundant. He is worth, I should imagine, a quarter of a million, and he has only started.
Dave is the ugliest man I know—or, at least, know well.
A huge but thin hooked nose divides his face vertically. Hitler's trained anti-Semites needed only a look at that toshoot. His large, round ears are set almost at right angles to his head. He has a conspicuous Adam's apple which—in talk, or merely from emotion—rides up and down with the acceleration and quick braking of a humming bird before a hollyhock. His forehead bulges; his mouse-brown eyebrows look as if they had been sprayed on as a random afterthought. He is almost bald. His mouth takes a generous cut into his pale, gaunt cheeks and his chin retreats. Only his eyes contrast with a face they cannot redeem: they are an immortal blue—living proof of compassion, of reflection, and of mirth.
He is a bachelor.
He was in love, once, with a stately girl from Boston—a quiet, brainy brown-eyed girl who wore sensible shoes and braids but sometimes had the look of wanting to lie in the grass with a man, or even of being ready to pull a man down. I had hoped that Dave would be granted this one exception by the unwilling gods. He wasn't. She married an opera singer—and divorced him two years later—and went to live in Milan.
My Campfire Girl, Dave called her, after that.
He meant the part about Camps.
It was in Hollywood that I met Dave.
I was weaving down Sunset Boulevard one night, drunk, desultory, and alone. Very much alone. My first wife had taken my kid back East—and no blame for that. She was sick of the way it was.
I'd spent the afternoon at an address in Beverly Hills where you could do what you pleased.
I'd spent the evening at a gambling place up on the hillside, sprinkling my money around and my IOUs—with a bunch of other writers, directors, junior producers, and picture girls. You'd know their names if I told you and the hell with that.
Up on the hill above the canyon at the Casa Crap.
Up there among the carbolic mountains—the near knees—the far, white peaks with snow on their nasty heads. Down below, the spot where God sat on the seventh day, and—in the big, flat print of His behind—Los Angeles. Ninety square miles of costume jewelry, Technicolor starshine, neon and sodium and all other colored gases, signboards with fifty-foot women in ten-foot brassières and men smoking four-foot pipes, boulevards under the palms and cloverleaf intersections with the billion paired headlights streaming and swirling, bungalow courts and drugstores, pool halls and bingo parlors, buses and trolley cars, acacias and roses and pepper trees, open markets with fruit piled in metaphysical polyhedrons, and the fog rolling in on the thin, chilly, sting-sinus air of California.
You can keep it.
I'd spent all my money and cashed a few IOUs to impress the girls.
The girls.
I'd played Mr. Bones with the bright young writers who go out there for the girls—searching amongst the girls in skirts for the girl that's their soul—Medea, Medusa and Circe, Sappho and daughter Eve, Calliope, Clio, Erato, Euterpe, Melpomene, Polymnia, Terpsichore, Thalia, Urania—and Aglaia and Euphrosyne, too—and Lilith—searching for her on the wrong coast—all evening, a badminton of wisecracks, battledore and shuttlecock with the soulless prizes going to the heads that stayed clear the longest, the pocketbooks that were the deepest, the tallest gold lettering on office doors, and never a Muse or a Grace in the joint.
I hadn't been able to find my car in the sepulcher parking yard.
Too lost, ingrown, ashamed to ask the attendant.
Too penniless to hire a cab.
I walked down that Golconda Golgotha, stopping to puke, with my fists in my pockets holding to wet handkerchiefs.
It was on the Boulevard, with the rich night traffic, the skimmed scarlet scum of the studios and the magnates from Pasadena with their cold, oiled working-model blondes.
The bells rang.The iron hands came down.Stop civilization. Go civilization.Red lights green lights cracking my drunken brain.The acrid flavor of tomorrow in my mouth.Alarm.Headsplitting daylight.How about this?She sees him get out of the ice wagon.She throws a snowball at him.Go sell it to the Eskimos, she says.I've got it!
She throws the snowball. That's good. So okay—her mitten sticks to it and soaks him square in the puss and instead of spitting out the mitten—which he gets in his teeth—he makes like it's a mustache!
Hell! He's a football player, isn't he—not just an ice-man? Going to be a big-shot brain specialist someday, isn't he? Quick thinker. So okay. So he leaps and spears the mitten and the snowball like it's a long forward and he runs at her and tackles her and spills her—not real hard—but hard—and there's how they meet, the both of them lying down in the snow with her on her back and the guy on top. Is that good—or is it terrific?
And there, so help me Christ, after eleven days, and twenty-three thousand dollars, is how they do meet.
Wrong coast for Aglaia, I say? I'm sure I did.
That morning's taste.
The rest of them. The contract. The months.
The arms and the lights and the bells became lost in the prospect and I stepped from the curb and brakes trilled.
"Want a lift? You need one, pal."
That was Dave.
At my apartment, I made some coffee and later we went back together to the address in Beverly Hills—because he didn't know it, and he was a lonely guy, too.
In fact he still is.
The most brokenhearted guy in the world.
You see
nobody told him about the six-pointed star on the box he was shipped in—he had to find out for himself.
And he wants to be sure, when he checks out, that he kept it bright while he had the use of it.
Dave came in.
"By God," he said, "Wylie! The old, articulate cryptogram in person, nude as a saint's stool!" It might have been a bracing autumn forenoon: "I'm glad to see you! I was saying to a friend only the other night—a jerk named Staunton—Staunton, the town's not the same—Wylie's not here. The old termite has moved to the country—turned himself out to pasture! And Florida in the winter! The son-of-a-bitch is chasing the analema! Where's the patient?"
I pointed.
Dave took a look and came back.
"Shall we wake him up? I can take him to the office and get some of my minions looking for his wench. Private dicks, too. They won't find her. They couldn't find a luminous memorandum in a two-drawer filing cabinet. But it might wear him down a little."
"Let him sleep, for now."
Dave sat down. "This is swell! Send for a barrel of iced tea, will you—with a clear gin on the side? I had a hard night last night. A bunch of the super-big-shots came in on the Super-Chief and the Super-Century last night. Things in Hollywood are so bad that two of them stayed sober the whole damned evening."
I phoned Room Service. "There's a depraved guest of mine up here who wants some neat gin and a lot of iced tea—"
Dave had picked up one of my ashtrays and was looking at it intently. When I hung up he said, "Depraved? Depraved, you say? Me? Don't I detect not just one, but two colors of lipstick here?"
"Callers from the other rooms," I answered. "Came in to consult the oracle."
"Depraved," he repeated. "That's the trouble with you Gentiles. Two rules for everything. 'If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out.' But—'Let not thy left hand know what thy right doeth.' Something of that sort. So you reconcile the pair by going around plucking out other people's right eyes; and not letting your open hand know the other is gouging. Consulting the oracle! What a phrasemaker!"
I told him about Gwen and Yvonne.
He pretended to be still more deeply outraged. "There you are! A perfect Wylie situation. God, what an imposter! Not one lovely girl—but two—are sent on silver salvers. You entertain them. You get all the social opprobrium and none of the benefits. What confidence can youth have in you, after a trick like that? Here you are—the last hope for phallic worship in a dying world. The man with the one message that makes sense. Either the boys get their breeches back—and do things to make the dames respect 'em—or Nature will throw us out of the party. You proclaim it with your foghorn and you play it on your xylophone. But when it gets right down to the bedrocking—what do you do? You personally, Mr. Prophet? Welsh! Walk out on the act!"
"Times are changing," I told him. "Phallic worship? Can you build good rituals around our businessmen? A healthy restoration of phallic worship would ruin the profitable activities of every vested institution in the land, from its banks to its churches. People wouldn't even care if the trains ran on time, any more. Think of that!"
Dave was leering at me pensively. "By God. It might be the thing to revive Hollywood."
"Yeah," I said. "You open with a prologue that showsmodern psychology has found the roots of love in our love lives. Then you fade to the American Home, where a Husband is trying to figure out how to arouse or enchant or even slightly interest one Beautiful Blonde Mother. She is rushing about the house swatting her children for bringing home a magazine full of art studies. Her husband tries to slip his arm around her—but she knows he is suffering from neurotic hay fever, makes his living by manufacturing second-rate household appliances which he sells owing to better advertising, is afraid of his stockholders, never had the earning capacity of Joe Benson or Harvey Tekker or Don Oaker, and is scared of her, besides. Great subject for phallic worship! We fade to a contented pagan maiden in the South Sea Isles—ukeleles and moonlight—"
"And the MPPA comes in and tosses out the film! It's a conspiracy!" he said in a Durantean tone.
"You guys have worked out the vein—that's all. There can't be any more very interesting movies till there's a new public attitude about life. You've got to where there's no permissible area that you haven't canvassed a hundred times. The new pictures are all remakes. People get sick of such things. Jam yesterday, today and tomorrow is as bad as none today. All the movies are self-plagiarisms. I even went to one with Ricky this summer."
"We're grateful."
"Remember theThree Little Pigs—and the song about the 'Big Bad Wolf' that people sang to kid themselves in the Depression?"
"I remember."
"So all right. We went to see this movie—and we also saw a remake of the Little Pigs. Same story. Same art. Same theme song. At the finale, the new inspiration is this: the wolf pops down the chimney of the little pig in the brick house—hind end first. And the pig fills a caldron with turpentine. The wolf lands in same—and the picture irises down on the wolf roaring away, his hind legs held high, histurpentined anus dragging, his forelegs pulling—like any dog. Now—I was brought up to believe that you can't tell the same joke twice. And I was also taught that putting turps on animals' rears was sadistic. I still think it is. And I think it's too vulgar a way to try for a laugh—cruelty to animals aside. That, my boy, is truly obscene—the dying effort of a perishing industry. Fortunately—television is coming in—and it will be far more vulgar. Television will really speed up the fertile necessity of a great change in this disgraceful Western world. Right?"
"Right," said Dave. "I saw that short. I psychologically snapped mypetits fours." He looked at me for a while. "Phil—why'd you call me over here, this morning?"
Karl came with the gin and tea. I signed. He went.
Dave's question startled me. I suddenly saw it from his angle. I'd allowed him to skip—or postpone—an important conference because (I'd said) my nephew was on an emotional binge and I needed aid. Dave would know that, all else being equal and normal, I could handle my nephew. He'd know that, barring some editorial crisis, the cutting of a serial wasn't so important I couldn't set it aside for a day or so to row a relative through the waters of a soul-struggle. He'd know, by my cursory attention to Paul—and by the way my talk had slatted around—that I had more on my mind than Paul's problem. So he had realized—and I had not—that I'd decided to call in a friend—for myself.
"I need a good lawyer," I said.
"Oh—oh!"
I looked at him cross-eyed. "What an evil mind you have! I keep my accounts and the tax people are not particularly interested in me. No brunette has letters of mine and is asking for a thousand bucks. Nobody is suing me for plagiarism. I just noticed a little nuisance in the back of my throat the other day and went over to see Tom and had a biopsy—and I want my affairs in order."
I shouldn't have done it that way. He turned sheet-white.
"There isn't any report on the biopsy yet," I said. "Won't be till Monday. Makes quite a long weekend. But I have a hunch—"
"You God-damned dour Scotchmen! Maybe it's nothing."
"Tom thinks it's something."
He looked out the window for a long time—with his shoulders folded forward and the sun beating on his face, reflecting into it from the cement top of the parapet and bouncing at it from the tile terrace between. That ugly, fond mug.
"I suppose," he finally said, "when they have taken everything else and everybody else they come around for you in person."
"I never really expected to get even this old. When I was a kid, I was sure I'd never see thirty. As I recall, I didn't want to. Seemed a stale age."
Dave grinned feebly. "Ricky?"
I shook my head.
"She well now?"
"We think so."
"Get her down here, man!"
I shook it again. "Give her the two more days. And it just might—might—and then—"
"You didn't take a drink?"
Again.
"By God! What a reform!"
"I'm trying to get that serial done—"
"—strictly on Presbyterianism."
I thought that over. "Maybe. They'll need the dough. And it's a favorite old anodyne of mine—rolling up the sleeves."
Dave poured out a second glass of iced tea and gulped it. He nodded his head toward my bedroom. "When hewakes up, tell him to come down to my office. Tell him we're working for him. We'll do what we can think of. I'll keep him stooging around—and sober, if possible—and see you later."
"Going?"
He came across the room and put an arm around my shoulder. "You said you wanted to work. I'll be back."
"Okay."
2
I remember, one day on the way to California, when the Chief stopped at Needles. It was summertime and the thermometer on the station wall in the shade said 125 degrees. I was standing around, dizzy, when I saw a guy pacing up and down the platform as if he enjoyed it. I ventured out in the sunshine to see if he'd lost his mind and he turned around—a dark-skinned character. Royalty, it proved later, from Hyderabad. He liked it.
My apartment, that morning, was something like the Needles station on the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe. No baking sand, red-hot rocks, or mountains pitching on the miraged distance, of course. Needles was dry, too, and Manhattan was close to saturate.
I worked along—not minding much.
But after all, even Negroes sunburn—even Papuans get lazy.
Around one o'clock I began to feel—not hungry but empty—and I went in to check on Paul. He was still snoring and sweating.
Four and a half grains of sodium amytal, by itself, wouldn't have knocked him that flat that long. He'd have wakened in six or seven hours, I thought—feeling fuzzy and feeble and maybe a little sick. He still seemed good for more time, to me. It showed just how much sleep he'd left out in the past weeks, past months—worrying about that girl and worrying about making weapons with his beloved mathematics. It was possible, of course, that he'd explode awake any moment—look at his watch—throw an outside loop—and get going like a jet plane.
I wrote him a note saying I was downstairs in the Knight's Bar and that I had a new search in progress. That would bring him.
I got dressed. The gabardine was like wet newsprint.
This time, air conditioning was a relief. I sucked in a lungful and Jay came up.
"Want to sit with Mrs. Prentiss?"
"Sure."
Exactly two days before, she had leaned over the same table, an immaculate grooming operation—hurt, snooty, aloof, reading her disguised book. A Cinderella. Avid and anxious—haughty and pretty hateful—beautiful and not much good. I could say what was different about her now but it would be difficult to convey the true impression of that. Her hair, for one thing. It was just neatly combed—just casual, gold-blonde hair whose owner hadn't taken pains for once, with every single filament. Her dress. Another plain, costly print—but the body inside it was relaxed and not subconsciously trying to avoid creases. It didn't seem to fit quite as perfectly, and yet it suited her better: it made—would make—anybody, any man, look at the girl inside and the clothes after—not the other way around. The Musak was giving out with "Dardanella" and her foot was keeping time under the table.
"Hello, Yvonne."
She glanced up—from the morning paper.
"'Lo, Phil."
"Want company?"
"Love it." She moved over a little. I came around the table and sat down.
"You look right sweet this morning. Noon. Whatever it is."
She folded up the paper.
I ordered some cold salmon and potato salad and iced coffee.
She studied me—gravely for the most part. Once, she showed a dimple. But her voice was placid. "You could be annoyed at me."
"What for?"
"Don't be obvious!"
"Last night? Annoyed? I was tired. In a talky mood. It was my guest's own idea to come down. I said sure—and after she'd been there awhile—I changed my mind."
"That's what Gwen thought." She ate a little of her fruit salad. Maybe her hand shook. Certainly not much. She drew a straight, easy breath. "I imagined I could learn something from her."
"Did you?"
She looked at me with frank, gray eyes. She smiled into herself. "You know I did."
"What?"
"Isn't it strange how much we attach to trifles—love and sex trifles? Set up a whole lifetime for happiness—but fix it so that one little act for a handful of minutes will ruin the whole thing."
"That."
She flicked her head to put back her hair. "It's mad! To imagine such things are so important! To imagine whole lives and people and families can be ruined by anything—so little!"
I gave her the red schoolhouse riposte. "Knocking a person on the head is a little thing that hardly takes even one minute. But it's murder. Slipping a hundred G's out of the cash cage takes only a sec—but it's robbery—"
"And kissing you in a cab the other night," she answered, "took only a couple of blocks and I don't love you in the least. We touched. A moment or two. It was fun. We'll never do it again. Or, say—we do. Is that like murder and robbery? Should it ruin lives?"
"Not to my way of thinking. I don't feel wrecked."
"Neither do I," she said softly. "Neither do I! On the contrary! You have to find out that how you feel is terribly important—terribly. But what you do—unless you make it important—that's such a tiny thing!" She smiled. "When you think that just forty-eight hours ago—I was sitting here shuddering over Rol—"
"It occurred to me."
"It seems—" she sought for the proper words—"sort of—caddish. Unchivalrous. And hideously unsympathetic."
"Aren't you pushing yourself?"
"What do you mean?"
"You could have a reaction."
"I'm having one."
My lunch came.
"I mean," I said, "a reaction to this reaction."
She considered that and her curls moved. "I doubt it. I'm—cured."
"Cured one way. Maybe you're going to suffer in another."
She seemed frightened for a bare moment. "I don't know," she finally said. "How can I tell?"
"Wait and see."
"If I suffer, I suffer," she finally said. And her eyes weren't alarmed.
"Good for you!"
"May I ask a question?"
"Shoot."
I waited while she ate a little and formulated.
"Phil, what would you think of me now if I were your wife?"
It was quite a one. It was the second really tough one she'd put to me. "What would you ask God if He came in?" was the other.
"I hope," I said, "that I'd cherish you more than ever."
"But you might not?"
"I leave room for the possibility. I don't know, after all."
"Why would you cherish me?"
"For at last being honest with yourself about yourself."
"Easy answer. Why might you not?"
"I dunno. You might have found yourself—by that honesty—to be somebody who wouldn't like me. Ergo—how could I go on insisting—?"
"Only that?"
"Only that. It's a lot."
"You sure, Phil? Certain?"
"My-God-yes! A great, great many of the people I know, and am fond of, and admire, would look at your sin as just a sort of timid, dainty experiment. I suppose you're fishing around for rebuke. You'll never get much. Most women learn by doing—some men, by just thinking. What are you doing tonight, for instance?"
"I—I don't know yet." She flushed peach-pink. "I haven't—decided."
"Unh!"
"You sound like Rol. Like Rol—after— Before I left. Dainty—he talked like that."
"They bring us up—in a desert," I said. "Because that's where they grew up." I thought of Needles and the metallic sunlight and the Moslem prince. "Still—there are other things in life besides sex."
"Not if sex isn't right, there aren't. Not any other things worth living for."
"Back to Freud and the Western neurosis. Yvonne—I have to scram in a moment. Work. And a nephew. Maybe you'd care to meet him?"
"You'll forget to call me."
"Then you call me—later on."
"Probably I will."
I scraped up the last of the salmon and tipped the ice cubes in my coffee glass against my upper lip.
Yvonne reached over and took my left hand. She ran thebacks of her fingers slowly through it and shivered with a small ecstasy. "Phil! I'm all new!"
"You certainly let your hair down."
She leaned toward me. "I let down—!" She smiled and shook her head. "Am I so wicked?"
"Nope. If you tried, you might make it. Right now—"
I left her in that subdued, shiny-eyed jizzle.
3
The door slipped out of my somewhat moist palm when I opened it and was slammed not by the day's breeze, for there was no breeze, but by a draft that sucked through the Astolat Hotel—a current of air bearing the odors of food, carpets, paint, luggage, and the scents of rich women—a damp, thermal issue that would have incubated eggs.
Paul sat bolt upright in my bed.
He saw me, first. He stared at the room. He swung his feet to the floor.
"Gotta get going. Any news of her?"
"Take it easy, bo."
"What time is it?"
I told him.
"You've let me waste half the day?" His voice broke.
"Not waste it. Thought the rest would do you good. Bring you back to your senses a little. Seems not."
"God damn you—you should have waked me up. I feel horrible."
"Snap out of it! Try to remember what the poet says about rags, bones, hanks of hair—and a good cigar is a smoke." His eyes were so wild that I took pity on him. "Jump in the shower. I've got Dave Berne—an old pal of mine—working on your Marcia. He probably has detectives on the hunt this minute."
Paul heavily rubbed the stubble on his face. "Ithoughtyou'd take charge."
While he used my shower and my razor I had his clothes pressed and ordered some breakfast for him.
But he ate the food only because he had to wait for the valet. I couldn't remember having seen anybody in such a tizzy about a girl since the days of my youth—since my own tizzies. And tizzy wasn't the right word for Paul's condition. It was pretty nearly psychopathic.
He ate and ran from my rooms, after I'd made him promise to report back later in the day.
I got into the serial again and the sun moved across the blue-hot sky, driving from Manhattan everybody with the fare.
Ambulances were collecting prostration cases.
Cops were going around shutting off the fire hydrants which wilted citizens were opening with wrenches. Cops trying to save the water supply against fall drought, against fires, against winter snow that could be flushed into the sewers, and in behalf of the thirst, cookery, and cleanliness of the millions.
The heat wave had become big headlines in the papers.
Sometimes I looked out the window at the glaring roofs of the metropolis and tried archmeasures of cortical autohypnosis, imagining the sky gray, snow falling in hushed and steady spirals, shop windows green and red for Christmas, and Salvation Army Santa Clauses ringing handbells beside their tripods and kettles on the main intersections. It wasn't any good. My personal limits of trained tolerance had been exceeded by a great, tormented gob of atomic fire ninety-three million miles away and right here on my windowsill.
Still—I made fair progress.
The light was losing its intensity, though the air was no less fevered, when I got a call.
"Is this Phil Wylie?" It was a man's voice—bland, on the booster side.
"Yo." I was not very enthusiastic about being Phil Wylie.
"This is Socker Melton. Friend of your father. He told me to look you up, here—and I've tried a time or two before now. Glad to catch you in. May I come up?"
What do you do? I told him I was working hard—on a rush operation—but to come up anyhow.