DANGEROUS ENCOUNTER
Darwin Teilhet
(Original Title: The Big Runaround)

The tranquilizer Marcia took in the dispensary of the space lab where she worked seemed harmless enough. But it didn't calm her down; instead, it thrust her headlong into danger - prey to a network of ruthless spies. For one of the "harmless" capsules in the bottle Marcia used contained microfilmed secrets worth millions to unscrupulous agents. The only way for them to get that pill was to mark Marcia for murder!

PAPERBACK LIBRARY, Inc. New York

Copyright © 1964 by Darwin Teilhet

Chapter 1

1.
How I first met Laurel was as anyone, going on foot to work, might meet a girl driving a car in the same direction. I assumed it was a random encounter. A meeting by chance. What else could it have been? It was like this.
I had started working at SMC Electronics & Aerospace Laboratories at Stanford University's Industrial Park. Meanwhile, I camped at my house in Colfax Springs until either the real-estate people found a buyer or the bank foreclosed.
I planned to catch the 6:51 San Francisco-bound commute each morning, and twenty minutes later get off at the California Street station in South Palo Alto. In the evening I could take the 5:59 southbound train. After half a dozen stops along a branch line through foothills once covered with apricot orchards and now covered by the spreading tract houses, I would find myself back in Colfax Springs by 6:19 p.m.
In the morning I should have time for breakfast at one of the South Palo Alto restaurants. It left me, I figured, a good thirty-minute margin to walk the mile and a half up through the gaseous smog into Stanford's Industrial Park.
At first it worked out as I had planned it. On a Tuesday of the third or fourth week, though, I finished breakfast and walked as usual to the El Camino highway crossing, waiting for the green light. One of the big new wide-track Pontiacs lolloped up along at my left, rolling like a ship at sea as its obsolete drum brakes managed to stop it. A girl's voice called, "Going to the Park? I'll take you."
So I got in and it was very kind of her, thanks; and I noticed she was wearing a crisp white nurse's uniform under an expensive wraparound bamboo-colored cashmere coat. I had an instant's impression of very black hair and of a round face too flawless to be true.
The light changed. The long nylon legs and flat heels released the brakes and stepped on the gas to shoot us across the highway and into the landscaped entrance of the University's Industrial Park.
While the Pontiac creeped upwards, bumper-to-bumper in the line, as one of the eighty some thousand cars that the electronics and research industries up here swallowed every morning and vomited every evening, I told her to let me off anywhere she found it convenient, thanks. I was all the way up, the SMC Electronics & Aerospace Laboratories.
It was where she was going herself. She was on duty as company nurse in the Special Section R & D. I said I was upstairs in the same building, having started last month as a tech writer. Well, reallyl Wasn't that a coincidence! That was all there was to it that Tuesday morning.
Traffic delayed us. After she parked the Pontiac in one of at least 2000 numbered parking spaces for SMC employees, we both were in a hurry. I didn't have time to ask her name; she didn't ask mine. "See you-" she called and ran ahead of me toward the entrance gate.

2.
At main gate my plastic badge admitted me as one of about 2500 other SMC employees swarming in to work. The flagstone walk on past the wire fence was like any well-kept walk through public gardens on a smoggy morning. A sign at a forking announced: STRAIGHT ON, GENERAL ENGINEERING BLDG., TRANSISTORS PRODUCTION BLDG., SALES AND AEROSPACE BLDG. LEFT, SPECIAL SECTION RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT AND EXECUTIVE STAFF BLDG.----NO ADMITTANCE EXCEPT WITH EMPLOYEE BADGE.
Hundreds of men and women streamed on toward the other three interconnected structures of steel, cement and glass, lifting tier on tier up the slope. However, along with only a scattering of employees I turned left at the forking and continued another dozen yards to another forking. Three ways this time: LEFT TO MEN'S ENTRANCE, STRAIGHT ON, WOMEN'S ENTRANCE. RIGHT, ADMIN. & EXECUTIVE PERSONNEL ENTRANCE.
At men's entrance. I got in line and waited my turn. A security guard watched me write down my name, badge number and time of entry. The guard ran his finger through the list of R & D employees, asking if I wasn't new here? Well, yup, about two weeks only. A little late this morning, Jack? Yup. He located my name on his list; and raised up his head to look at me and said, "Oh, sure, I remember you now. You got the patch over your eye. You get it shot out in the war?"
I said no, somebody'd poked it out while I was looking through a keyhole. The guard said, no kidding? Go on, get moving. I knew the routine by now, didn't I? In there, first` And watch the squealer, Jack.
In there was MEN'S LOCKER ROOM OBSERVE ALL SECURITY REGULATIONS on an illuminated plastic transparency. As I passed through, something instantly went skree-skreeskreel The guard rose up on his feet. I tole you, Jack. You boys in Pubs Sec better remember to wear suspenders. The machine was set at high enough frequency not to squeak if anybody passed through with small change in his pocket. But br-r-rother, the machine's always set to pick up a guy's metal belt buckle as big as yours and squeal. O.K., gwannin.
At locker 302-A on the left side of a long hall I stopped, removing my hat, Burberry rainproof, worn coat, and. my six-year-old handmade shoes. Across a white tile porcelain floor to locker 302-B for the tennis shoes and the clean gray-green smock provided for everyone in the high-security section of the Research and Development building, including the secretaries, printers, photographers, artists, technical editors and writers, as well as the some two hundred engineers and scientists. Overhead the TV eyes in the ceiling watched every one of us in here while we hastily changed.
Then out by inside exit into the long front transverse corridor filled with hurrying men and women in their sexless gray-green smocks.
I stepped upon the escalator, for the second floor where I signed my name once more in the second-floor guard's book before entering publications section. This section was located in a cement-floored hall, slightly smaller than Stanford's basketball pavilion, containing space for about sixty typists clacking away on electric typewriters in the center area and rows of bullpens on either side for the writers and the artists.
Someone named Arty Caldwell in a front bullpen looked up from his desk and said, "Hi, Al," and down the way, two or three technical writers called out, "Morning, Al," or, "Back to the salt mine," that sort of thing, for by now I was beginning to know most of them. The machine-gun roar of the electric typewriters hit my ears and would continue to hit my ears until the big clock on the front wall pointed to 5 P.M., and another day done.
As I entered the bullpen where I had my typewriter, desk, and chair with a straight back and no armrests, George Whitsun laid the Western edition of this morning's New York Times on his desk, filled a meerschaum pipe carved to represent the nose cone of a space missile, and remarked, "The smog was much worse this morning, did you notice?"
I said I sure had noticed. That morning for possibly two minutes after I sat at my desk I thought about the girl in the Pontiac. She had given off a faint exciting fragrance of an expensive eau de cologne sold as Chatillet's Muguet. I had recognized the scent because Vicki also had used Muguet eau de cologne and perfume.
I broke off from thinking about the black-haired girl because right then my intercom called me up to Ned Kramisch's soundproofed corner office where Ned had a large TV intercom, and studio-size color photographs of himself and a woman no doubt his wife on the desk, nothing else, a clean-desk man. In his gray-green smock open to the collar of a striped brown and white shirt, Ned had the appearance of a large and intelligent toad as he looked up at me, his eyes like brown puddles through the large thick glasses, his cigar wagging up and down in his mouth.
He sat, sprawled, in an executive chair: one with plastic-covered side arms. Why the side arms on a chair should bother me, I didn't quite know, although it might have been because my background was from a newspaper where the minute hierarchical distinctions of rank and status had never before been thrown in my face by even the office furniture. Ned waved a hand and said, "Take a load off, Al."
So I sat on the narrow chair for visitors. During the next half hour Ned Kramisch picked up from where he'd let off last week and continued explaining the duties of a technical writer. I learned that SMC Electronics & Aerospace Laboratories was only a subsidiary of the Spray Machinery Corporation of San Jose, California. Ned reminded me I was only on interim security, as verified personally by Mr. Weymouth, and until G2 at Sixth Army Headquarters came through with my secret clearance I could not work on any of the big government jobs. He ended up by explaining:
"Even if you got your job through Harry Weymouth don't ever forget you're responsible to me. Don't misunderstand me, either-but one way Mr. Weymouth gets results around here is to keep our men on their toes. Hell often take on more men than we need. We keep the best and let the rest go. Your newspaper experience won't necessarily qualify you as a tech writer, either. This is a new profession, buddy. We writers help our scientists and engineers prepare thousand of words a month on customer reports, progress reports, proposals, bids, and technical papers. It's a helluva lot of doing, too. A scientist usually writes in a jargon even when he attempts to communicate to non-scientists, like some of the government people who have to read our reports. He goes oacographic-"
"He does?"
“Oh, yes. Believe you me, he does,” Ned said emphatically. "For example, SMC’ll invest as much as sixty thousand dollars on a big proposal, like the Skyjack propulsion system proposal, when we're making a bid to the NASA people in Washington. That means our task here in Pubs Sec is to write, edit and print a six-hundred-page book so clear and understandable that any congressman, the civilian brass, and even the generals who aren't so smart, don't forget-where was I?"
"Generals."
Maybe I said that the wrong way, for Ned gave me an unblinking stare for a long moment.
"I've seen your job resume" he said, kicking his chair back on its casters from his desk. "Your father's a B.G., I understand. He knows all about electronics?"
"Pop? He couldn't wire a doorbell. He's on the Adjutant General's staff."
"One trouble we have with old-line army officers-"
Ned glanced left at his desk TV intercom, which had buzzed. From where I sat the miniature screen, at a slant, went bright; it showed Paul Perugia's face as young-looking as I remembered Paul from fifteen years ago, with Paul's voice over the speaker asking if Ned was free.
"Immediately, Paul..."
The screen faded. Ned Kramisch rose up on heavy legs while he explained to me, "That was Dr. Perugia, our Director of Research and Development. Let's take this up later, buddy. You're new but don't be too discouraged. I'm still hoping I can tell Mr. Weymouth you're qualifying for the job."
So back to the bullpen, where I used a viewer to read through a two-hour microfilm about SMC systems engineering projects. While I might not qualify for this job as a $400-a-month Asst. Engineering Writer, which was how a beginning technical writer was listed, I told myself in the time I was up here everything I learned would help me qualify for the job at SMC that I hoped eventually to get my teeth into and never let go.
Later I lunched in the cafeteria with George Whitsun where we talked over old times at Stanford when we were students together. It was one of those big noisy cafeterias but George and I had managed to get a small table off to one side, near the windows; and by now, I'd discovered the food was good and also very cheap.
We had almost finished when a flock of secretaries or typists trooped around by our table toward exit. A little faded blondy of about nineteen or twenty paused, grinned at George, and asked in a high-pitched squeak of a voice, "Hi, how's the deputy sheriff these days?" Reaching out a long arm, George gave her a light whack on the rump and said good-naturedly, "Stop bugging me, Marcia; beat it, will you?"
After the blondy kid giggled at him and vanished through exit I asked George what all that was for? George got himself to his feet, a long thin guy, six four, and as much as 140 pounds, with a little fuzz of hair on his bald top like the feathers of an ostrich's topknot. As we headed through exit to the escalator, George explained that the little blondy worked for Sid Horrabin upstairs in Public Relations. To earn enough money to publish another book of his poems, George went on, he was moonlighting Saturday and Sunday nights as a night watchman at the Kaiser Cement Plant south of Colfax Springs.
After taking the job George learned he had to be sworn in as a deputy sheriff and somehow Sid Horrabin heard about it and next thing wanted to run a human interest story on George as a poet and part-time deputy sheriff. George had said the hell with it. He wouldn't have anything about him appear in SMC Spaceways, the mimeographed monthly for employees. Evidently everyone up in PR had looked upon it as a great joke with the exception of Sid Horrabin and maybe it was, George remarked on our way upstairs; even so, it still wasn't funny to him.
Upstairs again, George had to go into the Operations Research wing to see a couple of systems engineers on a technical paper. I read through more microfilms of nonsecurity proposals on the viewer; and, all in all, I had almost forgotten about that tall girl in the Pontiac with the same black Irish hair that Vicki had and Vicki's scent of Muguet.

3.
Next morning, off at California Street station, breakfast, and by foot up through the usual stink of smog fry the Park. Thursday, the same. Friday, though, again I was waiting for the green light. The Pontiac stopped. The round sweet face under the swirly black hair pushed out of the open car window on my side. "Jump in. Hurry!"
It was like that. It never once crossed my mind that it could be anything more than a second chance encounter. She told me her name, Laurel Turner, and I told her mine. That much we learned about each other that Friday morning before we reported to work.
A weekend slipped by. The phone company couldn't promise to reconnect my phone until the first of the month. In town I phoned a cleaning woman Vicki used to have and the cleaning woman would try to give me a day next Friday. I bought food at a new supermarket. I didn't get the grass cut. On Sunday a couple whom Vicki and I used to know drove in from Monterey with a case of Old Crow as a homecoming gift and their new DBV Aston-Martin to show me. All the happy days.
On Monday of the next week I was half looking for Laurel and afraid I'd missed her when, bingo, the Pontiac swarmed up behind me, beating the yellow light after I'd crossed El Camino. "Jump in ..."
Tuesday morning I was finishing breakfast at one of the new drive-ins, a place called Fran & Joe's, when in walked Laurel with that same pleased look as if every morning was a beautiful morning to her. Standing, I said, "I think you're following me."
Laurel asked, how did I guess? At breakfast she explained she shared an apartment with another girl in an apartment-motel across the street from Fran & Joe's. Usually Laurel had breakfast here every morning except Saturdays and Sundays when she slept late. I couldn't help wondering if she had a phone number. When she drove me up to the Park I risked asking. Not too crisply Laurel said, "I'm in the phone book-" and we both left it that way.
That same Tuesday morning up in my bullpen I was still thinking about Laurel when George Whitsun entered, looking more than ever like a tall scrawny ostrich in the tube trousers and with his gray-green smock belted in at the waist. After George wiped his glasses, I asked him if he'd ever met the tall black-haired nurse in dispensary, downstairs.
"Not Laurel Turner?"
I said, "Now and then she picks me up on the way to work."
George cleared his throat a couple of times. I noticed he was filling a big calabash pipe this morning, not the carved meerschaum. "Al-* he said, "the talk is, one of the brass set her up in an apartment. You wouldn't have a chance with her."
"Oh, Christ! Laurel lives at the Bluebell motel-apartments with another girl."
George lit his calabash pipe, saying nothing.
"Who told you that guff about Laurel?"
"I can't remember," George said, pretty stiffly, and he buried his head in the Western edition of The New York Times.
I didn't try to argue it with him because I knew how George was from way back. I could remember when he came out of Stanford and the San Francisco City Lights Bookstore issued his first and only published book, so far, of his poems. Probably George could remember more than I wanted anyone to remember about me. I was sorry I had asked him about Laurel.
Getting off the train the next morning I took myself straight to Fran & Joe's and who was there, holding us a table? Laurel said, "You're five minutes late, aren't you?" and if she was running around with one of the top brass at SMC, at least the way she smiled at me I could not believe she had narrowed the field exclusively to one.
I answered that the train hadn't arrived quite that late, had it? Next, Laurel wanted to know how much longer I was going to keep using a train to commute back and forth and walk the rest of the distance to work? I told her I didn't believe in autos anymore; I preferred trains and two legs. That made Laurel laugh as if she'd decided I was only one more of the oddballs up at the Park, with their heads in the sky, who needed his hand held when crossing a street.
When we got into her Pontiac I said, "If you won't let me share paying for the gas for the free rides, how about this? One of the best restaurants on the peninsula is on the mountain above the smog and Colfax Springs. If you're free, we might have dinner at the Frenchman's this evening?"
Laurel's eyes gave me a thoughtful glance but she didn't reply. I let it drop, deciding I'd pushed too hard for a casually met stranger. When we were inching along, bumper-to-bumper, in the stream of cars feeding into the Park, Laurel asked uncertainly, "You know, I don't even know if you're married?"
"I was."
"Divorced?"
"No, an automobile accident. We rolled over into a ditch and my wife died instantly."
"Oh, goodness! I shouldn't have asked."
It was two and a half years ago and by now I could talk about it, I told Laurel. She said, "I feel awful after asking when you were going to get a car instead of commuting to work. Honestly, I was only teasing. I thought you were probably broke or something. Most of those tech writers they take on are out of magazine and newspaper jobs-or they're TV and movie writers who can't find work anymore in Hollywood."
I’d been long out of a newspaper job, all right. But my great hopes of eventually editing a prestige industry-wide magazine for SMC Electronics were nothing I cared to explain about either to Laurel or anyone else for the present.
After fishtailing her wide-track Pontiac into its numbered parking space, Laurel said hastily, "Al-" and it was the first time she ever had spoken my first name. "I can't go with you this evening."
"Some other time, maybe?"
Hundreds of other workers were getting out of their cars and Laurel glanced around nervously, as though she disliked being seen with me. I was ready to drift off, when she said suddenly in a low voice, "You know how most people talk about nurses even if it's horribly unfair. If I did go out with you, some evening ..."
"No strings," I promised. "By ten tonight you’ll be back in your apartment. You won't even need to invite me in for a short drink."
"You just can't guess how some of those young engineers talk about girls at my place. Honestly! If some of them saw you and me dating, I'd hear the same old stupid remarks. I could probably go out with you tomorrow evening, if you wanted."
"Very much."
"Couldn't I meet you at the Colfax Springs railroad station, then, at about seven, tomorrow evening?"
There was nothing I'd like better. So we made it a firm date. Then Laurel's voice sounded slightly edgy as she said she'd go on first, if I didn't mind, ahead of me, because, my goodness, everyone was so gossipy at SMC.
I didn't mind. I watched Laurel scurry off through the yellowish morning smog to get in line at main gate and again I remembered George's remark, about somebody in top brass setting her up; and I thought if that sort of latrine talk was going around about the R & D nurse, perhaps it explained why Laurel tried to be so careful. All the same, it goes to show you, I couldn't help wondering what prevented her from having dinner with me tonight and if it would be tonight with somebody else. So hell, I thought, and went toward main gate, and what did I care?
I lived through that day. I had lunch with George and Arty Caldwell from upstairs and a photographer named Walt Abbot who used to be at the old Call-Bulletin and now, I found, was working in photo-lab, downstairs. Off and on I looked around for Laurel. I caught sight of that little blondy, Marcia, off at a far table, where she was busy chattering away with a couple of crew-cuts that looked like young engineering MA's, but I didn't see Laurel. For that matter, I couldn't remember ever seeing her in the cafeteria.
Then I lived on through the next day, Thursday, from eight to five, somehow; and couldn't wait until I saw Laurel.

Chapter 2

1.
Thursday evening, the food at the Frenchman's wasn't quite as good as I recalled it used to be when Vicki and I would knock off at the newspaper and run our rebuilt 1959 model 1220 cm3 Lotus to the top of the ridge for dinner.
However, after leaving the restaurant, Laurel said, "It was so sweet of you, Al, to ask me. I really got a kick out of that French food. Up in Idaho, where I come from, my town never had any real French-type restaurants at all."
"When did you move down here, to California?" I asked.
I had opened the car door for Laurel to slide into the Pontiac, but she paused, with a trickle of night wind swirling her black hair over an eye and a round cheek.
For an instant she gave me the impression of suddenly eying me distrustfully, as though she wasn't at all certain of why I had asked the question when it had been only one of those casual comments of no importance whatsoever.
"Oh-" Laurel said, "quite a while ago, now." Her hand brushed the fallen lock of hair from the eye and cheek as she asked, "Why don't you drive? Really, if you have a phobia about cars from your accident it's not so good for you, is it?"
I said thanks, no, I'd let her drive, and pointing north, I remarked that that view used to be a hell of a wonderful view from up here.
It was about nine-fifteen in the evening and a winter's moon hung round and pale. From up here on the ridge, two thousand feet above Santa Clara Valley, spread a view of the umbilical lines of light connecting sixty miles of solid megacity that stretched all the way from San Francisco to San Jose.
Some fourteen miles north of the ridge and west of the umbilical lines of lights that marked the main highways were gleams as of far-off glowworms. The distant gleams marked the sites of the electronics factories and research centers spreading over the scarred hills of a campus that Stanford's Trustees had opened up to the aerospace-electronics industries. If there was a hell, with all my heart I hoped that Stanford's leather-headed Board of Trustees would be consigned to a hell of enormous hyperbolicparabolid structures of steel, glass and concrete slabs covering ravaged hills, gouged out endlessly by roaring bull-dozers, for all of eternity.
In the moonlight, Laurel turned her face to me, giving a little shiver inside her knee-length coat. "It's really a pretty view, isn't it? But I'm sort of cold."
So with nothing to say to that, I handed her into her car, got in beside her, and discovered that Laurel was an alert and careful driver when trundling that huge unbalanced Pontiac hard-top down a mountain road. Approaching the Colfax Springs highway, she asked, "How do I get to your place? I’ll take you home."
It wasn't necessary for her to bother. I offered to ride back with Laurel to her motel in South Palo Alto and then pick up a cab. Laurel said that was silly. There wasn't any reason why she couldn't drop me at my place. Where did I live?
It was pretty silly, at that, and not worth arguing about. So I asked Laurel to turn south on Santa Ana, past the town and hospital, and then left on the third side street from where Los Flores tract began.
The third side street down was Linden. Here a smearing of smog lay thicker to haze moon and stars. I wasn't altogether Certain I could locate my house as one among almost identical raneho-types spaced at intervals between unsold half acres of dead or dying apricot trees.
Laurel was amusing herself by asking if I couldn't tell my own house? I'd been away for nearly two years, I explained, and go slow along here, would she please? Through the rubbery-smelling smog of mist and darkness, finally I made out a streetlamp that cast a bleary radiance upon a blob of redwood tree in a front lawn-the redwood tree I had planted some three years ago, after buying the house. It was the only redwood tree on the street.
Laurel turned into the drive, stopping the Pontiac under the carport's roof. "Thanks, terribly, for inviting me this evening. I'd never been to the Frenchman's before."
"Well have to go again sometime."
"It'd be fun." Instead of saying good night and getting the hell out, next thing my own voice was asking, "Come on in for a minutes, for a quick drink? If it's not too late?".
It was unintentional. It was off the top of my head.
Before I could assure Laurel that I'd spoken off the top of my head, from habit, from when people used to drop in at my place for a drink, she took it altogether out of my hands.
"Well-all right. But only a minute, remember."

2.
Most front doors were left unlocked around Colfax Springs, as mine usually was. I had to kick mine open because rains had warped the doorframe while I'd been away. I showed Laurel into what the builder had advertised as a Together room, where she dropped her purse and the bamboo-colored cashmere on the lanai-couch.
Seeing her gloved inside that powder-blue sheath dress of heavy brocaded silk, its collar open at a long V of neckline, her arms curving up while she smoothed the black black hair, any man would feel his heart give a thump. "Al," she asked, "could I have bourbon, but not too much, please? Just half a jigger. You haven't ginger ale to go with it?"
Sorry. No ginger ale. She made a face. "Soda water, lots. Ice, too, please. And where would a girl go?"
At right angles from the long Together room was a second wing into which were rammed the utilities and a guest bedroom and bath. Along the narrow Pullman-size corridor I directed Laurel to the bedroom. In the combined kitchen-bar nook I made her a weak highball of bourbon, lots of soda water and little cylinders of ice produced by a humming wall refrigerator. While I was at it, I filled my glass as lightly as hers and nothing strong in it except good intentions.
Waiting for Laurel with the drinks in the living room end of the Together room, I could hear an intermittent night wind clawing at the roofs asbestos imitation shake singles. From outside a loose stake rattled in the high stake fence all around the patio and house. Suddenly I began seeing everything in here as if through Laurel's eyes. It had been a mistake, too late I realized, to let Laurel come in even for a short drink.
For the last five months the Colfax Springs real-estate firm I dealt with had failed to rent the house, which was one of the reasons I found myself out of funds in Mexico. The barbecue fireplace, possibly wide enough to barbecue one or two eggs, already showed cracks in the bricks where mortar had crumbled. Overhead the suspension box beams supporting the ceiling were sagging a little. One box beam had come half unglued where plywood strips had peeled.
I now noticed that the length of ceiling was badly stained from rain leaking through. Three years ago the house had been new. Now, wind and rain and neglect were killing it. The quick-dry paint on the walls had flaked, drapes hanging over the picture windows looked sleazy, the plastic floor was wrinkled, and everywhere was a grayish film of dust The room held the musty smell of a house closed and left empty for months.
I succeeded in lighting the fire in the fireplace. As an attempt to conceal some of the decay and failure in a house which once had briefly been cherished, I switched off the ceiling lights before Laurel could return.
I heard the muffled splash and rumble when Laurel flushed the john in the guest bathroom. The john needed fixing. The dripping water faucets needed fixing. Handing her her drink when Laurel entered, I said, "I made it weak."
Taking a sip, Laurel said, "Just right." Looking contentedly around, she dropped to the couch, one hand trying to pull the tight skirt over her knees as she tucked her legs under her. "Really, this is a wonderful house! Somebody could do so much for it, too. But I couldn't help peeking out of the bedroom window and you ought to have somebody cut all that grass in the patio."
I said I had planned to cut the grass over last weekend; but I hadn't. I sat on the other end of the couch, nursing my glass and looking at Laurel with the slash of black hair over one side of her forehead and her eyes smiling and her lips red in the creamy white skin.
She looked at me and wriggled a little, finishing her drink and sighing. She hadn't ever seen a couch this wide, she said; and I explained it was called a lanai-couch. It had come with the house. Most of the furniture in here was standard equipment when you bought a house in Los Flores: tables, chairs, beds and the whole works. It was one of those real-estate rackets tied in with a wholesale furniture store and not until moving in had Vicki and I learned that every other house in the tract was stocked with furniture identical to ours.
"A rocking chair! How cute!" Laurel pointed to a beat-up rocking chair at one side of the room and I looked at the chair as though I had never really seen it for years. I could remember how new and how quaint the rocking chair had been when Vicki and I moved in, with the real-estate man explaining it was a genuine simulated Kennedy rocking chair that would someday be an heirloom. I guessed that the tenants who had sublet the house the past couple of years must have been anti-Kennedy Democrats to have banged up a rocking chair like that
"And a fireplace, too," I heard Laurel exclaim. "I love watching a fire burning in a fireplace." I offered to bring her a refill when she held out her empty glass for me to put on the floor with mine. She shook her dark smooth head. No, thanks. She'd had enough. "I really ought to be going," she said a little later. "Only it's so comfy here. I do love a fire in a fireplace."
Laurel made herself even more comfortable. She bent her arms under the black half-length web of hair, supporting her head by clasping her hands under her neck on the couch's pillowed armrest. Kicking off the spiked shoes, her legs she doubled sideways on the couch where they pressed against my hip and thigh.
Along about then, with the nylon legs against me and Laurel in the soft shadows and only at hand's reach, I was surprised by a series of sensations I had not felt in a couple of years. I was asking myself if ever since meeting Laurel as far as she was concerned I had still been on the slow bus to Guaymas.
Half closed, Laurel's eyes were observing me from under the glossy lashes. Reclining on the wide couch she had that soft sleek look of a long and graceful cat, inviting someone to stroke her. As our eyes met I saw the short upper lip parting, showing small white teeth. A piece of damp wood scattered sparks at the fire screen. A night wind, I heard it, worried at more of the shingles like a big dog up there on the roof. The V opening at her neck parted, her breasts lifting, with a long breath. It could have been the remembered scent of Muguet perfume and the sight of the firelight rejecting in the black black hair to carry me backwards in time with the illusion of love and happiness, there, to be taken.
My hand dropped to one of her ankles. Instantly her left arm withdrew from under the black heap of hair around her neck and her hand pressed her skirt down between her legs as though the next second she expected me to attempt to run my own hand up her legs.
Then I heard the dog of wind worry more loudly at the shingles and a thin rain splattered suddenly on the curtained picture window, to break the spell holding me. I felt returned from the past and again seeing Laurel, Laurel Turner, and not an illusion of another girl, reclining on my couch.
After a silence I asked, "Laurel, how long've you been using that lily of the valley perfume?"
"Why"-my question surprised her-"for years. It's called 'Muguet.' Don't you like it?"
"I always have. Where do you buy it out here?"
"Oh, you mustn't try to buy me any. A girl doesn't need to use much of it and my last bottle's still nearly full. I'm glad you like it."
"Your hair I like, too. Has it always been that black?"
"What a question! I don't mind admitting I'm twenty-nine but I hope you don't think I'm going gray and tinting my hair?
"No," I said. "Only, my wife used to use that same Muguet perfume and eau de colonge. She had to send to the New York store importing it. She had your same black Irish hair. Sbe was almost as tall as you, too. You never met her?"
"No, never," Laurel answered flatly.
I looked down at my hand, still lightly grasping Laurel's ankle. Then I heard the wind and the rain at the roof and I had even more strongly the impression of this once-loved home, now slowly decaying for want of care and attention, Still trying to enclose me in its memories.
Lifting my hand, I got to my feet, glanced at my watch, and as casually as I could, said, "Ten after ten, Laurel, and I promised you'd get home early. Can I get you a small refill before you leave?"
I heard her sudden sharp intake of breath as she sat up straight and stared at me with an expression of great fury coming over her face and reddening the flawless features.

3.
Laurel exclaimed, "Don't be such a conceited fool! I'm not trying to get you to take me to bed if that's what you're so afraid of. I'm not in the least interested in you romantically. You're much too old. You must be forty at least, aren't you?"
That paid me back.
"Thirty-three, thank you. Will you let me get you a drink-"
"And, no, I don't care for another drink. I liked talking to you-you don't have to start laughing at me. I don't see anything to laugh about."
As a matter of fact, I didn't see any reason either for anyone to start laughing. I placed the empty highball glasses on the fireplace mantel and said I had also enjoyed talking to her.
"Why don't you sit down and try to be nice a few minutes before I have to drive back to Palo Alto?"
I removed a couple of cigarettes from the box on the end table. But again Laurel said no thank you. She didn't smoke cigarettes. They could give you cancer.
So I sat on the couch and goddamn it to hell, thought about all the months when I was in the hospital after the automobile accident. I threw both cigarettes into the fire.
"Isn't this better?" asked Laurel's voice exactly as a nurse might of someone needing his hand held or back rubbed. Perfectly sexless.
I got up impatiently, angry at myself, hearing Laurel ask what was wrong. And I didn't know what was wrong. It wasn't that Laurel vaguely resembled Vicki and used Vickie's perfume, I decided. It wasn't that It was Laurel herself. Again I glanced at her, catching that watchful look in her eyes and I unexpectedly found myself asking if she was in some sort of trouble or something.
"What a silly thing to ask. Of course not. But sometimes I get tired of being a nurse and working for hardly enough to keep myself and buy a few nice things. Anybody’d feel that way, except Mr. Weymouth."
"And what about Mr. Weymouth?" I asked, wondering if she knew Harry Weymouth had given me my job. I doubted it
"When SMC-San Jose lost their big contract to develop mechanized post office equipment and started feeling poor, they kicked out the men they had running SMC Electronics. They put in Mr. Weymouth as their vice-president and general manager. Mr. Weymouth has an option to buy stock-you know what that is?"
"Yes, I know what that is."
"Mr. Weymouth'll earn two or three million dollars while the rest of us still get stinking wages."
"Laurel, I'd say that Harry Weymouth's salary is about fifty thousand a year. To get that, I hear he works his head off, twelve to fourteen hours a day."
"Oh, honestly! You don't know anything. Don't I work my head off eight and a half, and nine hours, almost every day? Sometimes ten hours, because nurses are in short quantity right now. But all I get is overtime. I don't get stock options and bonuses, plus a huge salary like Weymouth does, do I?" Laurel said angrily. "Why should a few top people in the Industrial Park, like Weymouth, get to be millionaires in a few years-all out of government contracts? Taxpayers' money. Even Paul Perugia-Dr. Perugia-he only makes about twenty-five thousand a year, half of Weymouth's salary. Yet Paul's the real brains behind all the SMC Electronics and Aerospace research..."
I said, "Paul?"
"Dr. Perugia. But goodness! Everyone calls him ‘Paul.'"
I wanted a cigarette. I wanted to get up and I wanted a stiff bourbon over the rocks. Finally I said, "You sound like you read the financial pages. Laurel, you keep surprising me."
"Do I? Let me ask you something now. How do you like being a tech writer?"
I said I hadn't been long enough at SMC Electronics & Aerospace to decide. Laurel said, "You're getting a hundred a week, aren't you? Even I earn more than that. No wonder a beautiful house like this is falling apart. How can anybody live on so little a week? Look at that shabby suit you wear day after day. Wouldn't you like to do better?"
"Who wouldn't?"
"Al-a great deal better?"
The tenseness in Laurel's voice pulled my eyes away from file fire and again around upon her. Laurel said, "I'm serious, Al. Wouldn't you like to do a great deal better for yourself?" After I remained silent, Laurel said, "I'm seriously asking you."
"I like money as well as anyone else, Laurel-I’ll tell you that much without even knowing what you're talking about."
"Please hand me my purse. I'll show you."
I got Laurel's purse for her. She opened it, extracting a bundle of dollar bills held together by a rubber band. "Here-"
Either I was enough startled or unhinged to let her shove the money into my hand where I discovered the. top bill wasn't a dollar bill. It was a five-dollar bill.
"A thousand dollars," Laurel said. "All in used five-dollar bills. Count them. They're for you. Keep them."
"What for?"
"No-" Laurel refused to receive the money from me. "From now on, that's your thousand dollars," she explained all in a breath. "You're being paid a thousand dollars to listen to what I'm going to tell you and to forget what I tell you, if you don't want a chance at really big money. After listening to me, if you'll agree to help me I can promise you at least fifty-five thousand more dollars coming to you. How's that?”
"Jesus."
Laurel laughed. "I thought you'd be surprised. Now, listen. Here's all you have to do. At quitting time, tomorrow, you merely walk out of the R and D building with something I'll give you and it'll be ridiculously easy and perfectly safe. If you decide you don't want to try for a really stupendous chance to better yourself-all right. You still keep the thousand dollars I gave you to forget I was ever here. Isn't that fair?"
I stared down at her.
"Laurel ..." I said and couldn't go on with it.
Sitting beside her, I dropped the money on the end table and tried again with her.
"I'll accept your word you never met Vicki and you haven't tinted your hair a blue-black or used Vicki's kind of perfume to get me going for you-"
"Honestly! You're the most hateful man I ever met!"
"All right, sorry, I'm wrong. But what first interested me in you wasn't at all what drew me to Vicki. For one thing Vicki came out of Vassar at the top of her class. I don't say you lack brains. But, Goddamn it, Laurel, start using them, will you? Wake up. Don't you know all these electronics-aerospace research centers are on government secret programs? If you've been persuaded into a fast deal by someone, acting undercover for Russia, don't be crazy. You and anyone with you could get twenty years to life."
Laurel's face changed to a dead white in the firelight and then suffused to reddish purple. She astonished me all over again by flinging out an arm and giving me a round-house whack in the face with the palm of her hand. As soon as Laurel could control herself enough to speak she furiously announced her father'd been in the army for twenty-five years, as long or longer than my father had. Hers was a master sergeant. He'd received the D.S.C. for bravery |n World War II and two bars for heroism under fire in Korea. What kind of a girl did I take her for? She'd die before betraying her own country to those filthy Russians. Didn't I know anything? Didn't I know all the big American companies tried to snatch industrial secrets and plans from each other? Honest to goodness! It was done every flay and it wasn't really stealing or anything ever like that.
I must have still been on that slow bus to Guaymas, though. It wasn't until after Laurel quieted down and I listened to her explain what it was all about that I started wondering how Laurel knew my father was in the army. One thing I knew, I knew I hadn't ever told her.

Chapter 3

1.
After dabbing at her eyes with a small handkerchief, looking at herself in her compact mirror, exclaiming, "I look horrible!", smoothing her hair, repairing her mouth while I placed two more logs on the fire, waiting until I sat beside her, and taking a long breath, Laurel said:
"I'm sorry I blew up, but you never gave me a chance to explain. You've heard about the proposal bid for a fifty-million-dollar prime government contract SMC's sending in a week or so more to Washington?"
"What proposal bid?"
"The Skyjack project on a propulsion system for the big manned interplanetary missiles, like going to Mars."
I had a sensation of my hair standing on end and somehow I managed to say, "To Mars?"
"Don't look so startled at me-" Laurel gave a half laugh of exasperation. "The only way I know anything about the NASA Skyjack program is from the newspapers. Skyjack's the next step from the Saturn missiles. It uses modulated chemical propulsion only in the takeoff and landing stages. In space it goes on a-well-ionic propulsion system or something. SMC's already testing a prototype ion engine, too."
Evidently Laurel saw how once more she had astonished me.
"SMC's already developed an ion engine?"
"That isn't much of a secret anymore," Laurel said with a faintly contemptuous air. "It's in all of the technical journals. SMC'll include its engine specifications in the Skyjack proposal, too. So it's almost certain we'll get the NASA contract. Wouldn't you like to get even a little of the fifty million dollars? Just a teensy bit?"
Again I was aware of the dog of wind, rattling at the shingles and beating against the windows, while around me intruded the smells of wet plaster walls and a house lacking care and beginning to come apart. All I could say to Laurel was, "Drop it, kid. You're out of your depth. I'll see you home-"
When I stood up, Laurel reached for my hand to pull me back to the lanai-couch. "Think of the government pouring out billions! Just so a few people get rotten rich on contracts to shoot junk up into the sky! My heavens, why shouldn't we get a little of that money for once?"
"There isn't a chance-"
"Oh, there is!"
"Listen to me, Laurel. A proposal bid for a National Aeronautics and Space Administration contract’ll run up to hundreds of pages of diagrams, specs, estimates and whatnot. The bids are so secret that SMC even owns its own print-shop-"
Laurel didn't let me finish. "You know where the dispensary is? Opposite photo-lab?"
Yes, I knew. It was where Laurel was on duty as nurse.
"All right. At exactly four o'clock tomorrow, meet me in dispensary. Get there just before quitting time. That's when most of the employees are in a hurry to get home and never stop at dispensary for pills or first-aid treatment. Remember. Follow all security regulations. Say you're going to dispensary for aspirin or a tranqirilizer capsule. When you come in to the dispensary, tomorrow, I’ll give you something for a headache, so it'll be on the records-and something else."
"Something else?"
"Yes-to carry out of the R and D building."
"Don't even say such things. How do you know I won't hand you over to Security?"
Laurel smiled a small secret smile at me.
"You'd better not. Anyway, you won't."
"You don't know."
"Oh, be sensible. You like money as well as I do."
"Nobody can walk out of the R and D building with a microfilm copy of our Skyjack presentation, if that's what you're talking about."
"Oh, can't they?'
"You know they can't. Photo-lab makes only two micro-film copies. Ned Kramisch told me. One for our records. One for San Jose-"
"Oh, really?"
Laurel was silently laughing at me.
"Laurel, wake up. The copies are on six-millimeter films. Each frame's less than a quarter-inch square. A six-hundred-page presentation would run to what? Say, fourteen feet of microfilm. Wrapped on a big metal spool. Every one of us at quitting time passes through the security locker with TV eyes on us while we change our clothes. There's one security guard at the exit door who gives every man a pat-pocket search. Then I'd have to pass through an electronic squealer that would pick up any metal spools of microfilm I might happen, absentmindedly, to walk out with-"
"Honestly! It's all fixed so you can walk past the guard. Tomorrow afternoon, after you see how cleverly it's planned, if you don't want to go on with it-you don't need to."
It was going too fast. I wondered if that was how Laurel had planned it, to hit me quick tonight with the do or don't deal, on for tomorrow, before I might have time for studying it over or possibly deciding to talk to somebody.
I got up and stepped to the window and pulled the drapes a little apart and looked out into a wet blackness, my back turned to Laurel. I heard her exclaim impatiently, "If tomorrow you think it's too risky, after I show you how you'll walk out, so easy, then I don't want any part in it, either."
I looked around at her.
"Laurel, is that a promise?"
"Yes, honestly. At any point we can call it off. That's the agreement I made with-a third person."
That wasn't too much of a surprise. I couldn't see Laurel as the only SMC employee involved in a try at getting a copy of the immensely valuable NASA specifications out of the building.
"I can refuse, tomorrow, to go on?"
"Yes, of course," Laurel said from the couch. "So can I. It's your decision and mine after I get what's going to be handed to me and pass it on to you. If I refuse, I’ll still get to keep my-my thousand dollars, paid to me. You keep your money. It's only a payment down as evidence of good faith.*
Hearing Laurel say that, as though it was a recitation she had learned by heart, gave me an impression of someone plausible and clever hiding off in distant shadows and of smiling, like someone offering pieces of candy to small children. My dear, take it or leave it. If you like candy I know how to get all the candy in the world. But don't follow me unless you wish to, my dear. That sort of thing.

2.
I looked down on Laurel's flushed oval face, asking "Who talked you into this?"
"I can't tell you. Let's say I know somebody in photo-lab who managed to get a third microfilm copy of the Skyjack bid. That's all I can tell you. This person doesn't know -doesn't ever want to know-who I'm asking to be the receiver. That way-if I made a mistake and the fellow I picked to help did something deceitful, like going to Security, I'm the only one in trouble."
"You'd take the rap?"
Laurel shrugged. "I've as much right to get enough money to do some of the things I've wanted as anyone else, haven't I? Are you so perfect?"
I didn't answer.
She said, "If you informed on me, I'd only be fired."
"Cigarette?"
Laurel shook her head, again reminding me she didn't smoke. This time I lit one for myself and walked to the closed front door of the Together room and back to the fireplace while from outside in the night the wind was blowing harder.
I could think of a bank about to foreclose on this house. I could think of what could be done with some of that fifty-five-thousand dollars that Laurel previously had talked about and, as Laurel had implied, I wasn't so goddamned perfect. I wondered who must have told her about my own imperfect history.
I stared at her a long moment while Laurel composedly smiled back. Finally, I asked her, "Suppose I could walk out successfully tomorrow? You mean I'd get paid fifty-five thousand more, in addition to the thousand dollars?"
"Why don't you sit down? You make me nervous, pacing back and forth."
So I did as Laurel requested.
"Now please don't interrupt me," Laurel said. "Let a girl explain, will you?"
"Go ahead."
"You know how, after the stock market crash, all the electronics' growth stock dropped, like Varian's, Ampex, Hewlett-Packard-just all of them," Laurel said. "They dropped down badly. A lot of the smaller electronics and aerospace companies were hit even worse. Well, three of those smaller companies in the University's Industrial Park have had their scientists working like mad, too, on the Skyjack presentations. But SMC's got the edge because our engineers and physicists under Paul Perugia have actually developed an efficient prototype for this ionic propulsion thing that beats anything anyone else ever thought of.
"That's why," Laurel explained, "it's so absolutely safe. Just think! If any of the people in any one of those smaller electronics companies got hold of SMC's presentation, they'd know what we'd proposed and the exact amount of our bid. They could lower their own bid, too, and be next to certain of getting a contract to build the Skyjack's propulsion system. Isn't that right?"
If it wasn't right, it was nearly enough right for me to see that someone might have a good chance if not an excellent chance to earn a great deal of money.'
"There you are!" Laurel's eyes triumphantly looked at me. "After you quit work at SMC tomorrow evening, I'll meet you. You'll give me back what I gave you, is all. In return, I’ll give you the name of one of the smaller electronics companies. Right now, its stock has dropped to fifty cents a share. Last year, it was selling for ten dollars a share. Use your thousand dollars to buy stock. More stocks, if you've got any money at all of your own. Mortgage your house-"
"Laurel, it's mortgaged to the limit."
"Well, goodnessl Think of owning two thousand shares! In four or five more months, you watch. Imagine what getting a fifty-million-dollar government contract would do for any company's stock. You'd own shares easily worth fifty- five thousand dollars. Probably much more."
"Who's behind you, Laurel?"
"I told you-I can't tell you."
"It's a clever scheme, I'll admit that."
"It's brilliant." Laurel clenched her hands. "You don't know how carefully-this person worked out everything, either."
"Most of what you've been telling me, you had to memorize in advance, didn't you?"
One hand went to her throat. She held herself quite still. She said harshly, "Yes-I did! Doesn't that show you how terribly carefully everything's been planned?"
"There's one thing else."
"What?"
"Tell me. How did you-or whoever's behind you-decide to pick me?"

3.
"You wouldn't like having me tell you."
"Let me decide."
"All right," Laurel said. "Didn't you once take money from a San Francisco politician to write a favorable story about him for the same newspaper you worked for? Didn't the paper fire you?"
"Yes," I said.
"You were blacklisted, weren't you?"
"You seem to know."
"You want me to go on?"
"Yes."
"You couldn't get a job with any other newspaper. You married a Boston girl. You used her money to buy the Colfax Springs Dispatch. But you didn't do too well, did you? All you ever cared about was racing in those sports events. Then, one night when you were drunk and driving your wife on Santa Ana boulevard you ran off the road into a ditch and your car turned over. She was killed. You lost everything but this house ..."
I heard Laurel's voice trail away and stop.
Oh, Christ, oh, God, I thought.
Then Laurel said in a careful voice, "I told you you wouldn't like me telling you. You'd better let me make you a nice stiff drink."
"No."
“Actually, I was a nurse in Dr. Hodges' private hospital when Fritz"-Laurel corrected herself instantly-"when the ambulance brought you in that night. I was in the accident ward with Dr. Hodges. But all the other nurses knew about you, too. We were so terribly sorry."
'Were you?"
"Of course. How can you be so-so cynical?"
"I was sorry for myself too. That makes a quorum."
"Oh, for goodness' sake, don't be like that! When you first began work at SMC my heart stood still. You can't imagine how most of the fellows are. They say 'yes, sir,' and 'no, sir,' and do anything to stay secure and get a regular paycheck every two weeks-you know. Then I saw you. I knew anyone as reckless as you, always out to get everything for yourself, wouldn't stay very long at a sheep's run like SMC has. The very first morning I picked you up I recognized you, right away, even if you were wearing that black patch ... I mean ..."
Laurel's voice faltered.
She tried again. "I mean that patch over your eye makes you look-sort of distinguished. Piratical-looking-"
"Oh hell, Laurel."
“It does," Laurel said defiantly. "Honestly."
For perhaps half a minute I stared toward the fire with Laurel out of my sight, on my blind side; and I did not know what to say at all.
Finally I made a remark to the effect that I must have the hell of a reputation, sure enough, for her to be so confident and risk telling me how we both could grab off a big wad of money. Give a dog a bad name, I said, and see the son of a bitch hung. Was that what she meant?
Evidently it stung her, for Laurel cried at me, "Yes, I took a risk with you, Mr. Albin Durango. I had to. It's worth taking. You'll find I'm as brave as ever you once pretended to be, driving those noisy racing cars."
"Sports cars, Laurel."
"At least I’m not afraid of driving a car like you are, now."
"No, you're a good driver. I watched you driving down the mountain."
"Oh-really! Let's don't fight. This is a chance of a lifetime for us-Where are you going?"
If Laurel didn't mind, I was going to get myself a slug. Laurel said, "Then I'll have a small bourbon and soda, please."
All her wrath vanished. There was only the faint caressing tone in her voice of an essentially good girl who wasn't going to get loaded and now, please, be nice to me.
I still failed to make Laurel out. Either she was a natural actress or merely a tall good-looking girl too dumb to look both ways when crossing a street.
Back through the deep shadows of a house needing repairs, I carried the empty glasses into the combined bar-kitchen nook. Here I had to hunt for another bulb to replace the one, overhead, which had burned out in the last half hour.
I started making new drinks. I expect I was thinking of the thousand-dollar bundle that I had left on the table. I was still asking questions of myself. Like, why had Laurel risked it with me? Bad reputation or not, whatever I had, it seemed to me she was acting too fast. She hadn't waited long enough to walk around me, so to speak, to open up little by little and watch which way I would jump. And this other person: let's say, tie one behind her? Why wasn't this person willing to walk the steal past Security? Why me? Why me?
Then a door banged like a gunshot. Wind gushed in. I heard Laurel's scream.

4.
Side doors on the patio side had blown open, with a wetness of rain. The wind blazed the fire in the fireplace and twitched at the sleazy lengths of curtains covering the front picture windows. I saw Laurel grasping frantically at the front doorknob. She was pulling and failing to open the door, stuck in the warped frame. She turned, her eyes wide open in fright. She saw me. She pointed.
"Look, That dog-"
A big black dog had come in through the wide-open side door, along with gusts of rain and wind and a scattering of dry leaves along the plastic floor. It was no dog of wind, one to be imagined up on a leaky roof; but it was one to be felt, to be seen, and the dog had slunk on her belly, whimpering a little as if about ready to turn tail and run out again.
I said, "Mugsyl"
She wagged her wet stump of tail and ceased quivering. I started shutting the side doors, locking them against the wind, when Laurel cried, "That horrible black dog! Get it out of here!"
It was only Mugsy, I told Laurel. No one needed to be afraid. Mugsy was a big black Doberman bitch, very gentle and friendly. She belonged to one of the tract houses somewhere along a street above this street. Way back three years ago when not much more than a puppy, Mugsy used to come around to visit our house and Vicki always fed her. Last month when I returned from Mexico and started camping out in this house, who showed up again to welcome me? Mugsy, twice as big as I remembered and wagging her tail and mooching for a free feed.
I stroked her head and tickled her ears and ordered, "Mugsy, show off for the lady. Go on into the kitchen and dry off and I'll find you something to eat."
Laurel's eyes widened, for Mugsy did precisely that, trotting off into the kitchen.
Anyone who didn't know much about Dobermans, and how they promptly behave if a man gives one a hand signal to get the hell out toward the kitchen, might have believed Mugsy understood every word I said.
"See!” I told Laurel.
"Goodness! That dog coming in like that scared me to death."
"You scared Mugsy by screaming."
Laurel recovered enough to say indignantly she didn't think it was anything to laugh about. I hadn't meant to laugh, for I could understand how it might startle a girl or anyone else to have the wind come tumbling down from the black sky, doors banging, and then followed into the house by a huge black dog slinking in wetly to warm itself by the fire.
Laurel refused to be left alone while I returned to the bar-kitchen nook to make up the drinks. At the same time, she wouldn't return with me while that awful wet Doberman was in there.
She happened to look at her wristwatch. My heavens! It was nearly eleven-thirty, and much later than she thought. It was later than I thought, too.
So we took another three or four minutes of rapidly going over, step by step, about how I would meet her just before quitting time tomorrow afternoon. I ended by promising that at least I'd stay with it until I saw her in the dispensary and had a chance, myself, of sizing up the possibility of safely going past the point of no return.
Then I helped her on with the cashmere coat, repeating my offer to drive with her to Palo Alto where I could easily scare up a cab to get me back to Colfax Springs.
Laurel shook her head. No thanks. It'd be only a twenty-minute run into Palo Alto for her. I opened the front door. With wind blowing about our ears and tossing rain in at us from under the carport roof, I led her toward the shadowy outline of the Pontiac.
I stopped, raising my voice loud above the wind to ask once more, "Exactly why've you included me in, in this steal with you?"
Laurel burst out furiously, "It's not a steal. It isn't!"
"Why me?"
"I've told you already-"
"Not why you don't walk out yourself tomorrow. If it's so safe, why hunt someone else for help?"
Her body turned a little against mine as in the blackness she pressed in closer from the drifts of rain.
"A nurse just couldn't."
"Why not?"
"You haven't been with SMC long enough to understand."
"Explain, then."
"When they're readying a big presentation, everything's clamped tight by Security. That goes even for the executives over on the other side from the operational departments in the R and D building. If any of the executives, for example, go over to the operational side to discuss something with the scientists-they're checked in and out, like all the rest of us. SMC's got one of the tightest security systems of any of the electronics and aerospace laboratories in the whole industrial park."
"I still don't see why it'd be easier for me to walk out with baby than for you," I said.
"I'm trying to explain if you'll listen. As the nurse on the operational side of R and D, I'm called into any of the high-security labs if there's any sort of emergency. Consequently, as standard security routine, anytime I want to leave the R and D building not only do I have to go through the regular security checkout, but I have to pass a fluoroscope screen checkout, same as the high-security laboratory fellows, to make certain we're not carrying out anything inside our bodies," Laurel said disgustedly. "And if a person happened to be carrying a roll of microfilm on her, anywhere at all, after passing through a burst of X-rays from that awful fluoroscope screen any film would be fogged up and useless. Don't you understand?"
Yes, I finally understood that much. I hadn't realized that Laurel, as a nurse, had to stand up to one of the big fluoroscopes. I asked, "What about this man in photo-lab? Why doesn't he take out the job on his own?"
"Because if Security ever discovers an extra microfilm copy was run off, everyone in the photo-lab would be under a terrible questioning. This-this person has to keep under cover as much as possible."
"You trust him?"
Laurel's tall shadowy figure swayed away from me toward her car. I heard her open the car door. She slid herself into the Pontiac, slammed the door, and then peered out at me a long moment from the car window before starting the engine.
"Yes, I trust him," she said.
I heard the engine start up.
"Al?" Laurel said. "Don't forget: tomorrow, at four."
"I won't forget."
"And Al-there's something else I haven't mentioned."
"What's that?"
"Don't ever give me away. Don't ever! If you report me to Security you'll be hurt very badly. You wouldn't be killed-no. But some night when you'd be walking home, all by yourself, somebody'd jump out from a bush or a wall and stick a stick into your good eye, blinding you..."
There was a roar from the engine, the Pontiac's lights flared, and rapidly Laurel backed into Linden Street where she wheeled the Pontiac around and shot it west toward Santa Ana Boulevard with the tires whining on the wet macadam.
I must have remained where I was for two or three minutes, the wind blowing rain in my face. By and by I walked up the steps where again I had trouble opening the warped front door. I entered, locked the door, pulled the window blinds down tighter, and picked up the thousand dollars from the table, counting it, one thousand dollars in five-dollar bills, no mistake at all, exactly as Laurel said. Put it away, I thought. Don't look at it. I stuck the wad in the table drawer and whistled. Out bounded Mugsy from the kitchen-nook into this end of the Together room, wagging her stump of tail. She was as big as a seal, big as a moose, so she seemed, and as happy to see me as I was to see her. Mugsy, I knew, wouldn't shrilly threaten to put out anyone's eye, not Mugsy, no, never.
All that night it rained.
After going to bed I was restless. Once I got up to lock the bedroom windows, and the kitchen and patio doors. Finally I fell asleep. In the darkness of early morning, Mugsy's whining awakened me from a reoccurring nightmare of endless autos streaming by on a highway and of none of them stopping or of their drivers noticing a small sports car, upside down in a ditch.
I thought the Doberman was thirsty. No, Mugsy wanted out. So I unlocked the back door. Briefly Mugsy nuzzled my hand. Then she slipped out. Her great body, as black as the body of any seal, was immediately swallowed in a black downpouring of rain.

5.
Shower, shave, a tepid cup of instant coffee to hold me until breakfast in South Palo Alto.
Wearing a charcoal-brown gabardine which looked shiny from wear and an English rainproof Aquascutum coat that ought to last another year, I went into the Together room. I removed the bundle of five-dollar bills from the table drawer and paused. Today was Friday, when the cleaning woman was supposed to come. A thousand dollars was a fair-sized wad to leave around.
Returning to the bedroom, I opened my footlocker in the clothes closet. Under old clothes, some books and an old .45 automatic left over from Korea, I buried the bundle of money, locked the footlocker, and remembered to put its key in my watch pocket.
It was about a two-mile walk to the Colfax Springs station, west on Linden and north on Santa Ana past Dr. Hodges' private hospital and clinic. I just made the 6:51 a.m. Getting off in rain at South Palo Alto I headed directly to Fran & Joe's drive-in. No Laurel waiting this morning. I waited for her.
There was the morning rush of people crowding in for quick breakfasts before going on up to the Park. The hands-of the big clock above the counter moved to 7:15, 7:20, 7:33. My margin of time to walk to the top of the Park and check in by 8 a.m. was being cut down. Where was she?
Yesterday evening Laurel hadn't said she'd meet me at breakfast, but I assumed she'd be here at Fran & Joe's as usual. I had a fifth cup of steaming black, The way I felt, the eggs looked revolting. I was thinking of this afternoon at 4 p.m., coming up, faster and faster; and I was feeling lousy. I knew I had to get hold of Laurel in a hurry this morning so we could talk by ourselves before reporting in to the R & D building.
Over at my right I saw a phone booth. The Palo Alto phone directory listed a Laurel Turner with a Davenport 6-4124 number.
A sleepy voice at the other end of the line mumbled, "Yes?" and I asked was Miss Laurel Turner there, please? No, Laurel had left early for work this morning. Was there a message? Who was calling? Was this Paul?
There must have been only a fraction of a second before I answered. But to me it seemed that everything stopped, that time blinked out, while again I was remembering how George Whitsun had tried to persuade me that Laurel was set up by one of the top brass.
And in that same fraction of time, all over again in my mind Laurel's passionate voice sounded, assuring me that Paul Perugia was the real brains at SMC. Deliberately I put my mouth to one side of the receiver in order to blur my voice, and I answered, yes, this was Paul. At the other end of the wire the girl's voice at first mumbled unintelligibly as if only now she had awakened, or her mouth was still half full of toothpaste, and then more alertly she replied:
"Oh-hello, Dr. Perugia, Paul, yes, I'll tell Laurel you phoned. This is Wilma, her roommate. Remember me? I don't think Laurel expected you to phone this morning but I’ll surely tell her you did. O.K.?"
I said it wasn’t important, and hung up.

Chapter 4

1.
"Good morning," George Whitsun said from his desk, putting down the Times and filling his pipe, a long, curved Dutch pipe this morning with a windmill painted on the poipelain bowl in greens and blues.
"Some pipe."
"Isn't it?" He lit it. "Did you see the printed notices on our desks? We're requested to work Saturday, tomorrow. How do you like that?"
The printed notice signed by Ned Kramisch stated that everyone in Pub Sec would be required to report to work tomorrow, Saturday, to help edit and foliate a rush go-through on an important proposal requiring the fullest cooperation of the editorial and typing staffs.
At the time, I didn't give much attention to Kramisch's notice because I was still thinking about Laurel and the telephone call I'd made to her apartment this morning. The disturbing thought now came to me that someone, plausible and clever, as I imagined, in the shadows, acting behind Laurel, might have deliberately pointed Laurel at Paul-not to pull Paul into a big steal, but to smear him as a cover if at any time anything went wrong with the scheme.
"George," I said. "You told me you'd heard Laurel Turner was set up by someone in the top brass. As a favor, who is it?"
"You still worrying about our beautiful nurse?"
*What's wrong with her?"
"Oh hell, everyone in SMC knows Perugia's laying her.”
That morning I tried to concentrate on reading Technical Communication Problems, but repeatedly in my mind I would see Laurel from yesterday evening, intent and excited; and I could hear her assuring me how easy it would be to make fifty-five thousand dollars and more merely by walking out with something she was going to give me at quitting time today.
About ten, Ned Kramisch came in and dropped a sheaf of typewritten pages on my desk and said, "Here's a speech Dr. Felzoni's giving tomorrow morning on our big jump TV deal. Cut it down to ten minutes, will you?"
Then he and George left for a meeting with some systems engineers and I attempted to put the problem of Laurel out of my mind while I dug through forty-two typed pages,
I looked in on Arty Caldwell in his bullpen, asking him what was SCM's big jump TV deal for tomorrow morning, Oh, that? It was a demonstration cooked up by Public Relations, a live TV interview with an SMC mathematician, and transmitted up on the roof of our R and D building.
Back again to my bullpen where I worked on the speech until noon. There were pages and pages of specifications that passed over my head and made me feel useless for this job. However, there were three pages devoted to a detailed prediction that men could be safely landed on Mars and returned to earth by 1975, through combined chemical and ion propulsion systems.
Those three pages stirred me. I felt a glow of excitement. I believe for the first time since working for SMC I saw as from a distance the great purpose that Harry Weymouth and Paul Perugia were attempting to achieve with their scientists; and it was like a stroke of lightning illuminating the black night of my own ignorance.
In effect, they hoped to build a ladder up to the stars, right here where I was working. I was still thinking about such great hopes and great prospects after going down to the cafeteria for lunch. George Whitsun was still with his engineers. The mixed-up way I felt, that noon, I preferred to eat by myself. So I dodged off from the long table where Walt Abbot and Arty Caldwell and some of the others I knew were eating.
After seating myself at a small unoccupied table near a ceiling-high window streaked by rain, I tried to drink the milk, finished the soup, and let the salad go. I knew Laurel wouldn't be in the cafeteria; at any rate I had never seen her eat in here. I had never much thought of it before, but it occurred to me that Laurel evidently planned it that way, not to mingle around with the other employees during the coffee breaks and the lunch hour.
I ate very little; I wasn't hungry. I wondered angrily to myself how long Laurel had been engaged in a design to thieve away what might be the great chance that men of outstanding ability and vision, all working here at SMC under Paul and Harry, might someday have of saying they participated in the honor and glory of building a ladder up into the far reaches of the expanding universe. When 4 p.m. came around, I told myself, I could sit tight, I could stay pat; and all the time in my heart I had been committed to follow through long before Laurel Turner even picked me up that morning that now seemed so long ago.
I had got out another cigarette. I was reaching in my pocket for a match when a small hand shot into my vision, plucked the cigarette from between my fingers, and a greedy little voice said, "Hi, can I have yours, please? I'm all out."
I swung around on my chair.
At my left I saw that little faded blondy kid from Public Relations, Marcia, leaning across from her table and waiting for me to light my cigarette that she had stuck between her own pink lips. I lit the cigarette, blowing out the match. Marcia's crescent eyes promptly rounded into fringed circles of astonishment.
"An old-timey kitchen match? You use them?"
"The greatest cigarette lighters invented," I told her.
She grinned across at me, her smock open and draped in folds like a linen duster, showing the fake pearl necklace around her neck, the yellow sweater and sandstone-colored skirt. She sat with one leg crossed over the other and an elbow on the table that was littered with the empty dishes of whoever else had been eating there with her. Her hair, the color of old cornstalks, she'd pulled straight back from a triangular face that was all forehead and pointed nose, like a little fox face, with a large knob of the cornstalk hair gathered at the base of her neck.
She blew out another puff of smoke, asking, "Where's the part-time deputy sheriff this noon?"
"Who?" I said. "Oh-George. He's eating with some engineers in Palo Alto, I expect. Why?"
"Nothing. Just making conversation. You are Albin Durango, aren’t you?"
I told her I'd always been told so.
"About four years ago you nearly bashed me up," Marcia said. "It was at La Honda where I watched you drive that little beat-up Lotus you used to race. You came in first, ahead of a Ferrari I'd bet ten sawbucks to win. My God, I could've murdered you.
"Seeing you win," she continued, "gave me such a feeling for you, I even drove to Monterey to watch what I guess must've been your last race at Laguna Seca."
"That was a long time ago."
"You didn't do so good at Laguna Seca either."
"No, my gear box went out."
"Yes, and I lost the two sawbucks I bet on you, too." Again she grinned at me.
"You're in Public Relations?" I said.
"That's right."
"Isn't that in the nonsecurity section, on the other side? I didn't know people on the nonsecurity side of the building ate here."
"They don't. But three or four days every week I'm stuck in a cubbyhole over in the Ops Research wing, researching stuff with a couple of our high-security engineers on spectrum conservation, as they think they're getting by an advanced pring system."
"And advanced-what?"
"The P-R-N-G. system." Marcia spelled it out. "Only we're sloppy and call it "pring,' you know? Where small pieces of your signal seem to go off in utter random sequence just like noise."
"I don't know at all."
I discovered Marcia had eyes of gray-green like some cats 'have, or foxes, when thoughtfully she regarded me. They were disturbing eyes, gazing upon me from a little blondy feather-head.
"Anyway"-she made an expressive gesture of ripping an invisible piece of paper and of tossing away the scraps to indicate she'd dismissed such a dull subject-"when I'm stuck on this side, the high-security side, I eat here. I have to go in and out of the security locker rooms and check-in points, same as everyone else. A great headache for us simple-minded slaves working here, if you ask me," she said and rolled her eyes.
They were Renoir eyes, I saw, and I wondered why I hadn't noticed sooner. They were oval, heavily fringed by very pale lashes, and had that voluptuous look about them as though painted in soft luminous shades of gray, green, blue and pale straw, upon a tanned and expressive face, small, sharp and mocking.
"Well? Are you through looking? You don't remember me, do you?" Again Marcia grinned disarmingly, the oval eyes changing into crescents. Helpfully, she explained, "My father used to own the big vineyard and orchard above Spanish Road. Remember now?"
I still definitely couldn't fix Marcia in memory. But the single winegrower I could think of, above Spanish Road, was old man Herrera. After the death of his wife, Herrera lived in a great ramshackle place up in the hills where he bootlegged grappa, distilled from his own grapes, until the law stopped him. That was when I still published the Dispatch. His son was the best auto mechanic in the county when sober. Of the half a dozen motherless Herrera girls running wild, the oldest two, as I recalled, regularly used to get their names in the city papers for operating expensive calls houses in both Los Angeles and Hollywood.
The Herreras were a family of Basques, small and wiry, the third or fourth generation of them living above Spanish Road; and I decided this little blondy kid must be among the younger if not the youngest of the tribe. So I told her yes, I used to know her father.
Then Marcia said, "Well, I couldn't stick it in L.A., so here I am, home again. Imagine, punching a clock every morning. I've seen you getting off the train in the evenings at Colfax Springs. Next time, how's for noticing me and buying me a drink? How come you aren't driving a car anymore? After you smashed up your Lotus, when your wife was killed, did you lose your nerve?"
I stood up and said, "Yes," and Marcia said, "Oh, tough" as if she meant it, and I passed out of the cafeteria to go look and see if Laurel might possibly after all have remained in the dispensary during noon break. When I glanced over my shoulder the little blondy kid grinned like a clown as if all along she'd known I'd give her a second glance.

2.
The front corridor was empty except for one of the messenger girls streaking around me toward photo-lab on the noiseless rubber-wheeled skates. The lights in the dispensary plastic transparency were out. The door was closed shut. That was that.
On the wall between dispensary and women's exit thru women's locker room was mounted a large bulletin board. As I paused, half hoping Laurel might return, I noticed- along with announcements of a dance and a woman's song festival tacked on the board-two photostatic enlargements of newspaper clippings.
The item about the simulated American town of Winniza, U.S.S.R., for training Russian agents in the Ukraine, I'd read recently in a morning newspaper while commuting to South Palo Alto. The second clipping, I hadn't seen. Its headline, with Secret Capsule, sprang at me, freezing me there perhaps half a minute while I read the whole clipping.
It was a UPI dispatch from Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, dated last month. The gist of it was, an employee from a local security installation had collapsed the previous evening on a Ft. Lauderdale street. After being rushed in a police car to the hospital, the employee was immediately placed on the operating table for what was diagnosed as an acute intestinal obstruction. The surgeon removed an object tightly lodged in a fold of the patient's lower intestinal membrane. Apparently the object had fastened itself like a bur to the membrane by sharp granular filaments instead of passing on through to the anal channel.
A more complete examination of the object proved it was a nonsoluble plastic capsule, one inch long and three-quarters of an inch in diameter, less than the thickness and length from first to middle joint of a man's index finger. The capsule had been coated with a substance derived from acetylsalic acid-and that one I had to read twice.
I'd always assumed acetylsalic acid was the pain-killer stuff in ordinary aspirin tablets. So it was, I read further. But the derivative of the stuff, when exposed to the intestinal fluids, changed chemically. The capsule's surface roughed into extremely small crystelline particles sharp enough to dig into the intestinal membranes and fasten the capsule tightly to prevent it from being evacuated. FBI men had been called in by the hospital staff. When the capsule was opened, tightly wrapped inside was found a microphoto of USA missile guidance systems.
Two add-on paragraphs quoted from a CIA report from Washington: Such capsules were first developed in 1951 by Czechoslovakian chemists and supplied to Communist agents in the Near East areas for several years.
As secret containers of intelligence material the Czech capsule permitted an agent to be searched without risk of discovery. At the same time the agent had a period of approximately 24 hours to reach a friendly base where a minor operation disengaged the capsule. During the 24-hour period the granular extrusions fastened the capsule to the agent's intestinal membrane while permitting a limited passage of the body's waste accumulations.
However, the use of the Czech capsules had been discontinued in 1953 by the Russian OGM because the solution coating the capsule had been found unstable. It rapidly absorbed intestinal fluids after a 24-hour period, producing a complete intestinal blockage. Consequently, unless immediately operated upon, any agent whose body was host to one of the Czech capsules would become immobilized by convulsions, with death following rapidly. Neither the FBI nor the CIA had offered any comment to explain the reappearance of presumably a Czech-made capsule in the body of the Ft. Lauderdale security employee who'd died during the emergency operation.
Under the enlarged photostats of the news clipping someone had written: To protect your job and help SMC electronics, help America beat Russia to Mars. Always be Security Conscious!
That was the anticlimax. The payoff. I must have gawked.
Here I was in the Special Section R & D Building where day by day over technical writers' desks streamed reports on, for example, aqua-therm projects using pipeless pipes to pass one liquid through another; on magneto-hydrodynamic force-shields to control nuclear fission systems; antigravity studies; the feasibility of lunar tractors for carrying men and equipmerit over the unknown desserts and mountains of the moon; schemes to maintain, life cycles in space; and on this, on that.
All were fantastic. But my reason knew each suggestion or study, as proposed, was offered seriously. So if years ago a Czech chemist had devised a plastic capsule, coated with an aspirin solution to fasten the capsule inside a man's body, all right. I knew it was only an example of low-order research. It couldn't begin to rate with what SMC's researchers were planning for the world, come the middle of the 1970's when Mars would be only just around the corner.
My next thought was that that might well be Laurel's trick gimmick for the 4 p.m. walkout this afternoon. At the moment, if Laurel had stepped into the corridor I'd have promptly chickened. I'd have told her "nothing doing." From the side corridor of women's exit a woman in the women's gray-green security uniform looked out. "May I help you, sir?"
I said I'd felt a headache coming on, but evidently the nurse was still out for lunch. Yes, the nurse would be out until about one. I must be newly employed here? Yes, ma'am, I was. Oh, dear. You see, every Friday all the nurses from all the buildings meet a full hour for lunch and discussion in South A Production Building's big cafeteria. It was quite fair, too. Day-shift nurses reported half an hour early Friday mornings to get their full hour at the Friday noon break.
Just a second. The woman had a bottle of aspirin in her desk. Were two sufficient? She had plenty. Everyone always got sinus headaches when it rained. Yes, two were enough. Thank you very much, I said, feeling like a tricky dick. All the happy days.
After swallowing the aspirin with a cup of coke from a red dispensing machine, it was nearly 12:52. Again people were beginning to throng into the big corridor. While returning to the stairway there was that closed-in sensation from the three-color photomurals on the walls which, for a man with one eye, had a reality as from life.
From floor to ceiling spread a woman's open hand holding a transistor enlarged from one-fourth of an inch to about two feet in length. One of those glowing tublike furnaces, in which Production grew silicon crystals, toppled toward me. On further, a ten-foot-tall giantess in a gray-green smock peered into an enormous microscope while her pink fingers, as large as bananas, dialed a curve-tracer apparatus.
Upstairs again in the bullpen, I looked at my index finger joint. Any capsule that big I'd recognize instantly. It'd take some doing, I decided, even to swallow it down.
Another thing, I couldn't see Laurel as foolish enough to try to ram one down my throat when that security-conscious bulletin was posted just outside her own office. So for the next few hours I again immersed myself in a try at compressing the TV interview. I was way down deep on page 21 when Ned Kramisch entered, a cigar in one corner of his mouth; and, as I stood, I recognized the sum olive-faced man of my own age who come in with Ned.
"Al, I want you to meet Dr. Perugia, in charge of Research and Development. Paul-Al Durango, our new technical writer."
"Al, sit down," Paul said. "We aren't formal around here. Ned, Durango and I went through grade school together. We were at Stanford together. He was the best friend I had as a boy."
Ned looked at me and at Paul. "Nobody ever told me."
Paul said pleasantly, "I'm telling you now."
"Paul-" Ned removed the cigar from his mouth. "Mr. Weymouth put Al through Personnel on an interim security clearance while you were away."
"Don't worry about it."
"Nothing more you want from me, then?"
"No, nothing, thanks."
Ned glared pugnaciously at me and at Paul, thrust his cigar back in his mouth and, squat and thick, took himself out, leaving the two of us.
In his light voice Paul said, "How are you, anyway?"
"O.K., and you, Paul?"
"For the last month I've been in Washington, on conferences, but I kept in touch by long distance. Harry said he was bringing you in with us. I was all for it. I got back yesterday or I'd have seen you sooner. Commercial science is a rat race, and God knows we need capable writers who can work with our scientists."
Paul sat in George Whitsun's empty chair, taking a leather tobacco pouch from the pocket of his smock. I watched him fill one of those bulldog briar pipes, smaller, and not at all like the big carved meerschaum that George usually smoked.
Paul lit his pipe before asking, "Tell me, how is it shaping up for you here?"
It was useless to stall with him, I felt. I was still green, I said. Much of what was going on was still over my head.
"About your scientific background?' Paul asked. "I haven'thad time to run  through your job resume. How much science and math did you have at Stanford?"
"Not much-the required courses. I had one in elementary physics under Harry, when he was teaching at Stanford."
"You weren't in any course with me, as I remember."
"You've forgotten. We're the same age but you were a couple of years ahead of me at Stanford."
Paul sat there in a thoughtful silence, a small slim man of thirty-three, with hair of a dark wheat color in the usual crew-cut, and his olive and Italianate features, wry, withdrawn, were the same as I remembered them. He puffed at that bulldog pipe of his, sighting past me out the window; and if Paul was deciding how to tell me that I lacked the qualifications of a tech writer, I told myself I wouldn't go down without a struggle. I'd ask to stay on at SMC long enough to prove that my heavy editorial training more than made up for a lack of scientific training.
"We haven't seen so much of each other these last years, have we?"
"No," I said.
"After Harvard, I went first to Cambridge and then to Harwell on the fission experiments and stayed in England. All the years ..." Paul said absently. Again he glanced sideways at me. "The last year or so before Dad died, he was all alone at the house, with Mother dead and Sis back East at school. More than once he wrote me you used to have lunch with him in town to talk to him. It was when you were publishing the Dispatch."
I didn't have anything to say to that. Paul again fell silent. His angular olive-complexioned face suddenly appeared old and worn as he regarded me from eyes as thickly fringed as any girl's, as if he did not quite know how to break the bad news. Before he could speak, I said, "Paul, I'm new here. This is all new to me. I know I'm not doing so hot right now. You don't have to tell me. But I've worked on newspapers, up to rewrite man and editor. I've sold magazine articles. A newspaperman's trained to be adaptable enough to jump at any new idea or subject in a hurry, for him to write understandingly about it-"
To shut me off, Paul lifted his hand. His eyes smiled. They seemed to say, take it easy, I'm not firing you yet. Aloud he said, "Suppose you don't worry about how you're doing. Give it a try. It's about what we're all doing right now: giving it a hard try," Paul explained with the sudden grin of a man making a decision. "Its no great secret, Harry and I are having:a little trouble with our Board Chairman over in San Jose. But I believe we'll pull through. We're all hoping to see great things accomplished here. Stick around. Don't give up too soon-"
, He put out his small square hand, shaking mine. "Let's get together one of these evenings. I've got to see our Board Chairman in San Jose this evening. All tomorrow and Sunday, Harry and I'll be tied up on a big proposal we'll soon be taking back to Washington. But what about Monday-no, Tuesday? How's for Tuesday evening at l'Omelette?"
So we agreed to meet next Tuesday at l'Omelette, on the highway south of Stanford, where we used to meet sometimes with our girls after football games, a long time ago.
After Paul left, I wished too late I hadn't lacked the courage, or gall, whatever it was, to have thought of some way of asking him about Laurel. Next a degree of rationality steadied me as I reminded myself there was nothing whatever at this stage I could have asked him. What might I have said? Are you taking her out? Are you sleeping with her? Suppose she gets caught in a steal and uses you as a cover, tries to smear you, puts the blame on you, to conceal someone else?
It was all still conjecture, I knew, as well as being offensive enough for Paul to wonder angrily if I had gone off my rocker as a result of that automobile accident; and all I could do now, I thought, was to hold on, to see it through and try my best to keep Paul out of it.
The time was running short. I still had to complete condensing the TV speech. It was now well after two o'clock. I cut to the three pages that predicted man would reach Mars by 1975. By 3:47 I laid a ten-minute version of tomorrow's speech on Ned Kramisch's desk.
Ned humped over at the desk like a big toad, taking his time to read the speech while I began to sweat and the big wall clock's hands moved closer and closer to four o'clock. He read it aloud. He thought about it. Finally he surprised me by grunting, "Vu-ry good," and nodded, and said, yes, he'd give that to Sid Horrabin without making any changes.
So I was feeling even more of a son of a bitching dog when I lied and said I was going down to dispensary for aspirin or codeine to kill a headache. Immediately Ned told me to tell the nurse to give me one of her relaxer capsules instead of a pain-killer. He had headaches, Ned said, real bastards caused by the strain and tension of this business. Aspirin and codeine didn't work on his headaches.
Finally I got myself out of his office and to the rear corridor. By then I was in such a rush that I forgot to sign out. The guard at the upstairs desk called me back. I signed the book: Durango. 3:59 p.m. To dispensary. Purpose-to obtain relief sinus headache. Time of return-I left the last space blank. You didn't have to fill in that line until you returned; and, right then, I wasn't at all certain I'd ever return.

3.
The door tinkled twice, once when I opened it and again when I closed it. Laurel sprang up from her desk, her face, draining of all its color. She exclaimed in a furious whisper, "You're, late. I told you exactly four-"
"It's only three minutes after four," I said.
Laurel glanced at her wristwatch. "Mine says six after -" She shook it. "I forgot. Mine gains. Go into the examination room. Hurry."
She tugged me into a second and smaller room. This one was fitted with a porcelain sink, heat lamp, sun lamp, an adjustable hospital cot, shelves containing medical supplies and bottles like those of a druggist's supply room, and a door open to a lavatory which Laurel hastily closed.
"Lie down. Switch on the heat lamp-"
I said, not so fast. I wasn't taking off my pants and stretching myself on the cot for anyone to push a tube up my rear end. If that was the gimmick she had, no thanks. It would be one of the first hiding places Security would look for if I got caught in one of those surprise strip-and-search checks she'd been afraid of. Laurel said don't be so silly, while impatiently her black eyes scanned me.
"Lie down. First relax. You're too jumped up. Please do exactly as I say or we call it off."
Her back to me, Laurel had lifted a large green bottle from the second shelf, taking something out of it. She returned to where I sat on the hospital cot.
"Now-here's what. Those security guards can almost smell anyone who's all nerves. At quitting time, you've got to be absolutely relaxed. I'm giving you a Rennilin tranquilizer to swallow now. It'll begin soothing you in a few minutes. Ill give you a second you're to take as a double dose in another fifteen minutes. Here's a glass of water. Open your mouth-"
"Let me see it."
Removing it from her fingers, I turned the capsule around between my thumb and forefinger. It looked like an ordinary blue and white capsule of that kind I'd swallowed before. It was only about half as long and half as big around as my finger joint.
I got my breath back in my lungs; Laurel turned a derisory glance at me of knowing I'd wanted to be certain she hadn't handed me one of those horse-pill-size capsules that could kill you, as described on the bulletin board in the corridor.
Then Laurel gave a start. I sat straight up. From behind the closed door we both heard the buzz-buzz, like an angry bee, sounding from the intercom on her desk. With a finger to her lips, she warned me, threw open the door, and stepped inside.
I heard her voice falter, "Yes? Molly?" Then she said, "My goodness, why didn't you reorder your own supply? All right. Yes, all right!"
She flung herself back into the examination room, hastily pulling down a white pasteboard box from a supply shelf. In a furious whisper she explained one of the furnaces had blown in the Transistor Production Building. A woman had been burned. The nurse on duty, like a fool, was completely out of bandages.
Laurel opened the door, pausing to say she'd be back within ten minutes or quicker. Turn on the heat lamp. Stay in here. Don't move. Everything was still all right. Just relax. She closed the door on me. The outer door tinkled. Laurel had gone, leaving me with a Rennilin tranquilizer between my fingers and the assurance everything was still all right and to relax. Just try.
My watch said 4:08. Then, 4:09. I remembered a photomural on the corridor wall. The one showing one of the glowing tublike furnaces in which Transistor Productions grew silicon crystals. Out of the crystals they made semiconductors. 4:10. Where was that glass of water Laurel'd handed me? There it was. I reached my other hand. Everything was still-
I nearly dropped the glass of water. The outer door had tinkled and tinkled again.
"Laurel?"
My door opened.
"Oh, you again. Where's Laurel? I'm in a terrible hurry."
The high-pitched voice, I hadn't forgotten. Revolving my head, I saw who had walked in. The little faded nineteen-or twenty-year-old blondy, Marcia Herrera. I told Marcia that Laurel had gone out for a few minutes, I was taking a heat treatment for sinus, and what did she want?
"Oh damn, I've got the screamies this afternoon, and you'd have 'em too if you had a boss like Old Horror up in P.R., always wanting changes, changes-" Her crescent eyes opened wider. Her hand reached, as her hand had greedily reached this noontime. "Gimme-"
She popped the Rennilin into her mouth, drank from my glass of water, shut her eyes, took a long breath and said, "My God, how I needed that." With a grimace at me, she put down the glass. "Don't look so mad at baby. Here, I'll get you one, silly. I know where Laurel keeps the Rennilins."
Lifting on her toes, Marcia took down the green bottle, dipped her hand in, replaced the bottle, handed me another blue and white capsule, and even gave me the now half full glass of water. "There. Better?"
I swallowed.
Marcia whipped a little .22 automatic pistol from the patch pocket of her smock, aiming it at me. She pulled the trigger. I ducked as a cigarette popped out. She offered it to me.
"No? What makes you look so funny? You didn't think it was a real pistol?" She gave a little cackling jeer of a laugh. Biting the cigarette between her lips, she thrust the other end into the barrel, puffing smoke. "Cute? Christmas gift. Be good, now. Tell Laurel I saw you first. Watch that heat lamp. You're getting red as a beet-"
Dropping the black plastic pistol into her pocket, Marcia gave me that clown's grin. She swaggered out, shutting my door, and again the outer door tinkled twice. I got up and went to the sanitary sink and wiped off my face with a linen towel.
While I was at it, I wiped off my palms, too.
I sat down. I looked at my watch. 4':13. I got up again. I took down the green bottle from the second shelf. A white prescription paper, pasted on the bottle, said 1000 50 mg. Rennilin capsules, followed by the name of the supplier. So that was that. I replaced the bottle. I returned to the hospital cot. I turned off the heat lamp. My watch now said 4:14. Once more the outer door tinkled twice, my door burst open, and Laurel slammed in and told me, *I nearly couldn't get away-"
She got a second Rennilin from the bottle all in a panicky rush. She said to put this second capsule in my pocket and remember, take it in fifteen minutes, before going out through the Security exit; and then she said she'd go and get the other thing. That was what I'd been waiting for her to say. I followed after her. At the desk Laurel was fumbling in her hurry to open her purse. She stood with even more of a shiny film of moisture over her face.
"Quick. Slip this in your trouser pocket. Remember-I’ll be waiting in my car when your six-nineteen train gets you into Colfax Springs station. I’ll meet you for you to give the dollar back to me."
What Laurel had pressed into my hand was only a silver dollar!
"Don't stare at itl Hide it in your pocket," Laurel said in a frantic whisper.
"You don't mean-it's this?"
"Didn't I tell you, yesterday evening? Nobody’ll ever guess. Tight rolled inside the dollar's a tiny strip of ultra-microfilm only one millimeter widel Whole pages of printing have been pulled down as small as pinheads on the film."
My breath made a whistling sound.
"Look. You can't even see where the dollar's been joined back together again, can you? The squealer machine's set too high to pick up coins in a man's pocket. Now, don't forget -this evening at Colfax Springs. I’ll be waiting for you. Good luck!"
She pushed the door, giving that tinkle; and I was out here in the corridor. Again Laurel had surprised me-stunned me, I expect, leaving me confused. First, I located myself. photo-lab, I saw, was on the other side from me. At my left toward men's, the illuminated arrow of upstairs, pubs sec; and in the downstairs corridor, an ops research door, exit, then records, computor section, and at the south end of the corridor was a smaller door on which showed in large red letters:
EXECUTIVE & ADMINISTRATION.
NO ADMITTANCE FROM OPERATIONAL SECTIONS WITHOUT FULL CLEARANCE
To give myself a few seconds to think through the next steps, I went on past photo-lab to one of the red dispensing machines. Here, I helped myself to a free coke. By my watch the time was exactly 4:16 p.m. Less than a quarter of an hour before quitting time. I finished the coke. That tranquilizer stuff must have started easing me, too, for I felt perfectly contained and under full control.
First stop, printshop. Above the noise from the linotype machine I asked the watchdog secretary, behind the wooden railing, if I could see Walter Abbot on a personal matter. She was sorry. None of the printers in here was named Walter Abbot. As she spoke she glanced up at my badge number, writing it down. I said I'd stopped at the wrong department, sorry for troubling her.
On down the corridor, again at photo-lab's entrance desk I gave the secretary with the upswept hair Walter Abbot's name. After writing my badge number in her In and Out sheet, she spoke into an intercom: "Walt Abbot, Walt Abbot, you're wanted at the desk ..."
In a couple of minutes Walt came out from the shop, round-faced and pink-cheeked, at least ten years older than I was and appearing ten years younger. No, I hadn't interrupted him. The shop had about finished photo-graphing all the Skyjack diagrams and their changes and this was the slack part of the day. What was up?
There were two points in my mind and I asked Walt about film sizes, first. I told him I had been thinking of buying a German or Japanese minicamera and needed his advice. Was film tough to get in the ultra-small size? No, all you wanted of 8-mm and 16-mm film. How about smaller sizes though? The micro-size stuff?
Walt said a couple of German minicameras used 6-mm film. But he advised me to stick to 8-mm film if not larger. I told him I'd heard those pencil-sized cameras used 2-and even 1-millimeter films. Wait didn't know of any film that small being sold commercially. Here in photo-lab they'd experimented with the ultramicrofilm but results weren't so hot. He explained a couple of photogs were detailed to an R & D project to improve the process of taking microphotos on magnetic wire. They'd picked up from where the Germans left off after the Ampex process knocked out magnetic wire for video recordings; but he doubted if wire photos were anything yet for amateur use with a special electronic mini-camera, or ever would be.
I repeated that I hoped I hadn't pulled him away from a job? No, not at all, Walt told me. It was the slack part of the day. So I put the second question in my mind to him; and I tried to be casual about it. I asked if photo-lab had laid off any of their men recently? Walt shook his head. He knew there was talk of layoffs coming unless Skyjack struck pay dirt in Washington. But so far, no men had been laid off. A couple of men had quit in the last month. Fritz Gormerly had returned to X-ray therapy, where he could make more money. Ted Christenson had decided he could do better at Fairchild Semi-Conductor Corporation. But neither had been laid off.
Then Walt asked what about eats? Any evening. He and Milly had bought a house in Sunnyvale. I told Walt I'd like very much having dinner and we decided to make it sometime next week, and after again thanking him, I returned to the corridor with less than five minutes remaining before quitting time.
Women with smocks under their arms were lining up in front of women's for the checkout, and the one small chance I took was when I went past dispensary. The door was closed. Laurel was evidently still inside as I'd counted on her remaining until at least 4:30.
I stopped at records and at computor, asking for a Walter Abbot and getting my badge number down on two more In and Out books.
Once more in the corridor, at exactly one minute before quitting time, I stripped off my smock, folding it under an arm, and pressed the signal button at the far end. The door opened for me to enter the executive & administrative side of R & D. On this side, the floor was covered by a thick rug. Vases of fresh flowers perfumed the air. A white-haired woman was already closing her In and Out book on the watchdog desk. She asked, "Yes?" but very politely.
From my wallet I unfolded the undated note which Harry Weymouth had given me almost a month previously to use when necessary:

memo: From the desk of H.C. Weymouth, Vice-President to: A.H. Durango, Publications Section Dear Al-
Just received a letter from your father, General Durango. When you've time to spare, I'd like to see you. This note authorizes you to pass, at your convenience, into the Executive and Administrative side.
Harry Weymouth

I showed the memo to the woman, asking, "Could you please pass me through either to Mr. Weymouth or to Mrs. Cunningham, his confidential secretary? They'll both know who I am."

Chapter 5

1.
After producing a note from SMC Electronics' top man, it was like being switched over from the freight tracks to the express line. The white-haired matron called to one of the messenger girls who was about to leave. The messenger girl hung up her coat as though she enjoyed earning overtime.
"This gentleman to Mrs. Cunningham's office."
This way, sir."
Because of the rugs on the floor in this part of the building the messenger kid didn't have the roller skates; but the only thing slowing her speed below that of sound was me.
While being guided through a long hushed corridor I saw another enlarged photomural extending all along one wall, and enormous ceiling-high windows along the other. The windows gave a view of rain, wet grass, drenched canvas chairs, a tile swimming pool and cabanas, all contained within the employee relaxation area. Another door opened.
"Mrs. Cunningham, this gentleman to see you."
The messenger girl departed. I started to say who I was but Mrs. Cunningham stood up majestically from the first and only American T & T audio-typer I'd ever seen, into which she'd been dictating slowly as to an idiot child. She smiled, oh, yes, she remembered me from last month. One moment, please, Mr. Durango.
On Mrs. Cunningham's desk was an executive-model TV intercom; that, she didn't use, though. She picked up a hand phone with a muffler attachment into which she could speak without anyone in her office hearing her. She hung up. She said Mr. Weymouth would see me in another minute.
She reseated herself and from a memorandum resumed reading aloud and with great clarity into the audio-typer, which immediately flashed a green light, gave me the impression of listening, suddenly burst out with a few microseconds of furious clacking, and then again appeared to listen intently.
The door to my right opened. A large man of about fifty, with iron-gray hair in need of a haircut, and an old-shoe worn-looking face centered around a big nose above a long jaw, now entered, and quickly shut the door. He shot me a beetling look as if he didn't too much relish having me break in on him. He smiled faintly to take the edge off that first displeased glance, and asked not unkindly, "Al, what brings you in here?"
"You told me to get to you in a hurry if anything came up," I said to Harry Weymouth.
His eyebrows, black and heavy, raised, wrinkling his forehead. "You haven't run into trouble this soon?"
"It's run into me."
Harry thought in silence for a long moment.
"Look here-Yvor Hodges is in my office. He's a cousin of mine as well as contract surgeon on our employee medical plan so I can't throw him out very well without giving him time to see you. He was just now asking how you were. Say "hello' to him. Keep it short. Ill ease him out as quickly as possible and then we'll have a go at your trouble."
"All right."
"Let's keep our stories straight with Yvor. I told him only this: A couple of months ago you wrote me from Mexico, asking about job chances. I wired you I'd talk it over with Publications and let you know if an opening came up. About four weeks ago I wired you to fly here in a hurry."
I said "Fine," although Harry had left it unsaid about his wiring me money to buy the airplane ticket to get here.
Harry opened the door, leading me into an office so well proportioned it didn't appear uncommonly large until after I'd walked half the distance toward a vast rosewood desk. There were half a dozen green leather chairs grouped around the desk. A fire blazed cheerfully in the fireplace in the rear, and a wintry California light poured into the paneled office from a one-way picture window which opened some forty feet by twenty feet high all along the far side of the south wall.
From one of the green leather chairs near the fire, Dr. Yvor Hodges jumped up, a well-made Irishman in his fifties, sturdy as a bulldog, with thick reddish hair that I saw was going gray, his broad pug face wreathed in a smile.
He cried, "Albin, my boyf" in what amounted to a California-Boston accent, very flat, and only this side of being affected. All the while, too, his thin surgeon's hands vigorously pumped mine up and down. Yvor wanted to know why I hadn't looked him up and I answered I meant to, as soon as I got myself settled.
"Harry tells me you're working for him now."
"I didn't exactly say that, Yvor," said Harry calmly, still standing. "Al's working for SMC, as I and a great many others are."
Turning his red pug face to Harry and then back to me, Yvor laughed. "Well, by George, I've become a salesman with little time to be either physician or surgeon lately. I trot up and down the Industrial Park to discuss any and all complaints about our medical and hospital care plans for employees. Albin, tell me. How are you feeling these days? You're looking better since last time I saw you-when was that? Over two years, wasn't it?"
"At least."
"You were in Mexico all the time?"
"In Mexico City where I worked for a Mexican-American advertising agency until it folded. Then I took a hotel job in Guaymas, pushing out publicity on the guests to American newspapers and acting as night man at the desk."
"Splendid."
"It was, yes, until a German group bought control and canned the entire staff."
"I don't want to hurry this reunion, gentlemen," said Harry with a glance at his chronometer, "but it's growing late and I've a few other matters to look after once I've got Al off my shoulders."
"Harry, by George, don't always rush me," Yvor protested, jouncing up and down on his toes, moving his elbows, cheerful and bustling as ever. Next, he asked me how many physical checkups I'd had while in Mexico? I said none. Yvor said, "None?" and looked worried. He then asked, let's see, I'd left his hospital about two years ago, wasn't it? And I'd been there at least four months? No, closer to five. By George, hadn't he warned me I might possibly require additional surgical repair work after I'd had a year or so to build up my strength?
I disliked Yvor's implying, in front of the man hiring me, that I might not be in adequate physical condition. So I protested, I felt O.K. never better. Yvor promptly asked what that limp he'd noticed as I entered?
By now, Harry had taken Yvor by the elbow. He was easing Yvor step by step toward the door while Yvor questioned me. Before we came to the door, Yvor balked. He stopped and said, "Harry, devil take you, don't shove me," and then very seriously asked me to phone his office nurse at his hospital and ask her for the first two-hour appointment open next week, for a complete physical checkup and X-rays. Would I remember to do that? I said yes, I'd phone his nurse.
"See here, Yvor," said Harry, "let's don't hold your damn clinic in my office, O.K.?" And he grinned at Yvor to show no ill will was meant.
Yvor said, "Give me a minute, will you? I haven't seen Albin for two years," and then asked if my chess game had improved while I'd been in Mexico. I said I hadn't played chess since my last game with him in the hospital. Where was I living now? For the present I was camping out in my house in the Los Flores tract ... if he remembered? East of Santa Ana Boulevard on Linden. Yes, of course Yvor remembered.
If I failed to show up at his hospital, Yvor threatened to drop around at my place some evening with his chessboard. Clapping his. battered felt on his head, he waved a flap of hand at Harry, said, "Off on my rounds, gentlemen-" and went out the door.
Harry closed the door, said grimly, "That didn't take too many minutes, did it?" and walked across to his desk, stooped, and quickly spoke into the intercom. He asked Mrs. Cunningham to shut off all calls until he finished with Mr. Durango.
I glanced at my watch. 4:41. There hadn't been as many minutes lost with Yvor, after all, as I'd thought. I still had easily over an hour remaining in which to catch the 5:59 to Colfax Springs this evening where Laurel had said she'd meet me. Harry switched off the intercom and looked across at me. "All right. What brings you here?"

2.
"I'm here," I explained, "because it looks like someone’s trying to steal an extra copy of your Skyjack bid from the Research and Development Building."
"Impossible!"
Harry half came up to his feet, took a long breath, and dropped back into the chair. Then he said in a hard voice, "It might not be impossible at that-" and reached to switch on his intercom, telling me, "I want Paul Perugia to hear what you've got to say-"
He paused. He switched off the intercom. "Too late. Paul was going off early to San Jose. Well, let's have it."
"First-is there any chance of Paul quitting SMC in the near future?"
That brought me a blank stare from Harry:
"What the hell do you mean by such a question? Unless we succeed in getting additional business there's a good possibility of all of us quitting-by request from our Board Chairman. San Jose'll shut this plant down if we don't get out of the red."
I explained I'd heard talk around, latrine gossip was all. Harry shot me a black frowning look:
"I brought Paul into SMC Electronics and Aerospace research when we were still futtering around with unprofitable systems engineering crap-trying to sell a so-called problem-solving approach to any industry that'd buy. I've backed Paul to the hilt. Yes-we're having policy conflicts with the San Jose parent corporation. It's no secret. This evening, Paul's seeing our Board Chairman, hoping to obtain another commitment to keep us going a little longer. However, with Paul as our research director we've attracted some of the finest younger brains in the combined aerospace and electronics industries. Moreover, we've come up with an advanced propulsion system for the Skyjack program that can't be beat. I believe we'll win out. So does Paul. Does that answer you?"
"Could you reduce the five-hundred-page Skyjack proposal by photographic impressions on photomagnetic wire fine enough for a coil of the wire to measure less than, say, twenty or thirty inches?"
"No," Harry said.
Then not quite as quickly he said, "At least I don't think so. I wish Paul were here. He'd tell us. Don't forget," Harry added, "we include a cost estimate in our proposal and keep it to as few pages as possible. There's also the summary that reviews the entire program at the end of any detailed proposal."
"How many pages for only cost estimates and summary of the Skyjack bid, could you say?"
"Twenty. Perhaps less."
"Couldn't magnetic photo-wire reduce twenty pages into a small length of wire?"
"Yes. As I think of it, too, we've been researching thermoplastic material as a possible information-storage method. Thermoplastic comes out like catgut or violin strings. A six-inch length of it would easily hold all the impressions of more than twenty pages of print and diagrams."
I found I was on my feet as I asked, "Any competitor getting at your cost estimates and summary might cost you your bid at NASA?"
"God, yes."
I had a feeling of participating in an extremely dramatic moment for both Harry and myself as I stepped to the desk and in silence placed Laurel's silver dollar on the desk.
I asked if we could get the dollar either opened or cut in two without other people knowing? Harry picked up the dollar between his big fingers. He studied it. He dropped it, listening to its ring on the wood. Harry then considered me with an expression of enormous power and alertness:
"It's hollow?"
"The trouble is-I'm not certain."
"We'll damn well find out in a hurry."
Harry cleared through on the intercom to Mrs. Cunningham. He asked her please to get hold of whoever was night foreman in charge of maintenance. Have the foreman send her a cold-steel chisel and mallet in a hurry.
Immediately I heard Mrs. Cunningham's even voice answer "Yes, sir" through the intercom, no questioning in her voice, no suggestion of surprise; and Harry shot me another black-browed look, flipped off the intercom, and grunted that the only way to have complete and unquestioning efficiency from a confidential secretary was to pay her highly for it.
While we waited for a foreman to locate a cold-steel chisel and mallet and scurry up with them to Mrs. Cunningham's office, again Harry lifted the silver dollar from his desk.
He turned it around in his fingers and then said, "Assume there's a coil of photo-wire or "even a photo-plastic cord hidden inside that dollar. Who up in Publications Section gave the dollar to you?"
"Nobody."
"What d'you mean, 'nobody'?"
"When I started work here you asked me to go temporarily up to Pubs Section, presumably as a tech writer, actually as a company spy to act as your eyes and ears-"
"Now, wait a minute," Harry said in a suddenly solemn deep voice. "Wait a minute, fellow. Nobody asked you to do anything as a company spy. This organization doesn't hire company spies. I thought I explained that to you a month ago when we discussed what I wanted you to do for me up in Publications Section, as somebody I trusted."
"Harry, whatever you care to call it-"
"You'd better get straightened out, right. I repeat: we do not employ company spies. However, we have a problem at all times to prevent our know-how-our research developments-everything we're doing here from leaking to competitors. We do employ high-grade security men. And security women. We've as impregnable a security setup as both Paul and I can make. At the same time, I'm aware that most leaks in space and electronics developments usually come either from some research scientist who sells out, or while a proposal is being processed in a Publications Section for final submission.
"I wanted you up there," Harry said, "not as a company spy but simply to be on hand while our Skyjack proposal was being processed for Washington. As I told you a month ago, a trained newspaperman has almost an intuitive feeling anytime a hot spot develops. Isn't that true? And you've always had a go-to-hell way of getting along with most people and listening to what they say. Furthermore, once you were in Publications there'd always be a bare possibility, let's admit it, that someone might approach you because your reputation is ... well ..."
Harry boggled on saying it; I helped him:
"Because everyone who knew me at Stanford probably hasn't forgotten the old Call-Bulletin caught me taking a politician's bribe in an election fight?"
"I didn't say that, Al. I never implied that. However, to spur your interest I dangled an offer under your nose I knew you'd give your right arm to get. And next month if all goes well you'll have that job, too. You'll be managing-editor of our new promotional quarterly-journal for our shareholders and possible customers, vitally interested in aerospace and electronics developments."
"There's nothing I want more."
"If all goes well, as I promised, you'll have it."
"You don't know how much it will mean to me to get back into an editor's chair again. Harry, I'd give two right arms."
"I'm not forgetting. But I'm expecting you to cooperate with me at a'time like this. Now-what about this dollar? Don't try to crawfish with me, either. If you didn't get the dollar from someone upstairs in Publications, who gave it to you?"
I'd prepared myself for Harry's question:
"When I worked for the old Call-Bulletin I used to road-race in an old M.G. I needed money badly to rebuild its engine. There was a political fight on, in San Francisco. I took a five-hundred-dollar payoff an assemblyman gave me to write a favorable story on him and I placed it in the paper where I was night editor-"
"That's all old history to me. How does it relate to this situation?"
"I'm trying to tell you."
"Cut it short."
"After the Call-Bulletin fired me, I couldn't get another newspaper job. Fair enough. I earned it. But until I've more facts, I'm not blowing a whistle on someone who out of pure dumbness is mixed up in an attempted theft-"
"Oh, for God's sake!" Harry heaved up his full six feet and more. "Don't crawfish with me! Who is it? I've twenty-five hundred people Paul and I are fighting to keep employed-"
The intercom buzzed. Mrs. Cunningham's voice said that the equipment Mr. Weymouth asked for was here. Dropping into his chair, Harry slipped the dollar under his desk blotter and said, "Bring it in, please." She did, placing a package wrapped in burlap on his desk. Would that be all, sir? Yes, thank you.
Harry got up. He went to the door with her, locking the door after she went out. He returned to his desk while I watched, in silence. After placing a telephone book on his desk he hastily unwrapped a cold-steel chisel and mallet. He removed the silver dollar from under the blotter and put it on top of the telephone book. He struck one blow with the mallet and the chisel cleanly divided the dollar into two solid silver halves. Thunderstruck, I gazed down upon the silver halves.
No hollow. No coil of photo-wire. No nothing.
I started to say something to Harry, I don't know what, and heard my own voice trailing out into a wordless sound. All told, it was another highly dramatic moment in my life but this one was not one I cared ever to remember, for it left me feeling as though I'd played the fool with Harry and blown my chance of ever being appointed as the editor of SMC's quarterly journal.
"Whatever made you think a coil of either photo-wire or microfilm was hidden inside this dollar?" Harry asked furiously. "Why, goddamn it all to hell, Al, some of those writers up in Publications have discovered you're acting for me. You've been given a hotfoot. It's a gag."
Without replying I picked up the two silver halves, examined them, and then used the mallet and chisel to cut each half into two pie-shaped quarter pieces. Still solid silver, all the way through.
I heard Harry say sardonically, "Satisfied? Al, my friend, you've been had, badly." And the feeling of being played the fool was replaced by one of anger for getting myself in a hole like this; and then, if only out of a kind of stubbornness or refusal to accept an easy answer, it occurred to me to wonder if there mightn't be another explanation.
"Harry, suppose it was only a trial run?" Harry threw me a sharp questioning look. "To see how far I'd go?" I explained. "Suppose I'd given the solid dollar to Security with a story about an attempt to steal your bid? What proof would I have? You don't accept it yourself."
Harry rubbed thoughtfully at his long chin, and gave a sudden short laugh.
"I apologize. That's possible, yes. Damn it> I don't like this at all-"
He then pulled a magnifying glass from his desk drawer and once more examined the four pieces, remarking that it was a 1957 dollar, common enough, with no markings he could see. Impatiently he said to give him the whole story. Deliberately leaving out Laurel's name, I ran through everything, from being picked up the third week I had started working at SMC until last night, when I had been paid a thousand dollars as an advance.
Harry demanded: "Who's the girl?"
"She wants quick money as once I wanted for quick money when I worked on the Call-Bulletin. Unless I have to, I'm not blowing the whistle on her."
Harry observed that he could ask Security for a report on where I had been in the R & D building during every minute of the day and then question everyone I'd seen. Didn't I know that?
"Yes, I said. And since morning I had been in every section on the high-security side, with the exception of the Operations Research wing. He would find me logged in and out of publications, upstairs; and downstairs, in print-shop, photo-lab dispensary, records, and computer.
“Whose side are you on?"
"Yours."
Harry finally laughed. "As long as you don't forget that, all right"
"Is the girl herself so important if somewhere in R and D there's still hidden a microfilm, or wire, or thermoplastic copy of your Skyjack bid? When were you sending the bid to Washington?'
"Paul flies out with it Tuesday, providing we can get satisfactory bound copies printed, proofed and fully corrected over the weekend."
I said that that was going to be close, wasn't it? Harry nodded and got up. For a moment or so he silently gazed out of the one-way window into a rain-swept swimming pool.
A guard passed along the recreation area. I saw him, but I knew he would be unable to see Harry or myself. To anyone outside, the large one-way window would appear only as a gray reflecting mirror.
Harry turned, asking suddenly, "You plan to see this girl of yours this evening?"
I said yes, but she wasn't my girl, nothing like that. He asked if I wouldn't need a whole 1957 dollar. I had thought of that, yes.
Harry said there might be a 1957 dollar to be found in the secretary's cashbox. Wait a minute. As he stepped out, I glanced again at the time. 5:16. I was going to have to leave shortly.
Returning with a whole handful of silver dollars, Harry spread the six or seven on his desk. Among them we found two 1957 dollars. One was too badly worn to compare with the original dollar which we had divided like Gaul into four parts. The other one, however, looked all right, so I pocketed it and was ready to get away. But Harry detained me by saying grimly, "Hold on. We've got to get you back into the security side. First, I’ll write you a pass. I can't even return you to the security side without a pass and having you logged in again."
"I hadn't thought of that."
"You'd better," Harry said. "I'm as subject to a security check myself, when either entering or leaving the high-security section, as you are. So's Paul. We all are. And every copy of a presentation or report is numbered on a time sheet, logged in and out from Records. We have tried to make it impossible for our top-secret research to leak out to competitors. Now-it looks like we've missed an opening somewhere."
Harry handed me the pass. "Now, suppose this girl won't talk and tries to run?"
"I'll give you her name."
"Fair enough." He walked with me to the door. "I'll agree to go along this far with you then. Offer her five hundred dollars and my promise to allow her to resign quietly on the condition that she volunteers a full confession with names. Understand?"
"You don't have to pay her," I said. "I don't ask that-"
"Offer any reasonable amount of money to make her talk. If a competitor has leaked information on our bid to Washington in the next few days, SMC Electronics could lose the contract. We'd be closed down."
Harry rested his hand on the doorknob without opening the door. "Good God, I've thought of something else! Giving you a solid silver dollar-a dollar not hollowed out-to return at this evening's rendezvous means there'll be a next step for you, doesn't it?"
"It looks that way to me."
"Want me to assign a security guard to tail you?"
"Not this evening, no. If there's any danger, it won't be on the trial run tonight. ItH be when and if a next step starts."
"Phone me this evening, as soon as possible."
"I will. Don't worry-"
"Hell," Harry said, frowning, "in this business you always worry. Just to make sure, you'd better give me your home phone number."
I said my phone hadn't been connected yet and Harry said he didn't much like that. Suppose an emergency came up? So I gave him my address. Harry wrote that down in his pocket notebook and then gripped my hand, hard.
"There is only one thing more," he said. "Once we get this wrapped up, you're going to take over as the editor of what we want to be the finest publication in the whole electronics industry. Understand?"

3.
A mile and a half down the Park to South Palo Alto, through the rain, darkness coming on. Time even for a quick hamburger and coffee before I caught the 5:59 south from San Francisco.
It was the single evening commute train that switched off the main track at South Palo Alto to go crunching along an old branch line the S.P. had been threatening to pull up as long as I'd been in these parts. Either you caught the 5:59, or hired a cab, or walked to Colfax Springs.
I crowded in on the back platform of one of the coaches with about two seconds to spare. The old locomotive hooted up in front, grabbed at the line of coaches, and began moving.
The tracks curved away from the main S.P. line, across the big highway and then along the south rim of the Park, whose luminescent buildings, like glass butterflies, showed through the rain.
There was a smell of wet and tired people, packed around me, waiting to get off; and the faces in the half-lit platform were faces I didn't know. After the first station stop, I found myself going back in mind to my meeting with Harry Weymouth. Originally he'd placed me upstairs in Publications as flypaper, to say it, on the off chance of anything fly sticking to me if the regular security-screen happened to let anything slip through the meshes.
But any flypaper-job takes time to accumulate information, I reminded myself. When telling Harry how I'd been picked up by one of the hundreds of girls at the SMC I'd merely given him a quick run-through, followed by the anticlimax of receiving a solid silver dollar. Perhaps it was because we both were worked up, with that dead-fish smell of a caper all around us; but I hadn't noticed and neither had Harry that there was anything so unusual in the timing of events.
So this thought came to me while I was being hauled along toward the Colfax Springs rendezvous with Laurel: If my guess was right and Laurel had been set up for me in advance -even to wearing the Muguet perfume-hadn't the whole scheme been cocked and ready like a pistol, waiting for me to arrive from Mexico?
The answer was yes, quite possibly, at least as I scored it. It was an answer that increased a prickly sensation up and down my backbone as I remembered Laurel's shrill threat of someone poking out my good eye if I betrayed her. It meant that somebody knew me. It meant someone who'd known Vicki, didn't it? So I sent my thoughts digging through a detritus of friends and acquaintances of the old days, three and four years ago.
Of them all, there was George Whitsun upstairs with me in our bullpen. George had told me he'd divorced Emily, his second or third wife. Now he was renting a small house near Sunnyvale. And there was Walt Abbot, with his round baby-face cheeks. Walt was married. He had four children, and never chased around as far as I knew; and after the old Call-Bulletin merged him out of a job when buying the News, all Walt wanted was a secure slot for the rest of his life.
For that matter, all George wanted was an eight-hour job that gave him enough to live on for him to continue his real career as a poet. I turned both George and Walt around in my mind as possible thieves and, sweet Christ, I thought, I was crazy. What would either George or Walt do with a $55-million-dollar proposal?
The magnitude of such a thing would scare them both to death; it gave me the wallops, even thinking of all that money. It simply wasn't in my territory or in theirs, either.
Slowing for another station stop, the train jerked at my legs. Steady. Hold it. I needed a drink. I needed something before facing Laurel and explaining a roof was ready to fall on her head. Then I was reminded of the second Rennilin tranquilizer Laurel had given me, which I'd forgotten to swallow. I reached inside my shirt pocket. There it was. I swallowed it thankfully.
The train jarred to a stop. More commuters shoved down into the station's lighted area. From outside, briefly an auto's headlights flashed in upon one of the S.P.'s bulletin-board advertising signs displayed where I stood on the coach's back platform. Again the train moved, chewing along more miles and stops toward Colfax Springs.
It was black night this time of year. Rain was drizzling when the train stopped at the Colfax station and I got out behind exactly seven commuters, all of whom headed like well-trained cattle or sheep toward blurs of automobile lights. Giving a forlorn hoot, the train lurched off, coaches rattling behind.
Built by the S.P. sixty and more years ago when it was fashionable for San Francisco families to make excursions to Colfax Springs for the mineral-water cure, the old station was one of those monstrous mission-style creations with a black peak of roof, blacker turrets, dormered windows, weathered scrollwork, its waiting room closed, and the ticket window for a nonexistent station master boarded up.
I stepped away from rain into deep shadows of the overhung roof, watching the commuters' cars taking off. After the train departed for the next stop, lights on four or five poles had automatically bunked off. I was left in wet darkness. I listened. I believed I had good ears; but I heard no footsteps, neither soft on the gravel nor creaking behind me on the old station's platform. I still hadn't seen Laurel's Pontiac.
I edged around to the north side of the station which faced Spanish Road which in turn ran upgrade west to the town of Colfax Springs and an intersection with Santa Ana Boulevard.
I waited, expecting Laurel's Pontiac to turn down any minute into Spanish Road from the boulevard. Where was Laurel? Come on, come on. Across the street from the station was a streetlight. Its wet glow extended dimly, enough for me to distinguish any of the autos coming down from the boulevard.
At one side of the streetlight one of those little Volkswagen delivery trucks was parked in front of a hay, feed and fuel store. Nobody was in the driver's compartment that I could see. No other cars were parked on this side or on the opposite side of the street.
I waited long enough to be reminded of second-rate novels I had read and of TV shows and movies I had seen. A man with a blackened character, after resolving to try again and do better, risks himself out on a limb to save the beautiful girl from repeating a mistake that once he had made.
I always had felt that such situations were phony and completely false. Hiding here in wet shadows, I now discovered the same falseness in myself which Harry must have sensed when I was standing up to him and refusing to name Laurel's name.
The simple truth of it, I now perceived, was that I was fumbling around clumsily in an attempt only to recover fragments of my own self-esteem, a long time ago lost to Pop and to Vicki. I had told Pop and I had also told Vicki, before marrying her, of accepting $500 from a politician while holding a position of considerable trust with a fine newspaper. So now, a wish flooded over me; a wish of wishing to Christ it wasn't too late to withdraw, to get out, to let someone else do the dirty job of fingering a dirty steal from SMC. I wished I was back on the beach at Guaymas, doing nothing, nothing at all, waiting for a white burst perhaps of the atomic bomb high in the sky. Then the thought occurred to me, yes, I did have money. The thousand in used five-dollar bills that I had hidden in the footlocker at my house. Well, why not? Why not? Run, run.
About then, though, I became aware of a quick on-and-off flashing, followed by a blackness, with the same flashing repeated. It came somewhere from my left, on the off side of my face carrying the eyepatch. I got my head canted enough to see more distinctly another quick timid flashing.
Immediately I picked my way toward the alley which separated the station from a crumbly warehouse half falling down.
"Laurel?" I whispered. "Laurel?"

Chapter 6

1.
Parked in the alley's deep darkness, Laurel's Pontiac was almost invisible from where I was on the station's platform. If Laurel hadn't flashed her headlights to attract my attention I would have missed her.
Cautiously I edged around a telephone booth and along the station's wet stone walls in the direction of the alley. When from the wet darkness a sinister voice said, "Coo-coo-coo," I most nearly jumped out of my sldn. Then I heard the rustle of wings beating in the darkness, and more bloodcurdling cooing sounds-enough for me to realize I'd disturbed some of the pigeons that always had been a great nuisance around the old railroad station.
In the gloom of the alley I could now discern the hazy bulk of the Pontiac; I paused, and said, "It's me. Turn on your lights. Let's see if you're alone."
As soon as Laurel switched on the dashlight I could see the black swirl of hair as a halo to her ivory face with her eyes like shadowy pools and watching as very swiftly I stepped from the alley, opened the Pontiac's rear door, and peered inside. Despite my fears, no one was crouching behind the front seat to jump at me. Laurel promptly reached a hand behind her, closing the rear door. She asked in a guarded whisper, "What took you so long?"
"I didn't see your car here in the alley."
"I flashed my lights. Al-I've got to tell you something," said Laurel as though everything including panic had jammed inside her and she was terrified there mightn't be time to say what she must before the sky fell upon us both. "First-the phone at your house isn't connected, is it?"
Why Laurel was asking me about my phone I didn't know; but I said, "No, not yet-" At the same time I opened the Pontiac's front door in order to slide in next to Laurel.
"Don't get in!" Laurel thrust me back, slammed the door, and looked at me from the open car window. "Where's the silver dollar I gave you?"
I didn't have her dollar but I had the 1957 dollar out of SMC's cashbox ready in my hand. I offered it to Laurel while rapidly thinking to myself. First I’ll learn what Laurel wants of me, then give her Harry's offer, and make it clear there can't be any more fooling around.
But to my astonishment Laurel rejected the dollar, exclaiming, "No-you keep it. You walked out through security all right?"
"Yes-"
"What'd I tell you?"
Then Laurel giggled. The sound of her fit of giggling, all so unexpected, ran what seemed like a chunk of sharp ice up and down my spine. Choking off the giggles, Laurel said in a fierce whisper, "Listen, now. Everything's all arranged- a person's going to phone you. On that pay phone-there- see? In front of the railroad station-" Laurel was pointing toward the station. "You have to wait here. What time is it now?" She sighted at the little gold wristwatch on her wrist. "It's almost six-thirty. Well-it can't be helped," she said in that breathy half-choked way as if almost talking to herself.
She peered at me again. "You’ll have to wait a while. Until about seven-you hear? About seven, you'll get an important phone call-"
"At that phone booth?" I asked, thrown off guard. When I'd anticipated a second step that Laurel might ask me to take I'd never in my life expected to be asked to proceed in the direction of a public phone booth.
"Yes-seven o'clock, you hear? Answer the phone. You'll know who it is-"
"Listen, Laurel, I don't understand."
"All you need to do is exactly as I'm telling you. Goodness! It's somebody you used to know. That's the whole beauty of the plan-don't you see? He can identify himself to you on the phone--you’ll recognize his voice. So don't worry about a thing-you can trust him. Hell say where to meet him-to give him the dollar. And you'll find out from him what electronics stock to buy so you'll get yours, exactly like I'm getting mine-"
"Goddamn it, Laurel, wait a minute-"
"No, I can't. Don't get in-" Again she thrust her hand out of the window, and this time trying to rake at my face; and I heard her voice go thin and vicious:
"Remember-after this-you and I-we don't know each other. So don't ever phone my apartment and don't try to ask me for a date because I'm somebody else's girl-"
The Pontiac whooshed, its wheels spun, wet mud clobbered over my face and clothes. The Pontiac shot forward. When I made a last-second try at grabbing for a door handle, I nearly lost a hand. I ran out of the alley to the wet street. I watched the Pontiac streaking west the four blocks up Spanish Road and then it turned right, into the northbound traffic on Santa Ana Boulevard. Good-bye, Laurel.
Maybe a minute, maybe longer, I stood there, greatly deflated. Great hopes: small results. If I didn't do any better than I had at controlling the situation with Laurel, I could see Harry Weymouth deciding that perhaps after all I wasn't the man they wanted to run SMC's quarterly journal.
So I gave myself a shake, wiped some of the mud off my face, turned around to find the telephone booth, and I sucked at my fingers where the car's door handle had almost ripped off the upper joints.
The public telephone booth, resembling a metal clothes closet with hostile glass windows, stood backed up against the old railroad station's wall. Cautiously I approached as if I were wading deeper and deeper into a bog, and not caring for the sensation at all. Stopping, I peered all around. For the first time in months, all over again I discovered the disadvantage a man of impaired vision had when attempting to see everything clearly at night in muggy weather.
I opened the folding metal door of the phone booth and jumped when the flash of the overhead light bulb automatically switched on. Well, hell, I decided I was needlessly on edge after flubbing it with Laurel. The truth was, the thought of remaining in here for half an hour, at a deserted railroad station, on a dark and drizzling evening, was not a thought to give me much cheer. I noticed the phone's number, 948-4893, on the dial. It never had occurred to me before that public pay phones had their own numbers, though of course they had. A glance at my wristwatch made it only 6:28. Half an hour of waiting here for a man whom I used to know to phone me.
Belatedly I realized how exposed I was to anyone passing along the dark street, either on foot or in a car, with the bulb lit above my head and shining through the narrow windows like a beacon. I raised my hand, gingerly twisting a hot bulb, to plunge the booth back into darkness.
Every minute of waiting seemed like an hour. Restlessly I turned myself around inside the telephone booth's cramped space. I heard a splat! spht! The sounds came from below me, at the level of my knees. Instantly the splat! splat! Was followed by almost instantaneous whacking sounds as if small pellets unbelievably had struck through the lower metal panels of the folding door to puncture the back panels and shatter against the railroad station's stone wall. Then followed a third splat! and whack! along with a burning sensation in my left leg. The thought jarred me that somebody was shooting at me. Next thing, I found I'd kicked open the phone booth's folding door and I was out in the darkness, running along the station's wooden platform. I got enough control over myself to pause and peer around. I still couldn't quite believe anyone had shot at me.
I felt with my hand down along my left trouser's leg and found a tear in the cloth. My fingers touched at a burning place on my calf and a slight stickiness of blood as from a scratch. It was a disconcerting discovery. The shock of proof rattled me. I knew by then I had stepped down from the station platform to cross the tracks but right there I froze, fortunately. A blazing of light swept over me and passed by, while the earth shook under my feet. With a great thundering wham-wham noise, a monster of a locomotive rumbled by, dragging a line of clanging cement cars from the Kaiser Works, below Colfax Springs. The safety gates were still up, evidently they were out of order again. If either the locomotive or I had been five or six seconds faster, I would have walked myself directly in front of the thing as it bore down upon me. Thrown into a confused state of mind after discovering my escape route along east Spanish Road was now blocked by a clanking line of cement cars, and with some half-baked intention of discovering who was in hiding and then crying at the top of my lungs for help and the police, I stepped from the curb out into the street. Again I nearly got myself run down.
Brakes protested urgently. A car's headlights blinded me as violently I threw myself backwards. A little torpedo on wheels dug in and completed an emergency stop, its bumper just grazing my coattails. I scrambled around to the side of the car with the hope of getting a lift out of an untenable position.
I discovered I had been nearly run down by a four-or five- year-old little red Lotus Formula 1 car, with its top up and the side curtains attached. I pulled open the door and asked, "How about a lift-" and my jaw must have dropped. By the fascia lights I saw the fringed oval eyes of that little blondy kid from SMC turned up to me.
Marcia said, crossly, "Oh, Albin-quit clowning like that and pretending you're so scared. You know I'd have never hit you. I stopped in plenty of time. Get in."
I had. gotten in, all right, by then, not waiting for a second invitation; and still breathing hard I asked Marcia to get going, please. By now, I saw through the windshield, the way across the tracks was cleared. The red light from the caboose receded smaller and smaller in the night as the cement train clanked on toward the Industrial Park and points north.
I felt the old Lotus move ahead as Marcia eased in the clutch and asked, "Where?"
At the moment I had not yet decided where we were going or even how fortuitously it might have been that Marcia had happened along at the right time to offer me transport in a hurry. I left that for the moment, while twisting around in the bucket seat to sight through the rear-curtain window and told her, "Just keep going."
All the way up half a mile to its intersection with Santa Ana Boulevard I could see the long black ribbon of west Spanish Road. No cars appeared to be following us. The road behind looked empty. On one side were the dim outlines of the ramshackly collection of warehouses and stores and, on the other, the shadowy railroad station. Nobody stirred. Nothing moved. The Volkswagen truck remained where it was, near the streetlamp. The Lotus jounced over the railroad tracks. Marcia had accelerated to about forty miles an hour as I faced around, still very much conscious of the slight burning in my calf where a piece of lead, by God, had nicked me.
"Come on," Marcia said, "where do you want to go?"
I started wondering about her and asking myself could this little scatterbrain be somehow acting as a stooge for Laurel?
"Where'd you find the Lotus?"
"I picked it up in L.A. for six hundred and twenty-five dollars and paid to get the engine rebuilt. Now it's as good as new. Like it?"
"I used to drive a Lotus myself."
"I know, I saw you race. It started me wishing I could have a Lotus someday."
"How come you just now drove by the railroad station?"
"How come? Thank you. I drove by because I was looking for you."
'Tor me?"
"Who else? Old Horror, damn him, kept me late on a TV broadcast we have to do tomorrow at SMC and I was so afraid you wouldn't be waiting for me."
I said nothing. I didn't know what to say.
"Of course, at lunch today," she went on very seriously, "I hinted I might drive by the station at train time this evening to pick you up so we could have a drink. But you know how it is. The first time, you never really know how well another person'll catch a hint, do you?"
"No, that's a fact."
"Well, where’ll we go for a drink? You say," Marcia asked. Then she said, "Hey, what are you looking around for all the time? I'm a good driver. I don't drive too fast. We don't have to worry about any police cars chasing us."
I wasn't worried about police cars that might be behind us and I'd have felt relieved at the sight of one. But I still had a deep unease in me, or maybe a plain piece of blue funk goosing me up, ever since those shots. Looking back again, I saw the road behind us was still empty. I remembered that the Blue Barn couldn't be more than ten or twelve minutes away, on this road. The Blue Barn had a telephone booth, I knew, as well as a bar and a good man usually at the piano.
"What about the Blue Barn for a drink?" I asked Marcia. "You know where it is?"
"Oh, yes, wonderful, I've been there often since I've gotten back from L.A. You like grappa?" she asked.
"Certainly," I said.
"The Blue Bam serves lovely grappa, Albin."
Although I didn't say it to Marcia, I thought that probably her father, old man Herrera, might still be supplying the Blue Barn with his home-distilled grappa, out of grape skins and leftovers, and personally I was all for it. During the next ten minutes or so I sank down deeper in the bucket seat, enjoyed Marcia's expert driving, and I liked being in a Lotus again.
Marcia turned the Lotus into the circular parking area of the Blue Barn. There followed a long minute when neither Marcia nor I moved to get out. Once again, that evening, I was possessed by great surprise; and this time at myself. I felt an extraordinary impulse steal over me to bend my head down toward Marcia's face.
"Why, Albin, you look so funny. What's wrong?"
"Goddamn it, I wanted to kiss you."
"Well, why don't you?”

2.
When we got out of the car and walked around a ragged garden toward the old-fashioned wooden steps, up to the Blue Barn's illuminated doorway, the moon slid partway from a jagged black cloud. For the first time I could see clearly the fur coat covering Marcia and a fur toque or oversized pillbox or whatever it was girls wore this winter on one side of her head. In the moonlight her coat looked almost like real mink, too, instead of cat or rabbit.
"That's some coat, Marcia."
"You like it?" she paused on the wooden steps. "Real mink. Feel it. I won it in a sort of raffle down in L.A."
I felt it. My heart gave a couple of hard thumps at the way Marcia poked up her face at me, grinning defiantly in the moonlight, giving me back my licks, and good for her. From my time as a newspaperman, I knew only too well the sort of a raffle her two older sisters ran in Los Angeles and Hollywood; and moreover, I knew Marcia knew I knew.
As a way of raising the white flag, I offered her a cigarette from my pack, then helped myself. I was fishing in my pocket for a wooden match when Marcia whipped out her black pistol lighter, snapping it as she had snapped it at me this afternoon in dispensary. This time, though, I didn't jump half out of my skin: her pistol lighter failed to fire. "Let me," I said, taking it, and tightening the flint by using my thumbnail on the screw. I lit her cigarette and mine. Someone was starting to play the piano inside. When Marcia heard the tinkly sound of "Stomp Down Blues," with the nearly genuine Memphis beat, 6he said, "Oh, hurry-" and whirled around, running on up the steps and I followed her, pocketing the lighter to give to her later.
She pulled off her fur hat. She sat herself on a bar stool at the end of the bar, nearest the piano. I explained I had to make a phone call, asking her to order us a couple of grappas, and said I'd be back in a minute. Marcia nodded.
It was still much too early for many people to be sitting around in here and thanking God today was Friday, I passed between empty tables and chairs, all dimly illuminated by blue lights stuck around the walls, and reached the phone booth. By my watch it was exactly 6:52. In another eight minutes, I supposed, the telephone back there at the railroad station phone booth would ring and ring.
I gave the SMC operator my name, asking to be put through to Mr. Weymouth's private line. As Harry had promised, it was all arranged for me to be switched straight through. There was less than two seconds before his deep voice spoke. But before I could begin explaining, I ran into another bitch-up.
"Harry Weymouth speaking ...
"Al, I'm using my phone recorder to leave this message for you, on the chance you may be phoning back during the next half hour or so," Harry's deep voice continued. "It's now about 6:45. Ned Kramisch phoned me about an emergency problem with the proposal. I'm taking him to dinner where we can talk in privacy. Meanwhile, I'm trusting you to follow through on your own situation. I'll return to my office by eight, if not sooner-no-hold it a second .. ."
I heard a faint click-click of the revolving recorder.
"No, let's do it this way," Harry's voice resumed. "I'd rather not meet you tonight at SMC. I'd better meet you at your house. I'll meet you at your house, say, between eight-thirty and nine. You can give me a verbal report. If you bring the-ah-young lady, I will personally assure her immunity in return for complete information. Now-when my voice stops, Al, you'll hear a ping. Give me any message on the recorder.. .."
Harry's voice ceased.
Ping!
I took too long, trying to decide what exactly to say to Harry by way of the recorder, and heard a second ping.
Consequently, without any more crawfishing, I told it straight out to Harry, quick and short. I gave him Laurel's name and address. I said I'd tried to stop Laurel, had failed, and she had refused the dollar and driven away in her car after telling me to go to the station's phone booth and wait until a man I used to know phoned me at seven with more directions.
Next thing, I said, someone shot at me, obviously with a silenced pistol. If that sounded a little unbelievable, I added, or unreal, or screwed up, all the same, I had a tear in my trouser's leg and a nick in my leg to prove it. If one person whom once I knew had wanted to reach me at seven by phone, as I reasoned it, it appeared that a second person not in accord with Laurel's instructions had hidden on the other side of Spanish Road, firing at me to drive me out of the phone booth.
Because I had no intention of bringing in Marcia's name, I informed the recorder that I had gotten to the Blue Barn as fast as possible in order to put in this phone call. I'd plan to stay here until after eight on the chance that Harry might decide to phone me here. If I failed to hear from him, I would then go to my house on Linden Street and wait for more instructions there.
I hung up.
Inside the booth it was hot and stuffy and I felt damp from sweat. I took another minute to go into the men's room, which I found empty. It was a relief to breathe in cool night air from the open window. I removed the eye-patch. I pulled down a couple of paper towels, wiped off my face, replaced the patch, and quickly made my way back toward Marcia. It was 6:59 and I judged I could stay here with Marcia at least an hour while waiting for a possible phone call from SMC, before going on to my place on Linden Street.

3.
By now a few more people had drifted in. I passed around the piano where a girl in a loose sweater, green Capri pants, hair straight down her back, rested her elbows on top of the piano, and with a glass in one hand dreamily listened to a large curly-haired boy, big enough to be a guard on Stanford's team, running through "Night and Day" with great schmaltz and a good downbeat.
As I approached Marcia I saw a couple of beefy men in leather coats, truck drivers I thought, drinking beer and minding their own business at the upper end of the bar. Marcia had slipped off the damp mink coat. With her fur hat in her lap, she was smiling to herself and listening to the boy at the piano. I said, "I hope I didn't take too long."
"Oh, hullo," said Marcia. "Did you have to stand up somebody, or something, to have a drink with baby?"
"Not this time," I said. "It was a phone call on business."
"How dull. Hang this thing up somewhere, will you?"
After hanging her fur hat along with my rainproof on the coat rack by the entrance, I sat down next to Marcia and looked at her. She looked at me. Because she had driven directly from SMC to the railroad station, she was still wearing the fake pearls, the yellow sweater and the sandstone-colored flannel skirt that she had worn to work today. However, she'd ended the strictly business appearance from pulling her hair sleekly back and knotting it at the nape of a very pretty neck.
By the dim blue lights I saw that Marcia's hair looked as pale yellow in color as barley. It fell as loosely down her small straight back as that other girl's, in the green Capri pants, by the piano.
Either the long loose hair for the evenings was a revival of a neo-beatnik style for girls as their gesture against eight hours of conforming to office regulations in both dress and appearance; either that, I.decided, or it was a purely local phenomenon, a result of so many girls liking to lounge around Kepler's Bookstore with their hair down and in shapeless sweaters and stretch pants. Kepler's was an institution in Menlo Park, within spitting distance of Stanford. It was a great place away from the Industrial Park, as I'd found when now and then going there with George, where radicals, socialists, Democrats, Republicans, nonpolitical students, highly political scientists, and their women-all against Industrial Parks, smog, tract houses, foundations-not-paying-taxes, profiteering in 7-million-dollar Saturn and Polaris missiles, Presidents with weak hearts, with weak backs, et cetera, et cetera .-all met, read the latest books, bitched, argued, and drank coffee. "You didn't order for us?" I asked Marcia.
"Honey, I waited for you."
"Honey yourself, how's for grappa?"
"Certainly," Marcia said.
I couldn't resist staring at her cascade of shining hair.
"I can't quite decide what color hair you have," I-explained.
"I wouldn't have to bleach it if mine was naturally as tow-colored as yours," Marcia said. 'That Mexican sun almost gave yours a snow job, didn't it?"
"Falling loose, yours look pretty wildly exciting to me, if you'd like to know."
"Thank you: it's supposed to. Albin-we now have company."
I turned to the bartender who was waiting, a flat-faced man I hadn't previously seen here. I said, "Two grappas, please -" and then, "There might be a phone call coming through for me. Albin Durango."
"Yes, sir," he said, "I’ll remember-" and his old dulled eyes gazed dispassionately across at Marcia. He was very sorry, he said, with a shred of malice and no sorrow in his tone. Even if the Blue Barn was outside the town limits, the county sheriff clamped down hard if he found any bar inside Santa Clara County serving hard drinks to minors. He could give the little lady either a glass of coke or root beer or fix her a nice limeade. But, no sir, nothing doing, he wasn't serving any minor no alcoholic beverages and risking his license.
I discovered some of the customers at the bar were suspiciously eyeing me as if they had me figured as the sort of bastard who liked getting his hands on a high school girl to load her up, stiff and reeling, in order to get his whacks in later.
But Marcia spoke up, "Oh, what silly nonsense." She reached a hand under a fold of mink coat and whipped out a card that she shoved at the barman.
"See? This is my airman's card. It can't be faked. My photo's on it. You see? It says I'm five feet two; weight, one hundred and six; eyes, dark green; hair, light brown-that was before I started using blond rinses," she hastily said. "My age at my last birthday was twenty-four. Two glasses of grappa, please."
"On the house, miss."
"Why, thank you," Marcia said.
"You're twenty-four?" I asked.
"Yes," Marcia said. "Feel better about it?"
"Yes, much." I raised my glass to her and she grinned back.
More people came in. I kept an eye on the time. No one phoned me. Somebody with a guitar joined the large curly-haired boy at the piano. I ordered a second round of grappa.
I watched Marcia watch a couple arise from one of the tables and start dancing, languidly and slowly in a small space about the size of a postage stamp. The two truck drivers left.
An extremely big man came in, in a white raincoat, with a handlebar mustache on one of those empty faces that briefly turned our way, the eyes glancing at Marcia, before he seated himself at the upper end of the bar. He called the bartender "Jack" and asked for bar whisky. Two boys with beards next entered, followed by two girls in Capri pants and sheepskin coats which they promptly removed to reveal loose sweaters underneath. One had a switch-tail, one a free-flowing mane she could sit on.
Again I looked at my watch. There was still plenty of time. Between drinks, I asked Marcia about her airman's card. Every Saturday when she lived in L.A. she used to go out to Burbank and pay her own money, $35 an hour, to learn how to fly.
Once she glanced past me toward the very large man in the white raincoat, who by now was pouring down more whisky and loudly guffawing over some story he was telling the bartender, who appeared glazed with boredom. The door opened with a sweep of moist wind. More people drifted in, taking tables around the piano.
I hadn't heard the phone ring, even once, in the booth. I couldn't help wondering if Ned Kramisch's emergency situation connected in with the Skyjack proposal. I was conscious of a sensation as of waiting for more trouble. I became aware of Marcia remarking that she supposed I'd stopped flying entirely. When I said, well yes, I had, rather than letting the subject drop, Marcia said, well, way back in the 1930's or 1940's wasn't there a famous aviator, Wiley Post, who flew with one eye instead of quitting?
Marcia was the first person I'd ever encountered who could sail along like that, never thinking anything of what she was saying. I merely said something about not being able now to afford to rent an airplane to fly. It was also the truth.
Oddly enough, during the time in the Blue Barn, drinking grappa with Marcia, every so often the thought would come to me that I was enjoying being here with her. We could bear the tinkling of the piano, the guitar strumming softly, and once or twice some of the girls began singing. A waiter had come on duty, serving the tables. I saw Marcia look sharply at a tall man with a pipe in his mouth who came in with another chick in a fur coat, the two of them taking a table near the fat guitar player.
"For a second I thought that man"-Marcia nodded toward the one with the pipe-"was George Whitsun."
I looked again and saw it was someone younger than George, and not nearly as tall and gaunt.
"I forgot," I said, "but you know George, don't you?"
Marcia shook her head.
"I'd read his book that City Lights published. But I never knew him to speak to until Old Horror-that's Sid Horrabin up in PR-decided to have us research a story about George to run in Spaceways last summer. We got George's job file from Personnel. We found where he lived and all about him, even to his taking that silly deputy sheriff job on weekends. But George heard what we were up to. He charged into our office-oh, you should've heard himl George said he was paid as a tech writer. If SMC wanted to use any of his poems or his name he demanded to be paid as a poet. Old Horror about died!"
Marcia laughed and finished her grappa. "He lives down the road from here, only about a quarter of a mile, you know. He rented a little house after his wife left him to go to Spain with an artist who used to work at SMC."
"No, I didn't know."
"I thought you were a friend of his."
"I am. We went to Stanford together."
"And you don't even know where he lives?"
Marcia canted that sharp little fox-face of hers to one side, lifted her eyebrows at me, and gave herself an impatient wriggle. Her long hair rippled along the curve of her back like silvery smoke. I didn't know how this sudden interrogation had quite developed. I said I hadn't known where George lived. She asked wasn't I interested anymore in my friends? I said it was a long time ago when George and I went to Stanford.
Next, Marcia asked, "You must have had hundreds of friends once, didn't you? What do you do now, hide yourself after work and never see anybody anymore?"
"Honey," I said, and I said it deliberately for she was digging in at me where some of the nerve endings were still raw, "why don't you lay off?”
I saw her face flush and she bit hard at her lips. You know how you say something, immediately regretting it afterwards.
"Marcia, I'm a natural son of a bitch and I apologize."
She studied me a moment and then gave me that clown's grin of hers, reaching to pat my hand as if to say, "At least you admit it," and I ordered a couple of more grappas.
After a total of possibly three glasses of grappa, I was feeling somewhat better about loising control of the situation back there at the railroad station, less upset, and congratulating myself on keeping my head by phoning through with a report on what had happened at the station. The time was still well in hand, I saw, with another glance at my watch.
The grappa must have started Marcia and me off on cars. Particularly, we talked about sport cars, the 1200-cubio centimeter formula one Lotus designs; the great Coopers, that we both agreed didn't quite come up to a Lotus; the Appie Serie II Lancia, for example, that Marcia once had ridden in and ever since had loved devotedly; a little Abarth I used to race; and even an Armstrong-Siddeley that unaccountably Marcia remembered as one of the greatest, even if I tried to convince her she was crazy; and so on, et cetera, et cetera. Marcia's sharp little face, all forehead and pointed nose, got excited when she argued. She waved her arms. Her eyes raked me up and down as if I were crazy, saying an Armstrong-Siddeley was crummy; and, all told, I had a sudden unexpected feeling of at last coming home. That made no sense whatsoever.
I had no home. In reality, I was only camping out at Linden Street until either the bank foreclosed or somebody bought a run-down house. And right now, here I was, sitting at a bar with a little blondy scatterbrain who thought an Armstrong-Siddeley car was one of the greatest, and I was foolishly telling myself that I was at rest with Marcia, at peace, and home again.
Still no phone call. I watched the time. It was a little past eight and in a few more minutes I was going to have to think about leaving Marcia and getting on toward my own house. It would take me nearly half an hour by foot from here, even when cutting across by the hills.
Marcia had noticed my repeated glances at the time. Finally she said, "I expect you've got something cooking. Don't let me stop you."
"I wish we could go on and have dinner together but I've got to see a man on business at my house between eight-thirty and nine and I'd better get along."
"Where are you from here?"'
 I told her and she said she'd run me home and save me walking. I said thanks, but that wasn't necessary. I was used to walking. And anyway, wouldn't her people expect her for dinner? Marcia shook her head.
"Nobody expects me at my house. I come and go."
"How about tomorrow night, us having dinner?"
"Why, Albin, why plan anything so far ahead? How about right now dancing with me?"
We got up and went over to the four-by-four-sized dancing space and for the first time in over two years a girl was in my arms and we were dancing around and around as the big curly-haired boy at the piano played the old old tunes as if he had learned to play them by listening to the old records from the twenties.
Marcia was light on her feet and fun and very easy to dance with, too easy, because much more time went by than I realized until Marcia suddenly pulled back and exclaimed, "Albin! Look at the clock on the bar mirror. It's a quarter after eight. Have you got to see this man?"
"Yes."
"I’ll go powder my nose and meet you at the door."
After paying the barman, I finished my glass of grappa and started to stand up when a large hand pressed down on my shoulder and I looked around and saw it was that oversized man in the white raincoat. He had silently moved down the bar, taking his shot glass of whisky with him, to sit next to me on the stool Marcia had vacated. Again I started to stand up and again the heavy hand effortlessly pushed me down.
"Say, fella. Weren't you the one in the phone booth back there at Colfax Station? I sure ought to apologize. I sure had, but when I missed that there durnb pigeon and a couple little bitsy shots plunked into the phone booth-oh, myl”
He slapped at his thigh, laughing. "The way you jumped, lickety-split, outa the phone booth, runnin' fast as your little old legs could paddle-oh my, oh my! I jest can't help laughin'."
"You shot at me?"
"Oh my, no-" That oversized face of his, with the handlebar mustache and the curl hanging over the strip of forehead, all at once became very solemn and serious. He showed his gold teeth in an uneasy smile. He gave my shoulder a friendly shake that nearly snapped my head off my spine. If he hadn't been wearing a dirty white jacket and a pair of white duck pants under the white raincoat, I would have taken him for a cowboy bit player, up on a binge from Hollywood.
"I drive for the county hospital ambulance service," he explained, his hand keeping me nailed down on the stool. "When I get off duty in the evenings I like parking by the station to shoot at them dumb pigeons. I hate them pigeons. I own a real English air pistol-cost me eighty-five bucks. It's no kid's toy. It'd kill any durn man at a hundred yards and any durn pigeon at two hundred. This evening I parked, and I see a pigeon strutting round that dum phone booth. I shot at the dum thing but the light was so poorly I missed and than slugs rickoshayed into them thin luminum sides of the booth."
"I threw off his heavy hand, rose up, and said, "God damn you, you nicked my leg!"
"Say now, fella, don't blow your top-"
He also rose up and continued rising, a big meatball, six feet and a half, as I saw him, with one of those faceless faces where the features are all blurred, small eyes, blob of nose and gold teeth filling the mouth. Then he discovered the slight tear in my trouser's leg. He stooped as his hand grabbed at my arm, his weight on me, and he half stumbled as if drunk. "Sa-a-ay, I did nick you, didn't I? I want to do something about that, fella-"
"Forget it."
I meant to walk away from him. But he had grasped my arm. H« was grinning and fawning on me in the smoky blue air and all the time that big hand of his held a grip on my arm like iron. "I've got my little old ambulance parked outside. A fella gets a scratch on hisself from even a little ol' twenty-two pellet-my goodness, it ain't so good, sometimes. You jest let me get some antiseptic for that durn cut on your leg. Come on-we'll git to my ambulance."
The ambulance driver pulled me toward the door. I resisted. I was furious. I said let go or I'd slug him. That started the big ambulance driver laughing. With one hand still grabbing my arm he ran his other hand in one of those drunken gestures of affection over my face. At least it must have looked like that if anyone had noticed. But I felt his thumb press like stone just below my good eye and heard his wheezy soft whisper, "I'll stick out your good eye, damn you, like Laurel warned you, 'less you get out of here with me, prontol"

Chapter 7

1.
The ambulance driver's whispered threat to put out my eye unless I came with him, coupled with his mention of Laurel's name, combined to freeze me for an instant of great terror into one of those near-cataleptic states. While my body stiffened, incapable of moving, my mind ran off in six different directions: Laurel? This huge slob of an ambulance driver, Laurel's partner? Had he seen me phoning Harry from the Blue Barn's booth? No, impossible. But he'd shot at me. At the railroad station. To get me out of that phone booth? And him, tied in with Laurel? It made no sense, no sense. Jesus sweet Christ, he was going to blind me-
"Come on, fella," he whispered, the two of us in that dim light and no one even noticing us. He slid his thumb up against the soft base of my good eye. The scratching feel of his thumbnail against my eyelid jolted through me like electricity. My knee came up convulsively, getting him in the groin. He grunted. In that moment as his hands half loosened, I pulled free; ran around the piano, and bolted straight for the men's room with the intention of climbing out the window and running around in front to attract Marcia's attention and if necessary shouting down the place for help.
Inside the men's room, as I checked myseH my foot slipped, and I half fell against one side of the enameled washbasin with something sharp nearly puncturing my thigh. It was Marcia's plastic cigarette lighter, I found, the one shaped like a .22 automatic that I'd stuck in my pocket. So I pushed away hurriedly from the basin, turning toward the W.C. proper, to jump up on the toilet seat and haul myself out through the window. But I discovered the door to the W.C. was closed. Someone was in there.
From behind me, I heard the door open from the main hall, and I swung around. I saw the ambulance driver enter like someone about ten feet tall, with the curl over his forehead, his eyes squinted together, and all his gold teeth showing, in a loose grin.
As he reached out a hand at me I jumped back and pulled out Marcia's black cigarette lighter, pointing it straight at his belly. "Out of the way or I’ll blow a hole in you damn you."
"Easy friend," he protested, his large face bending anxiously upon me and his eyes bulging out with a stricken look. "I got a bad ticker .. ." He tottered. He swayed. I thought he was going to fall. I started to slide around him. From my blind side he struck me viciously. He struck a sidewise whack with the flat of his hand which slammed me back sprawling against the wall. My head spun. Blood gushed into my mouth. I was still stupidly pointing the gun at him, but my fingers must have twitched at the two triggers.
Instantly, a cigarette popped up into the air and fell to the floor. A small spurt of flame licked out from the plastic muzzle as though I had offered to light a cigarette. He regarded the cigarette on the floor and then me; his eyes bulging, his large face breaking now into ripples, his vast mouth opening. He guffawed. "Well, ain't that cute?" he said, slapping his thigh. "Ain't that the durndest thing?"
I wanted to kill him.
I struck at him. He took hold of me. He hit me a right in the belly that emptied all the breath out of me. The air around me turned gray and then black. The floor rose up with a crash. I strained and strained. Presently I managed to breathe again, finding myself sprawled on the cement, one of my hands still clutching that useless cigarette lighter.
I felt his hand grasp the scruff of my coat. I was lifted up.
As he lifted me, with my free hand I dug into my coat pocket for a wooden match. Then I straight-armed the match at his face, at the same time thumbing the match into a sulphurous burst of flame. All one side of his mustache kindled up into fire and smoke. He clapped a hand to his face and jumped upward, as though exploded. He came down, shouting. Tears filled his eyes. Half blinded, he swung a great roundhouse right that would have knocked me through the cement wall if I hadn't dodged. Instead of hitting me, he struck the big curly-haired piano player who emerged from the W.C. at the precise instant to receive a fist full in the face. The piano player staggered, clutched at his bleeding nose, bellowed, gave a second bellow, and charged at the large scorched ambulance driver who still groped for me. I seized the chance given and dodged out of the door. People were jumping to their feet as I ran around the piano. The girl in the green Capri pants cried, "Stop them, stop them, Teddy's in there fighting again!" I caught sight of Marcia at the front door. At the same time she saw me, her eyes opening wide in surprise. I said, "Let's go!" and urged Marcia down the wooden steps and around the ragged garden in a night filled with misty moonlight. There was considerable noise from behind us, shouts and yells, I could hear all that; and Marcia was legging it pretty unsteadily and probably I was, too.
She stopped, there in the misty moonlight, and cried, “I’m loaded, what's happened? You get in a fight or what?" and saw I was still clutching her cigarette lighter. "Hey, that's mine, gimme," she said, snatching it. I said I'd tell her later, to hurry, to get in her car, and as we ran into the driveway I saw a white Volkswagen had been parked opposite Marcia's Lotus.
Getting closer, I could see it wasn't a delivery truck but an ambulance. "You drive," I heard Marcia gasp and she flung around the Lotus, slipping into the passenger side.
Old reflexes and driving habits shoved me into the driver's seat. They fired the engine, backed the Lotus from its parking place, and pumped the 5-speed gear shift to send us the way only a Lotus can be sent in a hurry, forward, along the graveled driveway.
As we careened around the ragged garden into the stretch of the driveway, my eye had caught an instant's sight of a huge figure in white. He was tearing down from the Blue Barn's steps, waving his arms at us and shouting like a wild man. My idea was to get away from there, and fast; and then let Harry Weymouth and the SMC security people handle the situation, with clubs or blackjacks if they liked.

2.
The driveway ran about a hundred yards before opening into Spanish Road. I'd sent the Lotus almost that distance and had begun to slow down, before turning left- or west-toward Colfax Springs when from a distance I heard the faraway mournful whistling of another one of those goddamn cement trains. I knew trains ran every few hours all night long from the cement works through Colfax Springs and north to Palo Alto and San Francisco. If I turned left on Spanish Road to drive to Colfax Springs there would be a good chance of the cement train arriving at the crossing in time to block us. Marcia suddenly gave an angry shocked squeal from her side;
"AlbinI That maniac's started up the Volkswagen! He's trying to run into us. Hurry, get away from here!"
I hurried; I got away from there; I turned right, going toward Sunnyvale on a long two-lane highway bordered on each side by tall eucalyptus trees. Standing high in the moonlight like old forgotten servants, black and shedding bark and leaves, the eucalypti were leftovers from the 1880's when Spanish Road had been a great, fashionable boulevard.
That little Coventry-Climax engine, the heart of the Lotus, instantly responded to the need. It began shouting in the night. It continued shouting, a thunderous roaring that ripped us up to about 90 mph within less than a minute. The wind hit us. The Lotus stuck like glue to the winding road. The road wound around a bulk of Black Mountain. It then lurched downgrade, toward the flatlands of the bay. I should have remembered how it would be at this time of year and prepared myself. I didn't.
We ran straight into thick blanketing tulle fog. I knew Spanish Road. I'd bicycled on it to grade school; I'd ridden horseback on it, and driven on it most of my life. But the fog streamed in around us in long, tattered fingers for only a few warning instants. Next, we were blanketed in by what amounted to wads of thick whitish blotting paper.
Some night let anyone try closing one eye while driving at high speed into a sudden near-blankness of tulle fog from off the bay; and it was that way with me, because a one-eyed man lacks perception depth and has only a restricted tunnel-like vision at best.
I drove around a long, tricky curve of road as Marcia instantly poked her head out, on her side. A wind poured in, throwing her hair against my cheek. She called, "Easy, easy, more left-I can see the white line-oh damn, more left- now-straighten up-"
We safely made the curve. Slowly, slowly, the disk brakes gentled the Lotus. Without once drifting or fish-tailing on the slippery road, the Lotus at last dropped to a crawl. Marcia withdrew her head. She sat back in her seat. I heard her let out her breath in a long sigh.
Then she remarked in a most controlled tone, "You scared me for a second or so. Weren't you?"
"Not in the luh-luh-least."
In this tulle fog I couldn't let the Lotus go much faster than a man could run. Even if we'd had a few minutes head-start over the Volkswagen, we couldn't have had over a mile's headstart before running into the fog and having drastically to slow down.
In another three or four minutes, as I estimated it, we would be approaching Spring Lane. That was a back road which turned south off Spanish Road. It wandered over the eastern slope of Black Mountain and down along the eastern edges of Los Flores tract. What I hoped to do was to get around to my house, despite the blanketing fog, where I knew I had a .45 automatic in my footlocker. The fog pressed densely against the windshield. I was driving with my head shoved out of the window. A clammy wet drizzle of fog blew in my face as I steered the Lotus around a second curve that now helped place me about where we were on Spanish Road.
I straightened the wheel. All along this approaching stretch of the road, the fog level was not much higher than twice a man's head. Consequently the tops of the old eucalyptus trees showed above the fog in a hazy milkiness of moonlight, helping to indicate the edges of the road. As I increased the speed a little, Marcia cried sharply, "Your face is bleeding! Hey, what happened to you back there?"
"That oversized ambulance driver jumped me."
"The big fat-faced drunk at the bar?"
I told her yes, but he wasn't a drunk, he was an ambulance driver and he'd jumped me while she'd gone into the women's room and I was still trying to put the reasons why and what-for together and not doing at all well.
"I know his name. He's Fritz Gormerly-"
"Who?"
"Fritz Gormerly, I'm certain. I tried to remember where I'd seen him but I'd had so much grappa I'd get mad, thinking about who he was and not remembering his name."
"Can't you remember where you saw him?"
"Yes. Fritz Gormerly worked in photo-lab at SMC. He's a creep. He used to try to get Peggy Miller to pose naked for photos. Peggy hated him."
We were now cleaving through the fog at about twice the rate a man could run. For the past few minutes I'd been aware of another car which was coming slowly up behind us with its blur of lights shining brighter in my rearview mirror. The thought of Gormerly catching us in his Volkswagen ambulance and perhaps attempting to force the Lotus, so much smaller, off the road was a curdling thought.
Where was the turnoff? Again I sighted up to the tops of the eucalypti, hoping to see the break that marked the turn-off. In another minute or so I could imagine Gormerly swinging the ambulance against us with a crashing and rending of steel. Meanwhile, Marcia had continued briefly about this girl Peggy, also in PR, and how Peggy'd pointed out Fritz Gormerly to her; and, oh, what a creep he was; and yes, Marcia now remembered he'd quit or was fired only a week or so ago. That reminded me, hadn't Walt Abbot told me of a Fritz Gormerly who'd recently quit photo-lab?
I heard Marcia cry, "Hey, we've got car lights right behind us! Come on, step on it, I don't like going so slowl"
I shouted against the wind, did she want us to smash into a tree in this fog or go into a ditch? By now the blurry lights had increased as the ambulance approached within a couple of car lengths. In my mind I could see Gormerly, bigger and bigger, with bis scorched and swollen face, and he linked in with Laurel, all right. He must have been her man in photo-lab. He had had every chance of making an extra copy of the SMC presentation.
I had been watching the tops of the eucalypti. Coming up at any second should be, I hoped, a break in the treetops on the right-hand side. There'd be a wide gap to mark where Spring Lane entered Spanish Road. There it was!
"Marcia, hang on-" I cut off all lights, watched the tattered gap open to a watery January moon. I swung the wheel. I felt the Lotus leap in the dense blackness. Marcia yelped.
We slid smack into Spring Lane. Gravel showered as wheels dug in. The Lotus lifted. It lurched. It dropped again. It stopped. I killed the engine. Then there was a dead silence all around me.
I stuck my head outside into the wet darkness. In less than a minute I heard the sound of another car from the east. Then in the fog there was a sudden smear of headlights. Bulky and distorted by fog, the Volkswagen fled by, whitely, along Spanish Road toward Sunnyvale.
"If you ask me, that was damn lousy cornering," said Marcia's voice.
"If you ask me, we've ditched the son of a bitch. He's rocketed off toward Sunnyvale."
Then I sat there. I felt the grappa. I felt old; I felt beat-up. I asked myself why had I risked Marcia's life and my own in a merry-go-round of this sort? Let Harry and Paul shoulder the load from now on in. Let them stop the thieves associated with Laurel from trying to bust SMC Electronics.

3.
"It was a fake ambulance, wasn't it?"
Having Marcia ask that one brought me back to her, to being here. I switched on the headlights. I fired the engine and located myself in the fog as I let the Lotus crawl south along a graveled country road. A wind began to pelt a sprinkling of rain across the windshield.
Marcia insisted, "That Volksey had 'County Ambulance' painted on the sides. Didn't you see?"
"I didn't have time to see much of anything."
"The paint was so fresh, rain had smeared it. Wouldn't a county ambulance have 'Santa Clara' on it, and probably a number?"
"Yes, it would."
"What did that creep Fritz Gormerly want of you? Is he a gangster, now, trying to collect money or something from you?"
I said no, I didn't owe him money, and I put off Marcia by saying he was only asking for a fight, so she came back indignantly that I should know better than to try to argue with somebody twice my size.
During the next quarter of an hour we drove up over the tail of Black Mountain and down again, into a thinner fog which hung over the foothill country with gusts of rain blowing the fog into long, streaming banners. I thought of the chances of Gormerly turning around and following on Spring Lane and I discounted the chances and it looked to me as if we had ditched him. "This was a back road. The night and fog had all been in our favor, hiding us when I swung the Lotus off Spanish Road with the lights winked out. We met a couple of cars coming in our direction, but no cars followed that we could see.
Again Marcia put her head through the side curtains on her side, clutching at her streaming hair as she tried to locate the first side street off Spring Lane that would mark the beginning of Los Flores tract. She gave a yelp, loud enough to carry to me over the howling wind: "There!"
So we had the first street, the second, and I turned right into the third that had to be Linden even if Marcia couldn't see any street signs. In this tract, I expected by now all of the wooden street signs either had rotted or had fallen down. This end of the tract was mostly new country for me. The streetlamps were dim globes of yellow, each one spaced a long way from the next. Far back from the street were dim rectangles of light, windows of houses huddling in the darkness, separated by black stretches of dead or dying orchards. We approached another streetlamp and its light reflected on the shapeless mass of a redwood tree out there in front on a lawn. The single redwood tree in the whole street. Consequently I was able to recognize my own place although I didn't see Harry's big Lincoln Continental drawn up in front. No car was there at all. I turned in my own driveway at about a quarter of nine, still early.
By the Lotus' shine of lights I saw the wind had shaken down the big folding doors of the carport, closing them. The drive ran around the carport and patio to an alley in back. I circled around the carport and stopped. Here, I told Marcia I was expecting Harry Weymouth. I'd leave a note for Harry. Then I'd drive her home and pick up a cab to return me. Marcia said she was quite capable of driving herself home, thank you. So I got out into the wet windy night. Marcia slid under the wheel, said, "See you tomorrow," shoved the car into gear-and instead of sending the Lotus forward into the alley, slam-bang she drove backwards into the carport. "AlbinI You gave me too much of that grappa!" Opening the door of the car I said to come on in with me, we'd get some hot black coffee. No, Marcia wasn't going to have Harry Weymouth find her in my house. He wouldn't, I told her, helping her out of the Lotus with a gust of wet wind staggering us.
We beat against the wind up into the breezeway where I explained that the alley ran downgrade into Manuella. It was a quarter of nine. It looked like I'd arrived early. If Harry came before Marcia finished downing her coffee, she could easily duck out the back door and let her Lotus coast down to Manuella and be away without his knowing she'd been here.
Hanging to my arm, Marcia got up the steps to my door; and I was beginning to feel all the grappa take harder hold of me. I had forgotten how grappa can have a delayed reaction. I shouted at Marcia above the wind, "Stand back, the door sticks-" and lunged. Not this time, though, the front door didn't stick. It burst open. I fell on through into a deeper darkness. Instantly there was a sound inside the house like sheet metal being ripped into small pieces.
Marcia shouted, "There's a wild animal in there!"
I shouted to Mugsy to keep quiet and got to my feet again, telling Marcia it was only the Doberman, Mugsy. While I couldn't believe I had swallowed enough grappa to leave me stoned, or anything like that, I was having trouble finding the switch.
Here it was. Lights burst on in the Together room and there was the black Doberman, showing her teeth like white spikes at Marcia and spoiling the ferocious effect by happily wagging her stump of tail. I ordered Mugsy to quit showing off. Quiet. Lie down.
It was a waste of time ordering Mugsy, though, for immediately it was love at first sight between the two of them. Pulling off her wet mink coat, Marcia dropped to her knees and exclaimed. "Oh, what a beauty you are, aren't you?" Mugsy promptly wriggled all over like a black seal, wiping at Marcia's cheek with the wet red-flannel rag that served as a tongue. I shut the door. Before going back to my bedroom to pick up the .45 automatic I stepped over to die picture window to pull down the blinds. I found I didn't need to pull down the blinds. That was the first thing I discovered wrong about the house: the blinds were already tightly pulled down, though I couldn't recall pulling them shut this morning.
Marcia's voice asked, "Where's your topcoat? You didn't leave it at the Blue Barn?"
"Evidently."
"And your jacket! You've ripped a hole in the elbow."
There was a hole in one elbow, I discovered, no doubt as a result of the mauling I'd received back there in the Blue Barn. I placed a hand to the wall, steadying myself because the floor had a very slight tendency to pitch up and down.
I reminded myself again about the .45 automatic. As a means of leaving Marcia long enough for me to go into my bedroom and open my footlocker, I suggested she make herself comfortable while I fixed us some hot coffee. I was pretty certain there was some Hills Bros, instant coffee left in the jar in the kitchen. But instead of myself promptly going out of the Together room, unexpectedly my legs wobbled under me and I sat down, hard, on the lanai-couch.
For a dozen heartbeats I found it strangely pleasant to sit quietly and gaze upon Marcia, seductive, round and graceful as she bent her head over the enormous wedge-shaped head of the Doberman. It suddenly occurred to me that with Mugsy here, capable of pulling down any man, I didn't need to concern myself about trying to shove a bulky .45 automatic in my pocket and perhaps frightening Marcia by carrying a loaded weapon. So I felt myself relax while watching Marcia and Mugsy make up to each other. Marcia's back, I thought, was lovely when shaped by the shadows and lights. Her neck became a supple little column of tinted ivory that was enhanced by the heavy gilt curving of her hair, drawn around like a mantle over the one shoulder. Perhaps because of my unmoving silence, Marcia became suddenly aware of me. Greenly, her eyes swept toward me.
She stood. She remarked, "You look rather dreadful, Albin. I had better go make you black coffee. Where's your kitchen?" I also rose to my feet, but my stomach started rising at the same time. So I sat down again, pointing in the general direction of the kitchen nook.
Mugsy followed Marcia out of the Together room and I stared around and somehow nothing around me appeared quite right. The old rocking chair, as I saw it, appeared freshly waxed and as good as new. The fireplace was filled with logs. For the life of me, I couldn't remember scraping it out yesterday evening and bringing in more logs. I got up unsteadily to make my way into the bathroom and everything appeared slightly out of place.
In the corridor, I again had trouble locating the switch. I stumbled against a chair that didn't belong in the corridor. From the kitchen Marcia called, "You all right?" and I answered certainly I was all right, I was only in here washing my face. Looking at myself in the mirror, I wasn't at all so convinced it was my own face. One side was swollen. Blood had dried along and down a corner of my mouth. My jaw ached. In the bathroom I found a fresh towel I never remembered I had, either. As I wiped my face I suddenly recollected that today had been Friday-the day the cleaning woman came. I never knew before how much a cleaning woman could improve the appearance of a run-down house, though. It was amazing.
I started to go into the kitchen. Marcia said go on and light a fire in the fireplace, why not? After turning off the overhead lights, that was what I did. I sank down comfortably on the couch. When Marcia came in, I noticed she'd braided the blondy hair. It hung in a long rope behind her, swinging back and forth with every step she took. She brought in a big pot of steaming coffee and two cups and saucers. She rushed out and triumphantly returned with a tray of sandwiches and sat beside me, tucking her legs under her and regarding me with an expression of great satisfaction.
"I don't much like instant coffee, Albin, so I used your nearly full can of MJB regular grind I found. Was it all right?" I didn't know what Marcia was talking about. I had never bought a can of MJB regular grind in my life. She went on, telling me she'd found half a ham and a baked chicken in the refrigerator for sandwiches. Go ahead and take one.
I did not want to believe it was the grappa doing this to me or that suddenly I was dreaming. There was neither half a ham nor any chicken in my refrigerator. Unbelievingly, I helped myself to two of the sandwiches. One tasted exactly like ham. The other tasted exactly like chicken. I was so hungry, I ate them both; I drank the coffee. I then had two or three more cups, black and hot, hoping to pull my wits together. I watched Marcia feed part of a chicken sandwich to Mugsy.
If I had stocked the kitchen with regular-grind coffee, a ham and a baked chicken, buying them at the market in Colfax Springs last Saturday, then I must now be clean out of my mind. Next, though, it occurred to me that the cleaning woman, a good-hearted woman whom Vicki used to have years ago, might out of kindness have decided to replenish my refrigerator and kitchen; upon thinking that, I felt somewhat easier, determining to ask her when next I saw her, and of course to pay her. Immediately I ate a third sandwich. "There, now," Marcia said, sounding pleased, "you're looking much better. All you needed was food and hot coffee. Do you know, you looked almost green when I told you I'd found the ham and chicken. You shouldn't get into fights, just because you have a little grappa at a bar-" She gave a great start, jumping up. "I thought I heard a car stop."
She reached for her mink coat, thrown over a chair, and was ready to run.
Scrambling to my feet, I crossed over, pulled back the picture window's drapes very slightly, and peered out. No car. There was nothing at all where the stretch of street in front of my house was mistily illuminated by the street-lamp. Returning to Marcia, I explained it must have been the wind blowing dead tree limbs and leaves along the graveled driveway. After we had more coffee, Marcia glanced at her wristwatch, as I did at mine. It was a little past nine. "Albin, it's time baby blew. I'm up early tomorrow morning, don't forget."
"Stay a little longer. If Harry doesn't arrive by half-past nine I’ll drive with you to your place and walk back."
"That isn't necessary."
"I know it isn't necessary but I'd like to, Marcia." Her fringed eyes glanced down at where I had taken one of her hands, small and firm.
"Honey, don't sound so sore about it."
"Oh, hell," I said and released Marcia's hand.
"Why don't you tell me what all the trouble is?"
"What trouble?”
"For one thing, Fritz Gormerly back there at the Blue Barn. I thought you were going to tell me."
"It's SMC's trouble, Marcia," I said, "and so help me, I fell into it because all I want in the world is to get back again into an editorial chair and run a newspaper."
"I don't understand."
"It's really Harry Weymouth's problem. And Paul's. They could lose the whole works at SMC if they lose out on the NASA bid and I don't exactly happen to want them to lose the big chance..."
I paused. Marcia waited for me to go on. I said sometimes I wondered if I hadn't perhaps lost my mind; and I sat back, stuck out my legs to the fire, and with a feeling of relief at unburdening myself, I ran through the whole infuriating chain of events as Marcia listened. I left out nothing except Laurel's name. I said I'd been picked up by one of the girls who worked at SMC. There was a long silence after I finished and finally I asked, "None of it makes too much sense, does it?"
"I know this. Everybody in Public Relations knows the management's been terribly worried while our Skyjack proposal's been shaped up for submission to Washington." Marcia's eyes considered me. "Because you had so much newspaper experience in digging up graft and trouble, Harry Weymouth wanted you to be on the alert while you were a tech writer?"
I said, something like that, yes; and then, wanting to be truthful to Marcia I said, "Company spy," and she said indignantly it wasn't fair to call myself a company spy. I said I'd hire out to clean washrooms for the chance of again sitting in an editorial chair. Though it wasn't announced yet, in the next month or so Harry planned to issue a big quarterly journal and I had his promise to run it.
"We know all about the quarterly," Marcia said.
"You do? Anyway, please don't tell anyone until Harry gives the word that I'm taking over as the managing editor."
Marcia hesitated. Then she said uncertainly, "You probably know more about it than I do but the way I heard it, my boss expects to take over that quarterly. Mr. Weymouth promised him."
Having Marcia say that gave me a jolt; but almost instantly I knew she had to be wrong, or that her boss in Publicity was way out and didn't know what he was talking about. So I merely said that I'd known Harry Weymouth a long time and counted on him and went on and explained, "For that matter, Paul Perugia and I went to school together. I owe Harry my job and chance at SMC. I'd hate to have anyone knock them down and lose them their opportunity at the Skyjack program."
"Of course they mustn't lose their opportunity," Marcia said realistically, sitting upon her knees to face me. "Paul's put everything into making the Skyjack program a success. Who knows? He might even win a Nobel prize if NASA gives SMC the contract to go ahead! No, we can't let anyone steal his ideas. We can't. Even if it doesn't work out as you hope it will, you've still got to believe in Paul. Help him if you can."
I looked at Marcia with her hands tightly clenched, her face now excited, and her eyes big and like shining stars. It hadn't bothered me this way yesterday evening when Laurel called Paul by his first name, but it gave me a sudden twinge to hear Marcia speak so familiarly of him. Marcia had paused. She asked unexpectedly, 'Tell me- I suppose Laurel gave you that silver dollar, didn't she? Didn't she?"
"Laurel?"
"Oh, don't try to pretend! Laurel Turner. Everyone at SMC knows she's been giving you rides. Paul's having a go with her too. I suppose that's news to you?"
"No, I've heard the talk."
Mugsy, curled up in front of the fire, suddenly leaped to her feet with a tearing growl, her hair bristling, and barking she first ran to the front door and then dashed wildly toward the kitchen and back again and Marcia, up on her feet, said, "Is someone prowling around this house?"
I pulled open the front door, holding Mugsy by the chain around her neck.
Marcia cried, "Albin, look out!"

4.
There wasn't anything that I could see to look out for. But before I could drag Mugsy back from the open door and close it, two or three cats began singing and yowling at each other from the old dead orchard on the east side of my half acre. The cats explained why Mugsy started barking, I told Marcia. There wasn't any prowler. I shut the door, scolding Mugsy who wagged her tail at me. Marcia was still standing with her mink coat slung over an arm.
"Albin, look, I can't stay here any longer. Hadn't you better phone Mr. Weymouth to see why he's been delayed?"
"I can't. My phone isn't connected."
"I could phone him for you when I get to my place-" Marcia paused, biting at her lower lip. Then she shook her head. "He wouldn't much like your telling me, would he?"
"I wish you didn't have to go, Marcia."
"I have to be at work by seven tomorrow morning."
"That early?"
"Yes. The telecast we're giving is terribly important."
"I used to think I liked tall girls whose backsides were on the sexy side, in and out, with-well-bosoms that were say about the size Picasso liked to draw in his Blue Period. But look at you," I told Marcia. "No more of a figure than a whip. Five feet two at the most. And you're staring at me out of eyes like cat's eyes, or fox's eyes, angry eyes, and I’ll be goddamned if I know what it is about you-but I wish we could go to Carmel together this weekend. What do you say?"
"I don't have to stick around here and have you make love to me by telling me how awful I look!"
"With the firelight on it, your hair's the color of barley-"
"Figure like a whip? It's an outrageous lie. With only one eye you have to have everything twice normal size before you can see it!"
"We could stay over the weekend with some friends of mine in Carmel who own a new Aston-Martin. They'd even let you drive it if I asked them."
"I can't go off to Carmel with you this weekend and you know it. I have to help Old Horror on that rotten broadcast as I've told you. I speak the lines explaining about pring."
I rested an elbow on the mantelpiece and watched the play of light and shadow over Marcia's half-angry face.
"A girl gives me a silver dollar as a gag. A drunken ambulance driver shoots at pigeons. Marcia-at the back of my mind I keep thinking there's an explanation waiting to give me the shock of my life if only I can fit together enough of the pieces to arrive at a logical end. It'd be much easier to run off with you this weekend to Carmel and lie on the beach."
"Well, you can't always run when you feel like running, can you?"
"Marcia, suppose everything I've told you didn't have any real basis to it at all."
"Whatever do you mean?"
"Along with busted ribs and other damages after the automobile accident, I got my head fractured. A damaged brain can't repair itself even if ribs can."
Marcia sprang forward and grasped my arm. "Whoever told you you'd damaged your brain?"
"Dr. Hodges warned me it was possible-"
"Albin, look. Nothing's wrong with you except that bitch Laurel, along with Fritz Gormerly working with her, tried to mess you into some miserable scheme of theirs. I was back East when you had the automobile accident. All I heard-" Marcia stopped.
"Go on," I said. "All you heard?"
"All I heard," she said, "is you were drunk when you drove your wife and yourself off the road and I couldn't believe it."
"Thank you."
"Were you?"
"No. That evening we'd put the weekly Dispatch to bed and we had dinner up at the Frenchman's. Vicki and I each had a glass of wine, nothing else. I was tired. So help me, I let Vicki drive. I remember we'd passed the hospital on Santa Ana and were going into the turn when a truck or auto- I can't remember-swung way out on the wrong side and headed into us. To avoid a head-on collision, Vicki swung us off the road into the ditch-and I don't remember much after that. Where'd you hear I was drunk?"
"Dr. Hodges said you were drunk," Marcia said.
It was like being struck across the face.
I said that was impossible. Yvor Hodges knew I wasn't, I said, for he'd been there in the emergency operating room to work on me when the ambulance delivered me to the hospital.
Marcia said, "I've heard him tell Paul you were reeking of whisky when you were brought into the hospital. For your father's sake, he did everything he could to keep the newspapers from knowing. Albin-whatever made him say such a filthy thing about you?"
I did not know.
Marcia's eyes poked at me with a greenish gaze in the prolonged silence that lasted between us. I could hear the logs crackle. A wind thumped tree branches against the roof.
"He was there, this afternoon," I said.
"Dr. Hodges was at SMC?”
"Yes."
"Laurel used to work at his private hospital. Did you know that?"
"Yes." I remembered Laurel herself telling me she had.
A coldness ran down my spine as though suddenly an unseen enemy was grinning at me from the flickering shadows along the wall. Mugsy gave a low growl and once more prowled toward the front door, nosing and smelling around the edges of the door.
"Listen!" Marcia whispered.
A car did go by the house then, or at least I thought I heard one go by and stop briefly and go on again as though the driver was hunting a house number. I ran to the window to peer out. Once more I saw only the empty shine of street by the wet light of the streetlamp.
Marcia took my arm. "It stopped on down the road. I'm certain a car's down there. Doesn't Harry Weymouth know where you live?"
Harry ought to know where I lived. I remembered giving him my address and his writing it down. I ran into the corner bedroom-the so-called master bedroom. With Marcia crowding against my shoulder, I looked out of the window toward the upper length of Linden Street.
It was too dark and misty on beyond the streetlight to make out anything at all. If a car had stopped, on west of my house a hundred yards or less, we couldn't see it from the sted corner window. As Marcia pressed against me to peer out the window, I felt her rope of hair, honey-soft, alive and like a touch of electricity, swing along the back of my hand, pleasantly rasping my skin. With a turn of my hand I grasped the braided hiair, heavy and thick. I tugged at her hair in my hand, Marcia's face lifted. Her face came around to mine. I could see the gleam of her teeth as her lips parted.
"No, no more," Marcia gasped, pushed her hands hard against me, and pulled back. "What a place for people to start kissing!"
The telephone rang.
I held her with my arms around her, with the phone ringing and ringing.
Marcia whispered, "You said your phone wasn’t connected?"
"It isn't."
It rang and rang.
I released her, going around to the phone as though in a dream. Lifting the receiver, I said, "Yes?" A voice said, "Dale, old sock! How are you, anyway? This is Jocko. I just got in, at the Palo Alto station, from the city. What d'you think happened? I found I haven't a cent in my pocket to get a cab and I expect you're gonna have to drive in to Palo Alto to pick me up-"
"Sorry," I said, "wrong number," and hung up.
"Albin, look at this!" Marcia called to me from the bedroom.
Marcia had turned on the lights. She flung out an arm toward one of those three-panel picture frames that stood on a pine dresser exactly like my own pine dresser in my own master bedroom. However, I had never before seen the photographs. One photo was of a round-cheeked man; another, of a matronly woman of about forty; and the third was of a pumpkin-faced boy of perhaps twelve.
"Albin, this is the wrong house!"
I took myself out of the bedroom and through the corridor back into the kitchen-nook, taking notice of everything to be seen. The wrong house? I couldn't have gotten into the wrong house. But here the telephone was in the kitchen-nook and not, if I'd thought about it a minute ago, in the corridor where my phone certainly belonged.
I began gawking around. No wonder Marcia had found food for sandwiches-the refrigerator and shelves were well stocked. The shining new electric stove wasn't my old beat-up stove, either. Then I noticed a piece of paper, half under the table, and I reached down for it with Marcia coining in behind me and waiting to see what I'd found.
It was an envelope and inside was a check made out to a Mabel Clemmers and signed by a Dorothy Tebbow along with an enclosed note: Dear Mabel-Here is your check for the cleaning month ending this Saturday. Mr. Tebbow and I are leaving with Billy for a weekend of skiing at Squaw Valley. Please remember to leave food and water for Gretel and try to keep her locked inside the patio pen or she'll run away again." The note was signed Mrs. Dale Tebbow. Carefully I laid the envelope with its contents on the table where the cleaning woman would find it waiting for her tomorrow morning.
"Albin, how could you walk into the wrong house unless you had too much grappa?"
I shook my head. It wasn't only the grappa. All the rancho-type houses in the tract were remarkably similar if not absolutely identical, and as part of the deal to persuade customers to buy, each house came furnished. As Marcia and I returned into the Together room, I said instead of us continuing south far enough for us to hit the through streets and my street, I'd wrongfully told her we'd turn at the third street off Spring Lane. Well, so we had and it was the wrong street.
"Then Mugsy lives here?"
"Looks like it."
"Let's get out of here. Help me with my coat."
Helping her, I said, "I just remembered, I have bitched it. No wonder Weymouth never showed up. He must be waiting at my house on Linden-either there, or by now he's given up and gone-"
"Albin, I do hear a carl" Marcia swung around from me, listening.
Right then Mugsy began barking wildly. Once again I ran to the picture window. This time a large car had stopped in front of the streetlamp. I watched a man getting out. By the streetlamp's light I saw the stocky figure and the face turned into the light, toward the house, and then I saw plainly it was Dr. Yvor Hodges. He pulled what appeared to be a chessboard from the car. He started walking up the driveway, passing into the deep shadows and out of the streetlight.
"But he can't be coming here to see you. It's not your house."
"Suppose he doesn't know it's not my house?" I asked, pushing her into the kitchen where I switched off the lights.
"Suppose we didn't lose Gormerly after all? When Mugsy started barking, what if it wasn't at cats but Gormerly prowling around?"
I threw open the back door to the rush of wet dark night. "If Gormerly saw us in here, wouldn't he think this was my house? And who else could have sent Hodges here? What if Hodges is up to his neck in this business with both Laurel and Gormerly? Marcia, my love, you've brought me luck. I'm going to have a try at nailing down this thing tonight. I can handle Hodges. I'm safe as in church with Mugsy, who'd tear Hodges apart if he lifted a hand. We'll celebrate tomorrow with a magnum of champagne. Right now, out,, quick, and don't make a sound. Coast the Lotus down the alley to the next street-"
"Oh, you talk too much! There! You hear? He's already at the front door-"
The doorbell filled the whole house with a loud buzzing like a swarming of bees, that instantly started up a pandemonium of barking from Mugsy.

Chapter 8

1.
I cut off Marcia's protests that she wouldn't leave unless I did, by turning her around toward the hazy outline of the Lotus on the far side of the patio and hastily asking her to act as my safety man. If she didn't hear from me by midnight, I wanted her to get hold of Harry, tell him everything I'd told her, and have him put either his security police or the sheriff's office on finding out fast why I hadn't turned up. My request seemed to satisfy Marcia. She said, "Yes-yes, I will, good luck," and bolted for the Lotus.
I waited until I saw she'd reached the Lotus. Then I shut the back door while the front doorbell jabbed out repeated bursts, now like hornets trying to swarm into the house, while Mugsy about raised tie roof with her barking.
I took my time going into the Together room, wanting to allow Marcia a margin of time to get away before I opened the front door. In here, Mugsy was slavering, barking in the high excited yipping of a Doberman in a passion, and standing on her hind legs with her front paws on the door. I caught Mugsy by the collar and switched on the outside light. Looking through the Judas window I could see Yvor Hodges on the steps, a chessboard under one arm. His broad Irish pug of a face tilted to look back at me.
"Well, Yvor? Let me get a tighter grip on this dog," I said through the Judas window.
"Yes, that might be best."
I believed I was acting with great prudence. A fullgrown 90-pound Doberman, Mugsy was capable, I knew, of knocking down anyone threatening me, ripping him to shreds. I meant to keep Mugsy under my hand every minute after I let Hodges in. I ordered, "Sitl Quietl" and she obeyed, though alert and on guard when I opened the door. Hodges entered, stocky and self-assured, with that somewhat flamboyant manner about him of the successful surgeon. He glanced quickly around the room, sharp and darting glances that missed neither the coffeepot nor the empty coffee cups for two people.
"Well now, my boy, I'm not interrupting you, am I?"
"No, not in the least. A friend drove me here after we stopped in at the Blue Barn for a few drinks. She left some time ago. What brings you here?"
"I decided to come around to your house and have a little talk with you," said Hodges in his flat Boston way of speaking though I knew, as he knew I knew, he'd been bom in Colfax Springs and his way of speaking came from the three or four years, not more, of interning in one of the big Boston hospitals. He raised up the chessboard, nodding cheerfully at it. "We might have a game of chess."
"Yes. But this isn't my house, Yvor."
"Isn't your house?"
"No. All the tract houses look about the same and in the fog somehow I walked into the wrong house. It's the Tebbows'. They're away for the weekend."
There was a short silence.
"I see." Hodges squared his shoulders. "You mean you had a little too much to drink and walked into an empty house?"
"Something like that. Mine's a couple of streets below this one. How did you find me here, Yvor?"
There was a longer silence. He was breathing very hard.
"That's a good question. Yes, by George! we do need to have a little talk. Excuse me-" He turned, opening the door; and instantly I felt Mugsy strain under my hand and rise snarling with a lurch. Hodges called, "Fritz!" and looked around at me with his red pugnacious face hardening. "Watch that confounded dog, will you?"
With no great surprise I saw Gormerly's large shape in the white raincoat emerge palely from the darkness of the breezeway to stand, towering, in the doorway and there hesitate at his first sight of Mugsy. I felt Mugsy quiver as though ready to leap. With a Doberman such as she was, a lethal and savage bodyguard if provoked, I assured myself I was better armed than even with my .45 automatic. Mugsy could pull down a man as big as Gormerly and by the startled expression on his swollen oversized face, the mustache all lopsided and singed, he showed he knew it, too. And Hodges was well into his fifties and not at all formidable, at least as I saw him; so all in all, in the instant after Gormerly's arrival, I still thought the odds were on my side tonight with luck at last running my way.
 "Come in, Fritz," Hodges said. "Albin, you've met Fritz Gormerly even if you haven't been introduced until now. He's an associate of mine."
"Tell Gormerly to stay where he is or I'll let the dog loose on him."
 "No, I wouldn't do that. Albin, my boy, we need to have a quiet talk. It's for your own good and advantage."
"The girl's gone, Doc," said Gormerly, inching a few steps into the room and keeping his distance from Mugsy, who'd become ominously silent. "She's gone and so's her car."
"All the better," Hodges said, his eyes watching me and the dog. "Who was she, Fritz? Do you know?"
 "A college kid, she looked like in the Blue Barn, who picked up Durango for free drinks."
"Better have a quick search around the house anyway, Fritz."
 "Hold it, both of you. Yvor-I'd like to ask you a straight question."
"All you want."
"Aren't you the friend Laurel Turner told me would phone me at seven, earlier this evening?" I asked and waited for Hodges to bluster and deny he knew what I was talking about.
"That's right," Hodges said.
"You're-admitting it?"
"Now compose yourself, my boy. You've always had too quick a temper for your own good."
"Damn you, Yvor, you set me up to walk out today at quitting time with the Skyjack specifications."
"I assure you everything was arranged admirably. It's entirely your fault there's been any difficulty. You were to wait this evening in the phone booth at the station until I could phone you and give you instructions," Hodges explained mildly. "Fritz was parked and waiting to drive you to my hospital-"
"Gormerly shot at me! Didn't he tell you?"
"Only with an air pistol," Hodges said even more mildly.
That set me off. I heard my own voice in anger:
"I don't believe, by God, you were going to phone mel Wasn't Gormerly supposed to nick my leg, claim it was an accident, so sorry, and offer to rush me to your hospital?"
"One way or another, Albin, you've given us considerable trouble this evening-" Hodges carefully placed the chessboard on edge against the table and looked around him, curiously. "So we're all in the wrong house? Well, well. My boy, you drink too much."
"I hear you're telling everyone in town I was blind drunk when I was brought to your hospital two and a half years ago."
Hodges gave me a long, steady look.
"You smelled to high heaven of very bad whisky when Fritz carried you straight from the ambulance into the emergency operating room that night."
"Gormerly carried me?"
"Doc-* Gormerly spoke in a sudden uneasy tone from my left.
"Yes, indeed," Hodges said. "It was providential, I've always believed. That night Fritz was driving the ambulance back from San Jose. He passed by only a minute or so after you'd gone over into the ditch. Even if nothing could be done for Vicki, he saved your life by getting you to the hospital."
"Now, Doc," protested Gormerly, "we're wastin' time-" His voice broke off as he saw me swing around toward him, bringing Mugsy with me.
He was four or five feet away from me, standing in front of the fireplace, the firelight gleaming on his face, and I could see the drops of sweat glistening on his forehead. I felt my eye straining at him. My blood seemed to blow and surge. It was instantaneous. It was as though I had been hit by lightning. I hurled the words at him:
"You drove back drunk from San Jose!"
"Doc-"
"You forced us off the road! To save your own lousy dirty hide, afterwards you poured your bottle over me before hauling me out of the ditch .. . Mugsyl Get himl" I shouted and let her go.
"Doc!" Gormerly cried.
As Mugsy sprang, Hodges whipped out a revolver and fired. The explosion deafened me. Mugsy collapsed. She fell, like stone. Her body sprawled blackly on the brown rug. I dropped on one knee beside her.
She had died between one second and another, her body quivering and then still under my hand. She lay motionless on the rug like a black seal, dead, unbreathing. A red welling of blood came from where she'd been shot through the eye. I rose up on my feet and continued going, charging, hitting at Hodges, knocking him back against the door; and then Gormerly threw his enormous arms upon me.
"Fritz, take him to the car," I next heard Hodges ordering as I struggled against Gormerly.
"Hurry. Quick now, before I switch off the lights. There's been an attempted break-and-enter here: a robbery, that's what the Tebbows must think when they get back. Give me a minute. I'll wipe off our fingerprints on the door. Hurry, Fritz. That's it ... club him down. Not too hard. He's valuable property."
I must have shouted I'd kill Gormerly and I meant it. I meant it with all my heart, with Mugsy shot dead behind us, and myself discovering Gormerly was the driver of the car that had forced Vicki off the road that night, those years ago. It blew up in me like fire.
But Gormerly overpowered me. He muffled me with his hands. He struck me to my knees. The house tilted. A door banged against my head. Cement steps rapped against my ribs. The night howled around me.
I had a half-stunned knowledge of being bundled along the driveway by Gormerly and of being thrown into the rear seat of a large enclosed auto. Gormerly plumped down next to me. My breath strangled in me and then I slid off somewhere, down, down into a deepening darkness, with a huge roaring of blood beating in my ears.
I came to enough to notice when Hodges drove into the broad six-lane width of Santa Ana, going north toward Colfax Springs. Gormerly gave me a shake to awaken me. I then heard Hodges' flat voice, speaking to me from the front seat:
"Albin! Can you hear me? Shake him again, Fritz."
"He hears you, Doc."
"If you give us more trouble, I shan't mind if Fritz has to break an arm or if necessary we'll do what was done to stop that mad dog when it tried to attack Fritz. It's immaterial to me whether you arrive at my hospital as a casualty or not."
After five or six more minutes of going along Santa Ana I was aware of Hodges turning off the highway, up into the wooded hospital grounds. He drove through a dark and clammy fog, the way lit badly by a few lights spaced along the grounds. The car continued around to the rear wing of the old two-storied stuccoed building that Hodges had put up a quarter of a century ago as a private hospital at a time when hospitals were in much scarcer quantity than now. The car stopped. Hodges got out. "Fritz, what's delaying you?"
"I don't dare unloose Durango enough to git him or me out. Git Roy to help."
"Can't a man your size handle a man less than a hundred and fifty pounds?"
"If I let go of him, to start gitting us out, hell try to bite again."
"Nonsense." Then I heard Hodges' voice go louder as if he had thrust his head inside the car for a closer look at us. "Fritz, what've you done to him? Is he unconcious?"
"I had to bash him a couple times. Where's Roy?"
Hodges swore at Gormerly and then said to get me out, quick. I let myself go limp as though stunned when Gormerly pulled me from the car and threw me over a shoulder like a bag of potatoes; he carried me up into the first-floor entrance. Hodges preceded us, switching on lights. It was as though I were being lugged in all over again from a roadside ditch, smashed up and in great pain, and I felt the continuing shock of having discovered that this execrable man, from whose shoulder my head and shoulders dangled down his back, my legs down his front, had driven the vehicle that forced Vicki off the road. As soon as I had the chance and thought Gormerly was enough off guard I succeeded in delivering him a kick between his own legs. It caught Gormerly by surprise. He dropped me.
I scrambled up off the floor, but lost a good couple of seconds while getting my bearings before gathering myself to make a dash for the exit. I was too slow. Once again Hodges whipped out his revolver.
"Stay where you are. This wing's been closed off for the last year. I've only two bed patients in the entire hospital. They won't hear you: they're at the front. Gormerly-stand up. Get over here. Get this man upstairs."
"Doc, he kicked me in the balls. I can't hardly walk."
Hodges spoke to me in a cold passion, warning me to take care.
"What exactly do you want of me?"
"I want what Laurel Turner gave you at quitting time."
“The silver dollar?"
"Oh, that," Hodges said. "No. Keep it as a souvenir. I want what you carried out in your own person.. .."
Hodges turned. As he did, I saw a small rosy man in a white orderly's uniform advancing toward us from the far 'end of the corridor. "Oh, there, Roy," Hodges called, "Give us a hand." Then he said to me, "Fix your eyepatch, can't you?"
I restored it over the eye.
I offered no resistance when Gormerly seized on to me. "With the muscular little orderly on my other side, the two of them propelled me up the stairs after Hodges along the littered and unswept floor of a second-story corridor.
"In here," said Hodges.
They hustled me into a four-bed ward with a lavatory on one side, a wall phone, three unmade beds and a fourth made up without sheets, only blankets, near a narrow window where outside in the darkness light from the room reflected on a rusty iron grill of fire escape. What really captured my attention was in the middle of the room: a fluoroscope nearly as high as the ceiling. Then they threw me upon the bed. They strapped me down. They pulled up the metal sides of the bed and left me trussed up like a chicken. I heard Gormerly ask, "Where's Laurel? Why ain't she in here, helpin'?"
Hodges said, carelessly, she was downstairs and would be up soon enough, obviously not caring whether I heard him or not. So I spoke up. I said he was making a great mistake, asking him if he didn't know I'd stop at nothing to see him ruined and disgraced? Big talk. Empty talk and he knew it.
"Albin, look here," Hodges said, kindly enough. "I'm in debt over my head. I'm on the edge of going smash. Everything I've ever worked for will be lost and I'm growing too old to continue much longer as a surgeon even if I wanted to continue. Men I've known, caught in as intolerable a position as I'm being pushed into, would be so sickened and disgusted they'd say good-bye to this kind of a world-they'd kill themselves. I don't mind admitting I've thought of that as a simple and positive solution-"
From one side Gormerly said, "Now, Doc." Hodges glanced at him and then told me, more vigorously, "But I'm not throwing in the sponge quite that easily. The big hospitals that've been built, along with the huge medical clinics in Palo Alto and Menlo Park-and all over this area, by God-they've beaten me to my knees. I've lost all my employee medical-service contracts except two to the big clinics. I now run this establishment with only myself, a day physician, three day nurses, a night matron, Frieda Gormerly, Fritz, and Roy here. We've only two bed patients. They're both in the front wing on the downstairs floor. All this I tell you, to tell you you can shout but no one will hear you. Either you decided to cooperate with me as someone I had every reason to trust-as someone who won't forget I once saved his life by my skill as a surgeon-"
"The insurance company paid over five thousand dollars for your skill as a surgeon," I said. "What I won't forget, ever, is that you told people I was brought here drunk after driving into a ditch and causing my wife's death. I wasn't even at the wheel that night Ask Gormerly why my wife was forced off the road. Ask him, Yvor. Ask him!"
Hodges stopped back from my bed. I saw his face momentarily fall slack. His eyes struck around questioningly at Gormerly. Then, once more, Hodge's own face hardened. He squared up his shoulders as with a renewed purpose and energy. Nodding curtly to Gormerly to follow him, he passed out of the room. They left me in there with Roy, a little orange-haired manikin of an orderly no more than five feet tall, with the shoulders of a miniature bull.

2.
I was left alone with Roy for fifteen to twenty minutes. I had the time to start thinking all over again about what Hodges had told me downstairs-that I had carried out of SMC's high-security building in my own person, not on my own person, what he wanted from me. The following thought that came to me was such a monstrous one that at first I shied off from accepting my own reasoning.
With a stricken feeling I took myself back in memory to quitting time at SMC when I'd walked into Laurel Turner's dispensary. I'd been very much on guard. On the bulletin board outside the dispensary I'd previously read about the huge Czechoslovakian spy capsule, and I was keyed up and on the alert in case Laurel tried to give me a large capsule to swallow. Instead, she'd only given me a Rennilin tranquilizer. Again I could see it: a little blue and white capsule, much smaller than a man's finger joint.
But a most disquieting question now pricked at me. Why couldn’t a length of hair-fine photo-wire easily be coiled inside a capsule even the size of one of those blue and white Rennilin capsules? My stomach contracted. No, I thought to myself. Wait a minute. I hadn't swallowed that first capsule. Marcia! With a shock of pure terror I recalled, yes! it was Marcia who had rushed into dispensary and had popped the capsule down her throat.
"Easy there, chum," Roy said, throwing his stub of cigarette on the floor. "You can't break those leather straps."
"Let me loose!"
"Can't. Dr. Hodges’ll be back in a few minutes." "What's in this for you?"
Roy lit another cigarette and grinned, not answering. I moved my head away from the sight of him. I thought to myself, Hold on! When did Marcia swallow the capsule? A little after four, today. All right. Say she's got a twenty-four-hour margin. All right, again. If you go and tell Hodges, no, I never swallowed it, Marcia Herrera walked in the dispensary when Laurel was out, and to tease me took it out of my fingers and popped it down her own throat, well, what will Hodges do? Marcia's home by now. Old man Herrera must be over seventy. That brother of hers won't be there. At least I haven't seen him since I got back from Mexico. Sure as hell, Hodges will pack Gormerly up to the Herreras' after Marcia. Say nothing to Hodges. Nothing. Stall for time. You know Marcia won't let you down. Come midnight, she'll be phoning Harry Weymouth to tell him everything you told her. More than that, she knew Hodges had walked up the driveway to see you at the wrong house. She'll have Harry bringing the sheriffs men here to the hospital and on Hodges' neck within another two hours. So hold on. Stand on the burning deck, eating peanuts by the peck. Stall for time. Two hours only. Then get Marcia off on the double to the Stanford Medical Center where they've got the finest X-ray equipment on the Coast...
I was trying to sight across my chest at my watch, where my arm was strapped, when Laurel came in. She carried a pan of hot water and disinfectant to the bed and I saw she was in her white nurse's uniform. Roy moved over to help her. They didn't unstrap me or try to remove my torn coat. But Roy unbuttoned my shirt. Laurel wiped off my face, adjusted the patch, and then cleaned down along my chest, where I'd leaked my own blood; and she used an astringent that smarted to stop more bleeding from a cut on my cheek and another at the corner of my mouth. Hodges returned, now wearing a white physician's jacket. He was followed by Gormerly, who pushed in one of those padded examining tables.
Drawing up a chair by the bed, Hodges sat down, straddling out his legs. Then with a kick of his legs, getting himself set forward on the edge of the chair, again he exploded in a tirade against the big hospitals built during the last decade or so in Santa Clara County, along with the growth of the enormous medical clinics to take care of the thousands of families pouring into the county to find jobs in the expanding electronics and aerospace industries. He was a man, I realized, obsessed by the changing times, grown bitter, and perhaps also trying to justify his actions to me by blaming his own decline and financial ruin upon the industrialization of the valley.
Where once he could hire physicians for eight to ten thousand a year, he said savagely, now any young internist milk-fresh from his medical training asked from twenty to forty thousand a year and got it at the big factory clinics. He couldn't go against that kind of competition-running assembly lines for patients. He hit his fists together. "I tell you," he said in a heated tone, "instead of blowing my head off and going down to defeat, by God, why shouldn't I get my chance at some of the money others have grabbed out of government contracts? I've a few people here who trust me-Laurel, Fritz, Roy, and Fritz's sister. They're helping me. They know I'm a gentleman. I've promised they'll never get into difficulties if by any bad chance my plans go wrong. Neither would you, Albin. I'm in this to win or lose-but no one else backing me will ever risk any chance of trouble, I promise you-"
"Yvor-" Laurel interrupted him far more gently than I'd heard her speak to anyone before. "Yvor, we haven't too much time, have we?"
Pushing out his legs from the chair, Hodges stared at her, and then as though brought back to a more immediate purpose he told me in a much cooler tone of voice:
"It's this way. Last fall I began looking around to discover how I could profit as so many others have from the billions the government's pouring into throwing hardware up into the sky. I'm very capable with my hands, you know-most surgeons are. I'd heard of a spy capsule a Czech chemist made ten or fifteen years ago. Let me show my version-" From his side pocket he produced a little blue and white capsule I recognized as similar to one of those blue and white Rennilin capsules I'd seen this afternoon in Laurel's dispensary.
"Watch this." Taking the capsule between his thumb and forefinger he rubbed his thumbnail against it. For me, it was like watching a small beetle's wing case open and sprout two fragile little wings of plastic. Pressing the capsule together again, Hodges shoved it into his pocket. "It's of plastic with plastic-spring extrusions secured by micro-bits of plain fish glue-organic glue. The one I showed you is the first I made, to experiment with. Understand?"
I understood only too well; I was ahead of him. I couldn't speak for a moment.
"You swallowed the second capsule I made," Hodges explained. "After swallowing it, at about four-thirty this afternoon I believe, soon afterwards your intestinal juices digested the micro-spot of glue, releasing the extrusions to dig themselves into the membranes lining your intestinal tract."
I managed to ask him if the photostat tacked up on Laurel's bulletin board, warning SMC employees of the Czech capsule the size of a horse pill, hadn't been put there as a red herring for me? Hodges, damn him, laughed. "My boy, exactly. Laurel pulled down the photostat before she left the building. A matter of psychology, like giving you a silver dollar."
The thought of that little plastic capsule of Hodges', pronged like a horned beetle and now inside Marcia's delicate inner membranes, started a kind of uncontrollable jerking in my own legs as if I was a dead frog touched with an electric wire.
Bending over me, Hodges said in his cool flat voice, "If you'd completely observed Laurel's instructions after she paid you the thousand dollars, we'd have saved all this botch of draggin you here. You were to remain in the phone booth. Fritz would have been irresistibly seized by an impulse to shoot at those confounded pigeons. He's shot at them before. As a matter of fact, he was fined once. He'd have fired harmless twenty-two pellets, by accident--striking one of your legs. You'd have been wrathful, yes. But wouldn't you have permitted him to run you to my hospital? Most certainly. However, you scampered away. By George, that upset all our plans!"
"Tell me-why did you thumb me, Yvor? Why?"
"Why? Assuming all had gone according to plan, once we had you here and X-rayed you," Hodges said, "if I had told you we'd better place you on the operating table to correct the adhesions the X-ray showed, would you have objected? No, sir. We'd have run you in here, operated, my piece of goods safely out of you, and you never knowing anything about it. As it is, there'll be only a small incision. You'll be up and walking in three days. It's less than an appendicitis operation."
"After I'm up, what happens when I blow the whistle on you? Or are you going to silence me by finishing me as you did the Doberman?"
"You don't seem to think so very clearly, my boy. You'll risk finishing your own father if you don't go in with us."
"My father? Pop? What the hell do you mean?"
"Turn me in and he's turned in, that's what I mean. At my suggestion, some months ago he bought a thousand shares in Wently and Phillips Electronics, I flew back to Washington. It was my final try at asking the National Health Institute to give me my hospital a small grant after the millions they've given other hospitals on the peninsula. No, my hospital can't meet standards. Refused. I saw Dick-your father used to be a patient of mine, remember? He asked me about the electronic plants out here. I told him Wently and Phillips, with their shares now down almost to nothing, might eventually be as good a speculative gamble as Varian Associates were half a dozen years ago..."
Stocky and powerful, Hodges stood, with his blue Irish gaze thoughtfully upon me. "If the Pentagon ever believes you've helped fish out specifications from one electronics center to sell to another one," Hodges said deliberately, "one in which your own father had previously bought shares cheaply, I ask you-where would that leave your father and his army career?"
"Pop would never do such a thing!"
"Innocently, mind you, he would and he did. Your father asked me for a good speculation because he knows I know the standing of most of the electronic plants around here. Once I retrieve that small piece of goods Laurel gave you, in five months to a year the shares your father bought at fifty cents a share ought to jump to fifteen, twenty, or even twenty-five dollars. We'll all be knee-deep in honey and clover the rest of our lives-you, too, if you'll be sensible."
Upon that, Hodges abruptly left the bed. He glanced at his watch. He gave orders. Gormerly began fiddling with the dials of the fluoroscope in the middle of the room. With Hodges watching, Roy unstrapped me and removed my torn coat and shirt. Laurel wiped off my body down to my waist with a towel. I shivered in the cold room. I heard a humming sound from the fluoroscope. Gormerly spoke over his shoulder. "O.K., Doc. Any time."

3.
Very professional about it, Laurel took my arm while Hodges explained I was to step on the platform of the machine and stand erect as he ran the fluoroscope screen up and down. I took a step or so along with Laurel and immediately balked as the thought struck me that a fluoroscope examination would show up the fact that I wasn't the one who'd swallowed Hodges' capsule.
Hodges said, "It won't hurt you."
"It's not that," I said, and Laurel tugged at my arm and having her alongside me suddenly connected me up to last night when she was at my house and explaining about the security fiuoroscope screen checkout as the reason why she couldn't walk out with baby. With relief I said, "Yvor, if you put me in front of that fluoroscope you'll fog up the microfilm or whatever it was I swallowed in that damn capsule of yours!"
Hodges' eyes opened and then he smiled. "My dear boy. A burst of X-rays from a fluoroscope of this moderate size won't fog a developed film. Only an undeveloped film. Come, now."
I heard Laurel's giggle.
I glanced at her and she turned her head away and I realized I'd been a fool, yesterday evening, and Laurel had diddled me, good, with all her talk of the security fluoroscope fogging up a roll of microfilm if a nurse tried to walk out with it. I should have asked her if the film hadn't been developed; and I hadn't asked, I hadn't even thought to ask. Well, I'd been fluoroscoped before so I knew what to do. A person placed his back against the X-ray apparatus that threw shadows of his internal plumbing upon the large screen held directly in front of him between two perpendicular metal bars. Taking my other arm and leading me toward the machine, Hodges said, "Hold your breath when I give you the signal. Press your back hard against the plate. We ought to pick up my capsule on the screen. If we don't, well have to give you barium to drink and an enema and try X-ray photos. But with luck, we can save time with the fluoroscope screen."
I was prepared to follow dutifully as Hodges ordered. He could try me first with the fluoroscope and when he failed to locate any capsule inside my internal works, I'd let him lose more time with the barium and the X-ray photos. If it wasn't past midnight by then, I would lie, I decided. I'd say I'd vomited. I'd been ill after leaving the dispensary, and I must have thrown up the capsule when sick in SMC's men's lavatory.
It was the best I could think of. The photostat had reported a 24-hour period after taking the capsule before real trouble started and I knew Marcia would telephone Harry at midnight. Once they got me out of here, Marcia should still have an ample margin of time to be rushed to the Stanford Medical Center.
From possibly a sympathetic feeling, though, of the thought of that plastic beetle of Hodges' now digging into Marcia's inner membranes, I was beginning to have cramping sensations myself. So I crossed over from the bed, Laurel and Hodges guiding me as if I was a patient.
"Up here," Hodges repeated.
As I say, I was prepared to obey dutifully when I happened to see Gormerly's self-satisfied and fatuous leering expression of being pleased to death at watching me finally come around and doing as I was told. My gorge rose. I seemed to hear once more my wife's scream when lights of an oncoming car blazed up directly ahead in the wrong lane. I saw Mugsy shot, black and motionless, on a carpet in front of a burning fire. It all took me by the throat.
Instead of stepping upon the fluoroscope's platform, without thinking I swung hard with my right leg and kicked the fluorescent screen. It crashed into pieces all over the floor. The whole fluoroscope machine vibrated, hummed loudly, blew off sparks from a short, and emitted puffs of acrid blue smoke. Both Gormerly and Roy fell upon me with shouts and threw me on the bed and there was a brief period of myself struggling, much confusion, swearing, my eyepatch slipping loose and having to be replaced. When a kind of explosive silence was restored, Gprmerly and Roy drew back; Yvor Hodges evidently had shut off the electricity by now, the machine had ceased humming, and he advanced to my bed and stood in front of me, still speechless, his square pug of a face drained a yellowish color, his hands knotting and opening.
Then he said, very quietly, "If those butterfly wings on my plastic capsule have fully opened up as I believe by now they have, at any time fifteen hours after that happens, you can have a complete stoppage, followed by convulsions, uremic poisoning, and a rapid death. You-"
The phone rang.
Impatiently he told Laurel to answer it. Laurel stepped to the wall phone and said, 'Yes?" listened, drew in her breath sharply, and said, "A deputy sheriff?" She glanced, frightened, toward Hodges. "Yvor-it's Frieda from the matron's desk. A deputy sheriff's down there. He's here to arrest Albin Durango for criminally breaking and entering the Tebbow house on Oak Lane in Los Flores tract. Neighbors across the street recognized Al. They wrote down the license number of your car, Yvor, and phoned in to the sheriff's office in Sunnyvale after you drove Al away. What will I tell Frieda? She says the deputy sheriff is waiting to take Al into custody."

Chapter 9

1.
Seizing the receiver from Laurel's hand, Hodges said, "Frieda, let me speak to the officer." He paused, visibly gathered himself together, and now very easily and fluently he said:
"This is Dr. Hodges speaking, officer. What is it you wanted? ... No, I don't deny I drove him away in my car. He's a mentally disturbed patient of mine. Yes, I know he broke into a house. He phoned me himself to come and get him. He didn't know where he was. He's now under sedatives... No. No, I can't possibly permit you ... Very well. Wait there. I'll be down. I’ll discuss it with you in a minute or so."
Hanging up, he rapidly ordered Laurel to go get a 50 mm. bottle of scopalamine-hydrobromide and a hypodermic injector from the supply room. He turned and came to where Gormerly and Roy were keeping me pinned down on the blankets. Out Laurel went, running.
"Doc, we'll lose everything if you let him get taken to jail. What you gonna do?"
"Nobody's taking him to jail!" Hodges hit a fist against the palm of his other hand. "I've got to go downstairs and waste time talking to that officious fool. If necessary I'll phone Judge Walthers. I’ll say I've got a mentally disturbed patient I'm treating. I can't possibly release him to the sheriff at present. What's delaying Laurel? Where's she-Hold him, can't you!" he exclaimed as I made a try at rolling myself off the bed. With all his weight, Gormerly promptly bore down on me. "You, sir," Hodges told me, I’ll put you to sleep. I'll keep you asleep until we're through with you for tonight-
"Doc, here's Laurel."
Laurel had returned breathless, face flushed, with a rubber-stoppered bottle in one hand and a hypo injector in the other mat she gave to Hodges. "Here,' he said. "Hurry. Wipe Durango's arm with alcohol-"
What then happened became confused and mixed-up for me because I threshed around, making a great racket by my protests. I couldn't let Hodges knock me out by an injection. I had to stay awake to save Marcia. Gormerly wrestled me down, harder. Roy, like a vicious little bull, threw himself on my arm, straightened it out from my shoulder, and held it secure for Laurel to dab on alcohol. Hodges bent over me.
I felt a stinging sensation. I kicked out. I jerked violently. Hodges swore. Suddenly my arm hurt like hell where he'd pierced it. Blood oozed all over the inside hollow of my elbow. I heard Gormerly's sharp exclamation from above me.
"Doc-you've busted off the needle in his arm!"
"Hold him, can't you? There, there-all right I've got it out. What a mess!"
"Yvor, did you give him the full shot?"
"No, damn it, my dear, I didn't. Less than half. Go quick, will you? I'll need a second 50 mm. and another disposable needle-"
"Doc! Somebody's at the door!"
Silence.
Their heads swiveled. Hodges took one lurching step forward and stopped. Still struggling, I managed to turn on my side. The door opened from the hallway for a face, dimly seen, to peer into the ward.
Stupefied, I watched George Whitsun stride in, his head bobbing with every step like a giraffe's head, his expression mighty fierce to see, wearing an olive-drab police cap, a sheriff's numbered badge on it. Following him was a pasty-faced mountainous woman, Fritz Gormerly's sister by her looks, in an untidy nurse's uniform.
For a delayed second I clean forgot that George was a weekend deputy sheriff, regularly employed Saturday and Sunday nights at guarding the big cement works, and I thought the scopalamine-hydrobromide shot must be taking hold and I was beginning to see visions while in a drugged dream.
"Look here, sir," Hodges told George, "this is an unwarranted intrusion. I'll talk to you downstairs-"
"Doctor, is that Durango, Albin Durango?"
"The man on the bed is not your man, officer. He's a patient-"
"Yes," I said loudly.
Slowly, hesitatingly, Gormerly backed away from George's approach. Roy dropped my arm. I sat up and reached down to the floor for my shirt. Towering above everyone in the ward, even Gormerly, George strode to my bed and stooped over me, with his back to all the others.
George demanded severely, "You admit breaking and entering a house in the Los Flores tract at approximately nine this evening?" Stooping lower his lips almost soundlessly shaped the words, "Marcia’s outside in the grounds..." He straightened up. "Come now, my man, up with you," he ordered and I'm certain he was secretly enjoying himself.
I said yes, I admitted my guilt, I accepted arrest, I'd come with him willingly. When I pushed feet down to the floor, from off the bed, the whole room swung a little around me as though we were all inside a cabin of a ship at sea during heavy swells.
Quickly pulling on my shirt, my left arm still sore from the hypo, as I stood I saw Fritz Gormerly out of the corner of my eye, a large and threatening shape directly at the head of my bed and in front of the window. I seemed to see everything through a rippling haze which threw the room all out of perspective. Laurel's once flawless face altered into a chalky white mask with black holes for eyes. Roy in appearance unexpectedly turned into a little brass minotaur with distended nostrils. Even as I balanced myself on my legs I now saw Yvor Hodges, somehow thickened and enlarged, his square pug face inflamed like a comic-valentine Irishman's, and in a thickly furious voice he warned George: "Officer, I won't permit my patient to be removed. Where's your warrant?"
"Doctor," said George from high above my head, "your hospital's outside the incorporated limits of Colfax Springs and subject to county authority and I don't need a warrant to take a man into custody who admits illegally breaking into and entering-"
"This patient of mine doesn't know what he's talking about, officer. Don't be a fool. Gormerly-strap Durango back in bed before he does someone more harm!"
Out from under his leather jacket, George flourished a black automatic, pointing it at Gormerly. "Whoa, now. Not too fast. Don't let's get excited."
There was a frozen instant of no one moving or speaking. I thought that George had the situation under control. That I could leave safely with him. But despite the outward impression George gave of a police officer of iron command, his nerves played him something of the same trick mine had when twitching my finger on the trigger during a similar situation back in the men's lavatory of the Blue Bam.
I heard a distinct click! from George's .22 automatic. Thunderstruck, I watched a cigarette pop up from it and fall in a graceful arc to the floor. From the black plastic muzzle pulsed a blue flame, very handy for lighting a cigarette. I knew exactly how George felt I saw his eyes bulge upon the black cigarette lighter, that only Marcia could have supplied him, as if discovering he had grasped a small serpent in his hand.
At my left Fritz Gormerly slowly said, "Ah-h-h," like a man letting out his breath, then bawled, "Doc! By God, they've tried that trick on me twice! The cop's a fake-"
He hit George a crashing blow on the temple. George's head rocked back. George fell unconscious in a heap like a man dropped through the floor by a trapdoor. He fell all in a buddle, a heap of old clothes and broken sticks.
I then heard Gormerly's braying laugh. Something snapped inside me. Whirling around upon Gormerly, I charged him with my head down, catapulting myself upon him; my head rammed him, and he tumbled backwards and took most of the window glass and window frame out of the ward room in his tumble.
Glass smashed into more fragments as he thumped heavily outside the second-story window upon the iron grilled platform of the fire escape. My own impetus had carried me headfirst out the window opening onto Gormerly as though finding myself incredibly launched through space in some wild nightmare of wet darkness and insanely shouting voices.
Undoubtedly the effect of the half portion of scopalamine-hydrobromide jabbed into me, by now was also beginning to give me a sensation of having entered into an unreal and dream-like world filled with cliff-walkers and maniacs. The fire escape must have been one of those old-fashioned affairs, similar to those fire escapes at Colfax Springs Harding High during my time there twenty years ago, with the iron ladder supported at the short end by weights that balanced the lower length, extending out horizontally from the grilled platform at the exit window and some twenty feet or more above the ground level.
After Gormerly fell, wildly kicking his legs into the crackling glass strewing the fire escape's platform, from the shock of finding himself propelled out from the ward room, instead of saving himself, he threw himself away from me in the darkness and out upon the extended ladder. His weight at once started the creaking descent of the ladder and all I knew, in that unreal blackness, that steady roaring of voices, the next second Gormerly had vanished.
The second afterwards I myself was tumbling and had grasped by both hands an iron rung while my legs and body flew out into empty space. Where Gormerly had flown off to, I couldn't imagine. The third second my lower body and legs dropped with a great crash back upon the slowly descending iron ladder, while the weight of my body nearly tugged my arms out of their sockets.
Then I seemed to hear from far below me the thud! as of a large sack hitting the ground-a sack filled with bones, blood and flesh.
Lights suffused a pale milkiness in the night fog all around the hospital building as Hodges, or someone up in the ward room, had pulled on an emergency switch. In this dream where I found myself a dazed participant, I seemed to be hanging by my hands from an impossible trapeze. If I let go I knew certainly I would fall as Gormerly had fallen. The ladder tipped down, down, ever closer to the ground with what appeared excruciating slowness. I can't hang on any longer! Thud and crash. I dropped to the ground. Shouts came from above me.
As the iron ladder now lacking my weight began lifting, its shadow contracted on the ground. I forced myself to stand. I next saw Gormerly a few feet away, attempting to stand. I kicked him down. I kicked him again, nearly fell over, staggered toward the hospital wall where I supported myself, panting heavily. I heard a creaking of the iron ladder. Somebody must be on it, descending. Get away, an inner voice warned me. Run. So I must have run a few wobbly steps out of the floodlights to enter unexpectedly a world of blackness.
Though hidden from the hospital floodlights myself, dimly I saw up along the line of the second-story window. Up there, clinging insecurely to the ladder, was a little brass minotaur with smoking nostrils, his orange fur bright, as I saw him, and the white orderly's coat wrapped around his small muscular body. The little minotaur was so obviously frightened on the slowly descending ladder that I felt an unreasoning impulse to laughter when I should have been taking myself away the hell from there and sounding the alarm to bring help to rescue George.
So I again gathered myself up to run and run, and I did -two or three steps, and into a small soft object in the blackness that instantly said, incensed, in Marcia's voice, "Damn you, you brute, let me go-oh, it's you Albin-" I felt myself swaying as I attempted to set her upon her feet. She whispered, "Where's George? Who's the red-headed man on the ladder?" As I answered, calmly, I thought at the time, I recall that Marcia was furiously tugging at me as though to get my legs moving. I said George had been knocked unconscious, we couldn't help him now, and why had she given him her fool cigarette lighter to flourish as an automatic pistol?
Still pulling me along in a direction that she could locate, first by the gravel drive under our feet, next by the upward slant of ground, Marcia whispered passionately and all in a breath that from the cross street below my house she'd watched Hodges and Gormerly push me into Hodges' car, that she'd thought of George, that she'd driven to his place, and that she'd gotten George in such a hurry he'd forgotten to bring his .45 with him.
Then she urged, "Run, can't you? Try to run! The thickets are up here, not too far, where we can hide." She pulled at me. She must have been convinced I'd been knocked down as George had been because I was logy and half out and giving her an impression of not anymore knowing or caring about what was happening.
The effect of Hodges' abortive shot of scopalamine-hydrobromide was spreading. I could begin to feel it; but its effect on me that night began by placing me in a state approximating that of a twilight sleep. For a period my legs and body still could obey someone else's commands. I would walk and even attempt to run, though badly, repeatedly falling down, when ordered to run.
My memory of that night is in patches. Even during those four or five minutes when Marcia was tugging me by my hand, the two of us trotting and lurching like two drunks, uphill, behind the hospital, I was desperately trying to remember something important which I knew I must tell her.
A small center of consciousness remained active, deep within my head. It spoke warningly to Marcia of the Rennilin capsule she'd swallowed before quitting time today in SMC's dispensary.
But it was like trying to shout for help in a nightmare. I strained and strained. I could not get words out from my own twilight dream of prickles and nettles thrusting at me from a blackness of Marcia's real world. These prickles and nettles were from an overgrown thicket in which we briefly bid.
Actually, it was a huge overgrown hedge dating back half a century ago when all this upper part of the land belonged to the gardens and lawns of the old resort hotel, burned down when I was a boy, and once owned by Yvor Hodges' grandfather.
I can remember luminous dots of lights searching the grounds far below us, and of hearing voices muffled by fog and distance. Then from on west sounded the piercing shriek of a police car's siren, somewhere along the Santa Ana Boulevard.
Marcia had been born and brought up in Colfax Springs. She knew all this country as well as I did, if not better. Later, she told me she'd parked her Lotus on a side street above the hospital and east of Santa Ana at George's suggestion, while George had driven his Chewy around in front of the hospital.
So she now tugged and hauled me on up higher, over a rocky meadow, across a tumbledown fence, and above the fog level, along a grass-grown lane she knew that carried us across the shoulder of this side of the mountain upon which lifted the black twisted shapes in the moonlight of old apricot trees, flinging out their branches like ragged arms. She later told me that I went along docilely enough except that I often stumbled, repeatedly falling down. At the same time I would attempt to speak to her in the thick, unintelligible voice of a sleepwalker or of a man stupefied by too many glasses of grappa. Marcia said I mumbled and mumbled about a hollowed hill. She was afraid people were following us. Down I'd fall again, sprawling. Somehow she prodded and urged me up, even kicking me, anything to get me going that night. All the time, too, I was trying to shout to her from my own inner world that she'd swallowed a pill, that it would kill her, she'd have to drive immediately to the Medical Center.
I had a sensation of going along under water, of walking upon the uneven bottom of a rushing river, and of knowing that Marcia was in great danger somewhere above the water. I would take breath to shout. My lungs would be filled with a thick clotting, my voice would fail to break through the barriers.
Vaguely, I knew when Marcia lost her temper and pummeled me and roused me enough for me to push into her car and there sat myself. We were moving. From a distance, again I heard the screams of more police car sirens from along Santa Ana.
I felt Marcia suddenly swerve her Lotus. She drove to one side of the old road, stopping. She switched on the car radio to the police-band, picking up the last of a police broadcast describing an Albin Durango as an escaped psychopath from Dr. Hodges' hospital who was urgently wanted. Caution! Approach him with care. He may be armed. Less than an hour ago he attacked and seriously injured a hospital assistant after knocking down a deputy sheriff who'd arrived at the hospital to charge him with breaking into and robbing a house in the Los Flores tract below Colfax Springs...

2.
It had since been explained to me that half a 50 mm. injection of scopalamine-hydrobromide would undoubtedly send me staggering around through a black night of fantasies. Intermittent bursts of my own consciousness would break through, and then again fall back into a limbo from the effects of the drug.
All I know, I distinctly remember a time later that night when I stepped out of Marcia's car. There was a bright moonlight. I had an impression of being up here with Marcia on a high hill. With only my shirt on, no coat, I felt frozen. My teeth chattered. I shook as with an attack of malaria at every step along a short path.
Marcia led me from the Lotus into a black cavern of stone. In here it was all filled with the sweet smell of new hay and of horses. From somewhere under my feet came a whinny of a horse and a stamping of hoofs. I dropped into the sweet thick hay, piled up on the old plank floor. At the same time Marcia must have knelt down by me in the darkness to cover me with a couple of heavy horse blankets. Every word she said was glowingly clear and distinct in my ears:
 "Albin! Listen! Don't fall asleep yet. Albin! These blankets'll keep you warm for the next few hours. Listen! I couldn't get either Harry Weymouth or Paul. Can you understand? I phoned at the station phone before deciding to go for George and have him help. I couldn't get them through the SMC night operator. I know Paul's in San Jose. But no 'one answers at the San Jose number he left with SMC. Albin-"
I felt her shaking me. "Listen! You have to listen! That damned Dr. Hodges has the police after you with guns. You've got to hide here until I can get Harry tomorrow morning at our broadcast. Harry will have to be there for the TV broadcast. Can't you understand? You stay here. Hide here until I get back with Harry Weymouth. Albin? Albin ..."
I wanted only to sleep. A delicious warmness spread through every particle of my body. However, the need to warn Marcia about Hodges' capsule, to tell her to save herself, hammered at my consciousness. The need had never let go from the time I'd heard Hodges himself say there'd be only a fifteen-hour margin after swallowing the 'capsule until it began causing a blockage, uremic poisoning and death. I roused myself.
Well, I warned Marcia, all right.
I sat straight up. I took great gasping breaths. My roaring bellow that she'd swallowed the pill, this time sounded loud enough in my own head to break eardrums and knock down brick walls.
I had a feeling of my veins bursting after the effort I made, warning Marcia that sheep were on the hollowed hill, as that night she heard my mumbled squeak. Then evidently I let go of a last grasp on consciousness. I dropped down deep in drugged sleep, deep, there in the sweet-smelling hay of the old stone barn's haymow.

Chapter 10

1.
"You've the kind of come-hither eyes, luminous and voluptuous, Renoir liked to paint on his nudes. Did anyone ever tell you?"
"Yes. Frequently."
"Well, anyway, now they've brushed your hair and have you in that white hospital gown, you look pretty beautiful, I'd say."
"Oh, thank you."
"You needn't grin so derisively, I mean it. How was the operation? Rough?"
"No, my God, they just wheeled me into a big room, somebody fixed a funnel over my nose, somebody else poured a gallon of chloroform into the funnel, and zip! They opened me up."
"Yvor Hodges claimed it wouldn't be any worse than an appendicitis operation to remove his trick capsule. A person should be up and walking inside of three days."
“I’ll be up much sooner than that."
"Good for you."
"I could get up right now, if I wanted."
"Be careful."
"I can float in the air, too. See?"
"Wait a minute, Marcia. Don't float out of the window away from me-"
"Good-bye."
"Marcia!"
I struggled upwards into a kind of consciousness where I heard myself wildly shouting Marcia's name. I was in a great panic as though I had lost her forever. A terror filled me for her. She'd flown away. She'd gone forever out of my life. I felt an unendurable loss. I loved her. I was wrenched to the heart.
It must have taken me several minutes to realize that I had struggled free from a nightmare. That Marcia had not actually jumped off a hospital bed to fly away out any window.
All the same, as an aftereffect I felt still a terror and a sense of great personal loss. Where was she? At first I did not even know where I was. I was groggy, my mouth tasted of chemicals, and I felt a stinging sensation in the inner hollow of my arm as I moved myself.
Holding up a torn sleeve, I discovered a plaster bandage stuck over the torn place in my flesh where Hodges in his hospital had ineffectively jabbed with the hypodermic needle. Marcia-I thought: she had applied the strip of Band Aid. I called, "Marcia, Marcia ..." No reply. Where could she be? Opening wider a gummy eye I received a shock.
Green-gray early morning light showed through an open doorway. Outlined against this greenish light, a small black and misshapen animal on four stiff and spindly legs threatened me in a frozen posture of waiting to pounce. I got to my feet, legs knee-deep in hay. Immediately from this new view the black beast below my line of sight altered into a straight wooden chair.
I advanced. I found Marcia had left me what must have been her brother's checked sports jacket and tweed topcoat, for I couldn't see her old man clad in such coverings; and on the clothes she also had laid a piece of pasteboard upon which she'd printed words large enough for me to read in the dim morning's light: 

I LISTENED TO 6 A.M. NEWCAST. POLICE AND SHERIFF SEARCHING YOU IN LOS FLORES AREA. HIDE HERE. COFFEE AND FOOD BY CHAIR. TRYING TO GET HARRY OR PAUL OR BOTH AT SMC. BE BACK BY 8 OR 9. DON'T GIVE UP. MARCIA.

The luminous dial on my watch made it a quarter after six, this Saturday morning. I gulped down the hot coffee from the thermos jug, trying to shake myself loose from a drugged apathy. Up with you, damn you. Get going. That sort of thing.
A tin lunch box was on the floor by the chair. Before opening it, though, a thought struck me: if Marcia had been listening to the six-o'clock newscast, it now being only a quarter after six, meant she'd brought me the coats, coffee and food from the Herreras' house only a few minutes ago. I remembered Yvor Hodges saying last night there was only a fifteen-hour margin after swallowing that innocuous-looking plastic container. Marcia had grasped it from my hand. She'd popped it into her mouth a little after four yesterday afternoon. I felt a sympathetic cramping for her in my own vitals. It made me want to double up from a shaft of imagined pain at the thought of Marcia, right now perhaps, beginning to feel the effects of Hodges' plastic capsule as it released its prongs.
All this churned in my head as I snatched the jacket and rushed out of the stone barn, thrusting my arms into the narrow-shouldered jacket's sleeves. I couldn't remember ever coming to old man Herrera's place. At this time of year the sun hadn't lifted over the eastern hills. The light was tricky. A dim greenish hue suffused into the thin mist still clinging to the black branches of the old apricot trees like wisps of spiders' silk.
Up here I couldn't see Marcia's Lotus. The stone barn, I found, was built against the side of a steep hill. The barn's loft opened directly upon a muddy track which I now followed downwards, a couple of times losing my way as the mist increased. I lost sight of the barn altogether.
Somewhere, two or three roosters began crowing. A dog barked from up in the hills. From below me I could hear the rush and roar of cars along a highway that was probably Spanish Road. There was a good chance Marcia already had left to drive to SMC Electronics for the early Saturday morning TV broadcast where, I supposed, she counted on finding Harry Weymouth and Paul Perugia. In that case, I decided, the thing to do was to phone through at once to SMC to ask for Marcia or leave a message for her if she hadn't arrived.
I continued down the winding track and in about two more minutes I saw a tall old house lifting up behind a screen of poplar trees. I ran up the steps and hammering on the door, I shouted for Marcia. Next, I heard someone fling open a second-story window. An old lady I'd never seen in my life called down angrily that Marcia had left a quarter of an hour ago and for me to go away and stop pounding on the door. I knew the old lady up there wasn't Marcia's mother because Mrs. Herrera had died years ago so I asked, "Who are you?" She was the housekeeper, she said, and go away!
I asked urgently could I please use the phone: Marcia's life might depend upon my getting through to her at once. Well, the old lady stared down at me; obviously she never believed a word I'd said. She shouted, "You're drunk, young man. Go away instantly or I'll call the police," and she flung down the window, leaving me on the front door stoop, banging on the door to be let in. Then I thought, look here -the railroad station can't be more than ten minutes away. Get there, use the station phone, and by that time I was away from the house and legging it down a wide graveled driveway that carried me in another minute directly into Spanish Road. Off in the distance, perhaps a quarter mile away, through yellowish mist and smog, I could see the Colfax Springs railroad crossing gate lifted up in the attitude of a praying mantis.
I dogtrotted as fast as I could go along the bridle path at the side of the road. I thought, Marcia might be having stomach spasms right now. But she wouldn't pay any damn attention to them. No, that's like a girl. She'd rushed to hell off to SMC to get hold of Harry to help me. He'd better, too, preferably with lawyers. With George probably doped up and held quiet in Hodges' goddamn hospital-Hodges frightening everyone in the area by convincing the sheriff there's a mentally-disturbed patient, meaning me, at large. I don't know what happened to Harry last night. Yes, I do. I boxed him. Harry must have driven to my house. For all I know, perhaps by now Harry's decided the whole thing's a hoax. Well, get going faster. Come on. Push yourself a little.
I managed to get a glimpse of my watch. It was about six-forty when I crossed the tracks. Out of breath, I staggered up the station's wooden steps onto the platform, a good ten minutes before the 6:51 to Palo Alto pulled in from Los Gates at the south. Then, simultaneously, my eye caught sight through the morning mist of what must have been a commuter's car parked almost directly opposite the pay phone booth, with a man and wife inside the car, one of them obviously waiting for the 6:51 to arrive; and my ears picked up my own name blared forth from the car's radio in the tag end of an early morning newscast:
".. . Durango, a dangerous psychopath who attacked and injured two men last night-at the Colfax Springs Hospital, according to Sheriff Hawley, is still at large and presumably hiding somewhere in the Los Flores district. He is a man of thirty-three, very thin, deeply tanned, with tow-colored hair. He can be identified by the black patch over his left eye-"
As the rest of the newscast was drowned out by the loud clanking and huffing of an arriving train, instinctively I swung around with my back to the two people in the car.
It was too early for the 6:51 commute, I knew that; and I stood shakily on the edge of the platform, my back to the parked auto, afraid I'd be recognized if I tried to reach the phone booth, and I watched another of those goddamn cement trains go slowly past and then stop, blocking Spanish Road, and then again beginning to move as the engineer received a go-ahead signal. From behind me I heard a hoarse shout, "Hey, you, there! Wait!"
I didn't wait. I jumped.
It was a jump of only three or four feet from the station platform to the edge of one of the moving cement cars. I landed, grabbed at a pole, and hung on as the train gradually picked up speed and I was carried out of Colfax Springs and along a deep railway cut with Santa Ana Boulevard above and to the left and little tract houses sprawling away through the smog on the right-hand side. The cement car was no more than a long flat car with poles stuck in slots all around the edges and a huge mound of cement bags piled up inside the poles and I got myself seated on the rear shelf or edge of the car.
Cement dust blew in my face while at about thirty miles an hour the train rattled and clanked past all the commute stations. The train had to pass through the Spring Valley station, Fremont, Los Altos and Arastradero, I knew, before curving eastwards on the tracks below SMC Electronics to continue down along the Industrial Park into South Palo Alto and the main S. P. line. It was a run of about twenty minutes to go those thirteen or fourteen miles. I never saw time drag so heavily, so horribly; and I grew sick with anguish from thinking of Marcia. I wanted to get out and push the train faster. I had to hold myself in to keep from shouting to an unseen engineer, somewhere ahead, "For God's sake, hurry up, go faster, can't you? Hurryl" and in my mind I saw Marcia as she was last night and I could seem to feel her again in my arms when we had danced around and around in the Blue Barn. I remembered how quickly she moved. She would toss back her hair, like a cascade of gilt, when looking into the firelight at that wrong house I'd let her walk into. And I remembered Mugsy, as black as a seal, and Marcia stooping and caressing Mugsy. At the thought of Marcia having swallowed Hodges' pronged plastic beetle I felt the cramps taking me in my own guts, sharp as knives.
I saw the smog had increased. Through the yellow smearing I could now make out approaching shapes of factory buildings along a line of bill. There was a lurching and a grinding of wheels below my feet as at last the tracks began curving into the Industrial Park. My muscles went tense: I waited another minute. I recognized the cantilevered structures of the SMC building, curd-colored shapes like vast battleships, and here I come, I thought; and I threw myself off the train to land clumsily in a kind of grassy mire where stagnant water drained into the cut-over land on this side, the south side, of the Industrial Park.
It took me five minutes of hard climbing through acres of rusted machinery on scarred wet ugly ground before I climbed over a fence and dropped with my heart pounding halfway through my ribs into SMC's parking lot at the far end, away from the entrance and street. About twenty autos were already parked and among them was Marcia's little red Lotus; it lifted my spirits as I saw it.
I'd had time enough and more while on the cement train to decide exactly what I needed to do to get to Marcia, and the first thing I needed was a coat to cover my disreputable appearance. On my way around to the R & D Building I stuck my head inside two or three cars, not finding what I wanted, and then I looked in through the window of an old Mercedes 3000 SL and in there by God the driver had left a leather coat and even his cap.
Going to main gate and up to the lineup that was there, even this early, I pulled the leather coat more tightly around me. I wiped at my face with my arm, and tugged down the cap over the patch on my eye. Getting behind a line of four or five engineers, I listened to them talking about the Pring system they were trying this morning on the voice part of the TV broadcast. My alarm was unnecessary; no one noticed me. It was too early in the morning for the regular security guard who might have remembered me.
I carried my badge in my wallet, as all the others did, and when my turn came the night guard passed me. No trouble at all; and in another four minutes, I thought, I'll be talking to Marcia and getting her on her way to the Stanford Hospital. It cost me possibly a minute's delay to change rapidly into the gray-green smock and pull on the tennis shoes, breaking a shoestring in my impatience, oh, God, let it go; and now, I checked myself, don't forget your eye. The black patch would be a dead giveaway, I was well aware, if anyone inside the R & D Building had heard the early-morning broadcast about me. So I stepped into the men's lavatory and ripping off a sheet of paper toweling, hastily wiped the gray cement grime off my face and removed the black patch. Then I spit on my thumb and rubbed my thumb under the soap dispenser and that completed, I was out in a hurry into the corridor where I swerved to my left to the double doors that opened into the Operations Research wing. I saw no one at the end of the corridor.
So I lifted one of the pairs of safety glasses from the box at the doorway into Ops Research and with my thumb I smeared the left lens with the soap, leaving the lens clouded. Then I put on the glasses and instead of taking the escalator to the second floor, I circled around the escalator and climbed the metal stairway and now I braced myself to pass the first of the second-floor security guards.

2.
I saw the night man was still on duty and standing by the table, yawning. He nodded sleepily at the In and Out book for me to sign in. He scarcely glanced at me. I bent, my back to him, looked at the time; but instead of writing my own name, I deliberately signed in, Ned Kramisch, 7:07 a.m.
The whole length of the rear corridor was now open to me. In another minute or so I should be talking to Marcia. At the other end of the corridor there was the number two guard, at the door opening into the nonsecurity side and the Public Relations section. He had seen me, I saw, pass the first guard; it shouldn't be any problem to pass him. My confidence increased as I headed down the corridor. Then-all hell let loose.
Loudspeakers blared, "Attention all security guards! Attentionl Emergency! Intercept and detain SMC embloyee, Albin Durango. He escaped early this morning from the Colfax Springs Hospital after attacking and seriously injuring both a hospital attendant and a deputy sheriff. He checked in to R and D about ten minutes ago. He can be recognized by the black patch on his left eye .. ."
Feet clumped behind me. A large man in a guard's uniform with his pistol holster at ready, ran up to me and stopped. He gave me a quick scrutiny, seeing me in the gray-green smock and the glasses, and said roughly, "Look, Mac, get back into your office. We got a nut running loose in one of the corridors. Keep out of the way." He charged off toward the number two guard.
I dodged into the huge echoing Pub Sec hall, finding myself the first one here this morning. The bullpens with their partitions at eye level offered no place in which to hide while using a phone. But Kramisch's enclosed office was a perfect refuge. I shut the door. I sat at the big desk with the color photographs of Ned and his wife facing me reprovingly.
Avoiding the wired TV intercom on the desk, I used the red phone, dialing the SMC operator, and asked to speak at once to Marcia Herrera in Public Relations. I waited. Every second's delay, I knew, might be increasing Marcia's danger. Suppose by now they'd taken her down to the dispensary? They wouldn't know what was wrong with her. A fool doctor could diagnose her spasms as only a stomachache. From the corridor came more sounds of running feet and voices and then the loudspeakers shouted that a man with a black eye-patch had been sighted in the machine shop. The phone operator told me, sorry, but there was no Marcia Herrera listed in Public Relations. I said there had to be, there was a mistake. No, sorry, no one was employed in Public Relations by that name. Click. She hung up.
Immediately my stomach tried to twist itself into knots. I doubled over with another cramp. That Marcia wasn't listed made no sense. Again I managed to dial Operator. I said she might be in one of the other departments or down in dispensary. I waited. No, sorry, no Marcia Herrera was listed in the index of currently employed employees. It was staggering. Now what? Now what? Marcia had to be over there in Public Relations. I could remember her telling me about the early-morning TV demonstration scheduled for seven, today, using a pseudo random noise something system.
I got up and hung on to the desk as more stabbing pains of anxiety struck at me. I told myself, "Go over to Public Relations, stop losing time, she has to be there-" and I took a couple of steps toward the door of Kramisch's office when a loud buzzing stopped me.
The TV intercom was buzzing violently, to attract my attention. Looking around, I was startled nearly out of my skin to see the face of a man with bulldog jaws regarding me from the. four-by-four-inch TV screen in the intercom set. His voice asked between the buzzing signals: "Kramisch! Kramisch, where are you? Wake up! Captain Preberming here, night security captain. The guard says you've signed in. Switch on, will you?"
If I switched the set on to answer, at the same time a TV eye would be activated on the intercom to pick up my face and transmit it live to Captain Prebenning's set, along with my voice. I hesitated. Prebenning buzzed at me more violently. My eye caught sight of Ned Kramisch's face in the color photograph. It was only a second to strip the photo from the leather frame, to hold it about half a foot away from the TV eye, and then to switch on the sending part of the intercom. I said:
"Kramisch here. What's up, Captain?"
"Oh-it’s you, all right, Ned. I'm making a check all around the offices where men've signed in. There's a screwball loose. He might be dangerous. If any of your secretaries get here before we grab him, keep 'em all herded together. No wandering around. O.K.?"
Prebenning vanished. I jumped up. The pain in my stomach was continuous. I had Operator put me through to the number two guard in the Pub Sec corridor. He answered, panting, as if he'd run to answer his phone. I said I was Ned Kramisch and I was sending a man through with a load of research books to the PR side. Arty Caldwell was his name. PR was asking for the books in a rush. Pass him through, let him sign on his return.
"Yes, Mr. Kramisch."
Ned's library consisted of half a dozen shelves rammed tight with technical books and scientific encyclopedias. I walked out into the corridor carrying a stack of books in my arms high enough to hide most of my face.
The guard said, "Art Caldwell?" and I said, "Yup," and he sprung the electronic mechanism, the green metal doors opened and then closed silently behind me as my feet walked upon thick carpet. I turned to my right and pushed open a mahogany door upon which was printed:

Sidney A. L. Horrabin, Capt. USN (Rt.)
DIRECTOR PUBLIC RELATIONS
PRIVATE

In a large office a small, fierce-looking man with sandy sparse hair and unexpectedly faded blue eyes looked up from a large 40 by 40-inch TV wall screen at the far side of his desk, and said, "What do you want? What the burning blazes are you doing in my office?"
"Marcia Herrera ordered these books, sir."
"Marcia-who?"
"Marcia Herrera. They're technical books-"
"Don't have a Marcia Herrera in Publicity. You've made a mistake. Get out. Don't bother me."
Well, over there, all in color on that huge wall TV screen I could see Marcia as real as life. A TV camera had picked her up in a close-up. Her hair had a sleek brushed look, the color of bright barley. Her eyes, those Renoir eyes of hers, like painted ovals in shades of blue and green and gray, were fringed around by the long barley-colored lashes. They smiled out from the small smooth face of a beautiful ochre-colored tan, in the TV colors. The close-up was instantly followed by a long shot of Marcia standing opposite a thin man with a black beard whose voice was explaining about cesium ion propulsion systems.
Pointing, I said, "There she is, Mr. Horrabin."
"That's Marcia Perugia. Now, get out of my office. I'm busy."
Horrabin had risen, very short in the legs. He beat the desk a couple of times with his fist as I still remained there. He said, "Marcia Perugia's my assistant-" Then he asked me what the burning Joseph and Marcia I was doing in here. Would I get those books I'd dumped off his desk? He didn't want any books.
All along I should've known Marcia was Paul Perugia's sister. I suppose I didn't want to know inside myself. Marcia's face was before my eye on the big wall TV screen. Hers was only a feminine version of Paul's face, with the same angular molding and wide forehead and the eyes that expressively changed from crescents to tilted ovals, heavily fringed. Horrabin shouted furiously at me:
"Here! You can't go in that door. They're on the air in there. Can't you read?"
I pushed upon the door with the sign on it. I shut it, bolted it, and turned around, blinking in the dazzle of light. His back to me, reading the speech I'd revised yesterday, stood the thin bearded man-Dr. Felzoni, I guessed. He faced a large TV camera. Men on either side of the camera waved their arms for me to get out. Felzoni read steadily from the manuscript in his hand. At one side of him, Marcia had swung around. She saw me. She gasped. She ran to me. She then did several things simultaneously.
She flung her arms around my neck. She kissed me. She jumped back. She looked O.K. to me, too. She didn't appear to be in any pain-I must have got to her in time. She said to me, "What are you doing here? Don't you know the security guards are looking for you with guns?"
"Thus, we believe," Felzoni's voice said louder, "that given every opportunity to develop the cesium ion system .. ."
"I'm looking for you-"
"You're in trouble-"
"... by nineteen seventy-five, in all probability .. ."
"Marcia, you're in trouble. You're the one who swallowed that capsule of Yvor Hodges'. Not me."
Marcia's eyes changed to a kind of azure gray.
With a start, she seized my hand as someone from Horrabin's office began furiously battering at the bolted door, as though with an office chair. "Lets get out of here," Marcia said and darted through a narrow door, that had emergency printed on it in red, into a small corridor, pulling me with her; and she shot around a corner and through another door, myself after her.
For the first time in my life I found myself in a women's lavatory. Pressing to one side, Marcia opened the door a crack, peered out, appeared to listen, and then shut arid locked the door.

3.
I heard the rush of feet as of people running down the corridor outside. Shouts. Yells. Then a silence. Placing her back to the door, Marcia said in a hushed alarmed whisper, "I told you, Albin, to stay in our barn and wait! Paul's not back yet from San Jose. He's having breakfast with the Board Chairman. Harry's watching the TV demonstration over an intraoffice wired transmission and he won't accept phone calls-"
She pushed her knuckles against her lips. "Harry saw you rush into the broadcasting room. He saw us rush out-"
"Marcia, listen, will you? You swallowed that thing of Hodges’, not me-" Another spasm caught me for a long second under the ribs and I gasped. Marcia grasped at my arm as though she thought I was going to keel over. Again I was able to speak. I explained quickly how yesterday she'd swallowed the capsule that both Hodges and Laurel had meant for me. She looked dazed.
"Remember?” I asked. "You came into the dispensary. Laurel'd been called out by an emergency. You grabbed that Rennilin tranquilizer from my fingers and popped it down your throat-"
"It was only to tease you."
"They had it rigged for me. It's why Hodges wanted me at his hospital. The thing's of plastic He showed me one like the one he'd fixed for me. It opens up-inside you. There's only a fifteen-hour margin-" I said. "You've had it in you close to fifteen hours by now. It's got to be removed by a surgeon. It's why I came here as quick as I could. Last night I tried to warn you. I was too doped up-"
"Oh, what a filthy creature Hodges is!"
"How do you feel?"
Under that soft biscuit-colored tan of hers, Marcia's face looked fragile and delicate and very pale.
"I-don’t know. I've been too worried about you and George. What’ll we do? I could try to run downstairs to Harry's office while you hid-"
"No," I said. "How far are the spiral stairs from here?"
I knew there must be emergency stairs. There were spiral metal stairs behind the escalator on the other side of the R & D building. I assumed there would be similar stairs on this side. If we could make a rush down those stairs before the security guards backtracked and combed through this side corridor again, I thought we could break into Harry's office. Then after I'd phoned for an ambulance for Marcia, I'd have a chance to wind up the whole thing in a few minutes with Harry. Harry could arrange through his lawyer or the security captain to have the sheriffs officers extract George Whitsun from that decaying hospital on Santa Ana Boulevard.
We made a run for it down the spiral stairs. A guard jumped and bellowed. We ran into Harry's outer office where Mrs. Cunningham cried in an ascending wail, "You cannot go in there. Mr. Weymouth is tied up-" A guard burst into Mrs. Cunningham's office, behind us.
I pushed through the door into Harry's spacious office. Marcia darted in at my side. There was a following instant when everything seemed to be held in suspense. Three men were in there; all three on their feet.
Directly in front of us and a little to my right, Paul came around as we burst in; Paul, small and slim, green-gray eyes astonishingly like Marcia's as they probed at me and then at his sister; and a topcoat was folded over his arm as though he had just now arrived from San Jose. Harry, in an old tweed jacket and slacks, was standing in front of the fireplace not far from the large TV floor set. His old-shoe face with the big nose revolved in our direction. But I never expected to see the third man here. Yvor Hodges sprang up from a chair. His broad Irish face turned to us, his bushy red eyebrows shooting up nearly to the top of his forehead.
"There he is," Hodges said, not excitably, but in a restrained and soothing tone. "Paul, be careful, he's got your sister-"
Hodges had the audacity to approach me. "Now, now, Albin," he said, very soft and kind, taking the initiative before I could speak. "Now, Albin, my boy. Don't be afraid. No one'Il hurt you if you'll come quietly with me."
From one side I saw two security men slip in through the door. They stopped and looked at Harry for instructions. The TV set still gabbled.
"Harry-" I said and another stabbing pain caught me under the ribs. I forced myself to keep speaking. I asked Harry to listen only two minutes. I could prove Hodges had been the brains behind Laurel and a man named Gormerly, formerly in photo-lab, to steal SMC's Skyjack specs and prices. I heard Hodges splutter. I saw Paul's olive face drain to an ivory color as I continued rapidly, describing how Marcia instead of myself had swallowed what we both had assumed was a blue and white Rennilin tranquilizer. Only it wasn't a tranquilizer. It was Hodges' version of the Czech spy capsule.
It was a little after four, yesterday, I explained, when Laurel Turner had been called out of the dispensary by an emergency and Marcia had walked in.
"Paul!" Marcia cried. "You remember? There was a blowout fire and a woman was burned about four yesterday."
"Go on, Al," ordered Harry.
"Marcia popped the thing down her throat, Harry. Phone for an ambulance. Rush her to the Medical Center. Not Hodges' hospital where he had me last night to open me up."
"Nonsense. Albin is a paranoiac in an imaginary world," Hodges said evenly. "Why not ask Laurel to report in here and ask her?"
Harry bent his head to speak into the intercom while Paul said in a cold careful tone, "If there's a shred of truth in this, Yvor, I warn you-"
"Nonsense, Paul. I repeat, I've been worried about Albin. Ever since his accident when he fractured his skull, among his other injuries, I've suspected pressure on the brain. It's not an uncommon condition. He's retreated into a fantasy world, a pseudoparanoiac state where now he's imagined a great conspiracy. Unless he quickly receives treatment-"
"Harry"-I faced Harry at the desk-"phone for an ambulance. I tell you, it's an emergency. Have Marcia X-rayed. The X-rays’ll show the thing that's lodged in her. Get her to a reputable surgeon quick. Paul-she's your own sister. Are you going to stand there and do nothing? Do you want her to die?"
Paul asked sharply, "Harry, what about the big fluoroscope our organic scientists use in Ops Research?"
"By George, yes. Place Marcia in front of your fluoroscope," Hodges instantly said. "Gentlemen, see for yourselves that this man's making up a fantasy of his own. Marcia could've swallowed a dozen Rennilin tranquillizers yesterday with no harm to her, whatsoever. Nor any obstruction showing anywhere at all in the digestive tract."
Harry shoved out his big chin, peering across at me. "Well?"
I had expected Hodges to waver and break when confronted by the fact that it was Marcia who had taken his bait yesterday, not me. For a moment I had a feeling of going out of my head and of almost believing that I had imagined everything last night. Then I felt Marcia's hand squeeze my hand, hard, when Laurel walked in, past the two ramrod-stiff guards, her black hair smooth, the face flawless and composed, and she said meekly, "Yes, Mr. Weymouth? You wanted me?"
"Harry," I said, "ask Laurel. When I was in her dispensary, didn't she first give me a Rennilin tranquilizer, or so she claimed it was, and then a silver dollar that I was supposed to walk past Security and return to her later that evening? Ask her."
Laurel regarded me. Again she looked at Harry. “Yes, sir," she said, as though embarrassed. "I gave Al a dollar. He doesn't have very much money. Several times I've lent him small sums. Yesterday, he needed a dollar to buy his supper and I lent it to him."
"Laurel! You didn't let me think that dollar was hollow and contained a coil of photo-wire?"
"Mr. Weymouth, honestly! I really don't know what he's talking about."
"Goddamn it, Laurel-"
"I'm only listening to you, Al," Harry said, "if you can keep yourself under control."
"Laurel, you don't admit you had dinner with me at the Frenchman's, Thursday night? You didn't go home with me? You didn't pay me a thousand dollars in old five-dollar bills? You didn't ask me to listen to a scheme you had to get away with the Skyjack specs and prices?"
"Paul-"
"Answer him, Laurel," Paul said quietly. "Don't mind me."
"Well, really!" She gave her head a toss. She faced Harry again. "Yes, I had dinner with Al. I was sorry for him. He pestered and pestered me and I was sorry for him. He didn't have a car so I drove him home. Then he was so- so-" To my horror, Laurel choked up, placed her hands over her face. "Awful," she said. "I got away from Al-he scared me-"
Paul's face, the color of ivory, jerked around at me. He shot me a furious look. Marcia whispered between her teeth, "The bitch, the bitch," and I had a stricken feeling of everything going to pieces. I said too loudly, "Harry, if you don't believe me, send a guard to my house. Hell find the thousand in five-dollar bills inside my footlocker-"
I stopped, seeing a faint smile of satisfaction slide over Hodges' pug face. Instantly it vanished. Hodges' face again became anxious as though in my behalf. It instantly occurred to me, between the time I'd escaped his hospital and this morning, either Hodges himself or Roy had searched my house and found the money. I saw Harry nod toward the security guards. Pain increased, stabbed me fiercely under my ribs. My heart hammered.
"Yvor, you can't get away with it. You're bluffing it out to stop them from placing Marcia before a fluoroscope. Tell me. What about that wrong house, last night?"
"What about what wrong house?"
"When you and Gormerly tagged me there."
"You phoned me, my boy, from a house into which you'd broken in. You entered it after you'd killed a Doberman dog. Are you beginning to remember?^
"Oh, Albin," Marcia cried. "Not Mugsy! If Mugsy is killed it was Dr. Hodges who killed her. Oh, I've listened and listened and Hodges is being so clever. Albin, think! Did Laurel give you only one of those things to swallow-those capsules?"
That brought me up with a start.
I looked at Marcia. I said. "No-as a matter of fact she gave me two. You gave me one from the big jar after you took mine and then when Laurel returned she gave me a second to swallow in fifteen minutes but I forgot. I never swallowed the second one until I was on the train, going to Colfax Springs."
"You swallowed the second capsule-" Marcia turned upon Hodges in a fury, and he retreated as she cried, "It was the second one all the time, wasn't it, Dr. Hodges? Wasn't it? Admit it. Albin might've been suspicious of the first capsule. But you and Laurel were much too clever. Oh my, yesl The second one was the one, loaded and filled-
“Paul! Mr. Weymouthl" Marcia pointed at Hodges. "Oh, look at him! Look at your brave Dr. Hodges, will you? And where's Laurel? Stop her, can't you? Paul, are you going to let that-that bitch get away? Are you?
"I'm so damned mad at you, Paul," Marcia shouted in a raging voice. "Do something, can't you? Who cares about Albin? Who's ever cared? He was only good at racing sports cars. He's no longer even any good at that. All he was capable of doing was to save you two from losing your precious Skyjack specs and prices, after getting himself nearly killed and badly beaten. Instead of taking care of himself he's made his way here this morning. Half the county's police force is out hunting him. He came here because he believed I'd swallowed that thing and I might die. At least, will you look at Albin if you need proof? Look at him-he's shivering and shaking and in so much pain he can scarcely stand. Why doesn't somebody do something for him?"
"By George, I'll do something for him," said Hodges in a thick voice. He whipped out his revolver.
Marcia jumped in front of me.
Harry said, "Don't be a fool, Yvor."
Hodges stared once at Marcia and at me. He sagged. "Harry," he said, "I'm ruined, I've lost the throw of dice-" He paused. Then he said something that sounded to me like, "Laurel-tell Laurel-" and he saw Laurel had skinned out and his voice came to a stop.
Perhaps Hodges hoped to reassure Laurel that he was keeping his promise to her, and being a goddamn gentleman and letting her off the hook. But no one will ever really know what he hoped to say to her, for immediately he thrust the muzzle of his revolver into his mouth-and pulled the trigger. The concussion was tremendous. It echoed and echoed.
Sometimes, at nights, the memory of it still echoes in my mind.

Chapter 11

1.
Instead of getting up and walking three days after they opened me up at Stanford's Medical Center to extract a small fully pronged plastic container, complications set in, my kidneys nearly stopped working, and I wasn't released for nearly two and a half months. After the first couple of weeks, visitors were allowed; Marcia arrived promptly every evening during visiting hours and usually with a Scrabble board.
It was George who told me that Paul Perugia had remained in the hospital with Marcia when the surgeon had me on the operating table that Saturday morning in January, and that the following day he'd flown to Washington. Paul was away five weeks. Consequently, I didn't see Paul until a late afternoon late in February when he walked in, shook hands with me, pulled up a chair by the bed, said he'd returned from Washington only a day ago, and how was I?
O.K., I said. My kidney specialist, Dr. Young, hoped to have my kidneys free of uremic poisoning in another three or four weeks. After we'd talked awhile, Paul mentioned, by the way, Sid Horrabin in PR had asked how I'd liked the news releases on me?
I said, very much, my reputation appeared to be looking up lately.
That Saturday last January all of the local papers had come out too soon with headlines about me as a man on a psychopathic rampage in Colfax Springs; and accordingly, they'd afterwards tumbled over themselves to make it up to me. The happiest outcome of all was a long-distance phone call from my father, followed by a letter, Pop's first since I'd been canned from the old Call-Bulletin.
When I asked how the Skyjack bid was doing, Paul's face lit up with a smile. While the news wasn't out officially and wouldn't be for a few more weeks until a joint announcement was made by NASA and SMC's Board Chairman, the contract was signed. Over a ten-year period it ought to amount to sixty million dollars. I said that that was something, wasn't it?
Paul nodded. "Yes, we're shifting into high gear now," he said, glanced at the time, and stood, explaining if he didn't get going he'd be late for an appointment. But before he left, again he wanted to thank me for spiking Hodges' great scheme to hand over the Skyjack bid to a competitor.
I assured Paul I didn't know what I'd have done without Marcia backing me up all the way that explosive night last January. Now Paul was here, it also occurred to me, I couldn't find a better moment to tell him I hoped to persuade Marcia to marry me, once I was on my feet again.
I never had a chance to tell Paul I loved his sister. He interrupted me before I even began. His olive-colored and Italianate face had suddenly grown greenish as if his lunch disagreed with him, he twiddled his fingers nervously around his pipe, and he shot me a look of intense displeasure that surprised me. "That reminds me," Paul said, "now you've mentioned Marcia-" And he came to a dead stop.
He tried once more. "Often a very young and unsophisticated girl, like Marcia, you know, is apt to become briefly interested in an older man."
"Marcia's twenty-four, isn't she?"
"I'm not referring to temporal age," said Paul stiffly. "As with all highly intelligent persons, Marcia's maturing late. I matured late. He walked to the door and back, stopped in front of my bed and took a deep breath. "Al-Al-this will probably pretty much astound you. The truth is-I'm afraid Marcia's somewhat interested in you."
I said nothing, nothing at all, to that. Paul got his pipe turned around in his hands and by accident tried to insert the bowl in his mouth instead of the stem. He jerked away the bowl, gazing balefully at it and then across at me.
"When Marcia was a teenager, I remember," he continued, "how much she liked watching you race those damn sports cars. I hoped she'd forget that teenage crush when she went East to Smith. But now-" He left it unsaid and his oval eyes, so much like Marcia's, gave me a swift scrutiny to observe how I was taking it, so far.
"Smith-College?"
"On a scholarship. Dad never had much cash. Didn't Marcia tell you?"
I swallowed. "About Smith?"
"About the scholarship."
"No."
"She graduated with honors in math and came back here while we settled Dad's estate. Then a year ago she started in at UCLA, in Los Angeles, on a grant they offered her to continue her Ph.D. studies as a cryptanalyst."
"Jesus."
"She threw away a brilliant future in that field because damned if she didn't get interested in human communicative problems, instead. When Sid Horrabin was at North American she talked him into giving her a job. I was against it, but catch Marcia listening to my advice anymore," said Paul with a bitterness. "No, there's no use of me talking to her. Marcia does exactly as she pleases ever since a real-estate syndicate bought Dad's two hundred acres of apricot orchard for six thousand an acre. Marcia's invested her quarter of a million, her share after taxes and fees-"
"A quarter million dollars?" I heard my voice say.
"More like a third of a million by now," Paul said, sounding glum about it. "She hit a lucky investment. I don't know how she does it, either."
After a short and painful silence between us, Paul said with another long observant look at me, "I don't know what my old man'd say if he heard me throwing the shaft into you like this, about Marcia. He always liked you. But what can I do? Marcia's my sister. I consider myself responsible for her, and I want her to marry someone with a responsible future."
"Not someone with a four-hundred-a-month job."
"Your words," Paul said. "Not mine."
"Didn't Harry tell you he's promised me the job of editing SMC's new quarterly journal? That ought to be worth eight hundred a month to start, and a good future, providing SMC keeps expanding."
Paul gave me as near a pitying look as ever I cared to receive in my life and said, "Oh, hell, you ought to know how Harry is, by now."
"I know how Harry is, yes, and I'm still counting on him."
"I recommended to Harry we give you a thumping big bonus. But what Harry decides about the quarterly is his decision, not mine."
"Don't bug me with Harry and I'm in, I tell you."
Paul's eyes slanted a dubiously inquiring glance at me as if to say, "What kind of talk's that? What the hell's wrong with you?"
"You wouldn't try to kill my chances with Marcia," I asked, "once I hook into that editorship?"
"Let's wait until you've talked to Harry," Paul said reasonably and reached to open the door.
"Paul, what’s new about Laurel?" I asked, suddenly wanting to throw a shaft of my own into him. "I see by the papers, Laurel still hasn't been found."
An opaque expression shuttered over Paul's face. He opened the door and paused, before speaking, while a nurse sailed by in the corridor.
"The FBI know Laurel got across the border into Mexico with a wad of money, probably on her way toward Rio. She'll never make it to Rio. They're convinced she's disguised herself-changed her hair color-and think she's hiding somewhere in Guatemala. Sooner or later, she'll try for a ship or airliner and then-bingo!
"Hodges must've given her the money to use in an emergency before he shot himself. I know I didn't give her money to run off with and I wouldn't want anyone," Paul said, "ever to think I did. I wish to God I'd known in time she was playing around with Hodges' scheme to steal us blind and I'd have done everything possible to stop her. Now it's too late to do anything for her. There's been too much finagling and plain thieving in the big scramble for government aerospace and component research contracts. When the FBI finally grab Laurel, as they will, she'll have to stand the gaff-I can't help her. What happens to a couple of Hodges' other employees, a nurse and an orderly, who also went to ground, I don't care. They're small fry.
"But that meatball cousin of Laurel's, Gormerly-" Paul's voice became grim. "He also got across the border with her. Take my word for it, I'll never rest until he's found and given everything the law's got to give him."
Paul turned, walked out, and shut the door.
* * *
That evening, Marcia came in a little after seven with her hair brushed smooth, and wearing a bright yellow linen affair that set off her hair, her legs bare, tap-tapping in on spikes for a change, very ladylike, my love, and carrying the Scrabble board and her new spring coat.
We played two full games until the light flashed above my bed and a ghostly voice announced it was five minutes before closing time for all visitors. Marcia hastily toted up the scores of some fifty-two games we'd played since I'd been in the hospital. By her count I came out, so far, four games ahead. "Not so bad for a sicker," Marcia said and gave me a searching look. "You aren't feeling too up this evening, are you? You have scarcely said a word. I haven't tired you?"
"No, Marcia, I've been thinking about us-"
"About us? How nice."
"It's not so very nice, I'm afraid."
"No!”
"It's hellish hard to say this, but I've been thinking it's probably better if you didn't visit me so often in the hospital-"
"What!"
Marcia shot up from the chair, grasping the Scrabble board, going red in the face and opening her mouth as if to say something more, and then her teeth snapped shut and she said nothing more at all.
"It isn't fair to you, Marcia, if people start talking about us seeing so much of each other until I get that job Harry promised."
"Oh, God, I tried to tell you-you haven't a chance."
"I'm not entirely the fool you think," I said, sounding obstinate and sullen, and knowing how I sounded, "even if I failed to recognize you as Paul's sister after knowing you all your life."
"You didn't know me all my life. You only knew me when I was young, wore braces on my teeth, my hair cut short, and everyone called me 'Sis' or 'Horty' for 'Hortense.' After mother died and I went East to Smith I used my mother's name, 'Marcia.' It's better at least than 'Horty.'"
"Yes, I remember you as 'Horty'-"
In a falsely hollow tone of voice Marcia cried quickly, "Damn you, Horty, get away from that engine. Stop trying to reset my timer when I've got it right. Clear out from my car or I tell you, I'll beat your little tail to fragments-" She checked herself, drew a breath, and gave me a half-smiling look.
I passed over Marcia's attempt to mimic what I must have said to her years ago when she used to try to take out my MG engine, piece by piece; and I told her:
"And all that hoo-ha you gave me about winning a coat in a raffle didn't exactly help me remember you, either."
"Oh! When I was at North American Aviation I did win a raffle. On a block of lottery tickets and one happened to pay off enough for that mink. I suppose my dear brother talked to you about me this afternoon?*'
"We're not talking about Paul. We're talking about us."
At that, Marcia rolled her eyes while her face suddenly went quite red with anger exactly as it used to go red when she was a kid. 
"Marcia, please. For once in my life I'm trying my best to do what's right and rational-"
"Oh, I'll bet. You're the most irrational and selfish man I've ever known. I suppose you listened to Paul telling you how I was such a young unsophisticated girl. How I let myself get infatuated with a no-good dog who got me stoned on grappa. Who nearly wrecked my Lotus. Who was so loaded himself he drove me to the wrong house instead of his own to kiss me. And would jump at the chance of marrying me because my father-all his life a hard-working Italian apricot grower with little cash money-died and left Paul and myself small fortunes in Santa Clara land."
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"Oh, like hell you don't know what I'm talking about!"
"Marcia, when I ask you to marry me, I'm trying to tell you it won't be until I'm more than a four-hundred-a-month tech writer who your brother thinks hasn't any-"
"Oh, what silly conceit! What makes you think I'd ever think of marrying you!" Marcia hurled the Scrabble board at me, followed it with the box of wooden letters, snatched up her new white coat, and departed, slamming the door.

2.
During the several following days and nights a retrospective thought impinged itself upon me. Not only had I bashed up all remnants of friendship with Paul; but, thanks to Paul pressing me, from start to finish I'd bungled things irrevocably with Marcia, being presumptuous and almighty ridiculous about it in her eyes, and showing to her a real crappiness of mind when my own emotions had pitched me up into a schmaltzy Walt Disney-type mood for a great and useless gesture, only to find myself flat on my ass.
I tried writing letters to Marcia and tore them all up: Dear Marcia, Since yesterday I’ve decided I should certainly apologize-: Dearest Marcia, After a couple of days of reviewing my egregious and crepitated attempt-: Marcia, my darling, I know I've been the damndest fool and if in time you could forgive me-et cetera, et cetera. I tore them all up.
I got out on a Monday, the last week of March. By that time, the real-estate firm had sold my house and after paying back taxes and the bank I had $750 left from my equity. More than that, my $400 a month from SMC had accumulated in the bank during ten weeks of hospitalization. However, Hodges' thousand dollars in five-dollar bills was gone. In early February I'd asked George to have a look in my house for me. He reported that someone had smashed my footlocker. Though he hadn't found any money he found the bedroom in a shambles, and it was his guess that that little orange-haired orderly had been sent by Hodges to ransack my house the same night I'd gotten free of Hodges' decaying hospital.
At all events, I had more money in the bank that I'd had for years. With George's help and his battered Morris, Monday afternoon I moved my few belongings and myself into the same apartment-motel in South Palo Alto where once Laurel lived.
I returned to work the next day, Tuesday, everyone in the Pubs Sec shaking my hand, and Ned Kramisch taking me to lunch in the cafeteria; and it was a great day, although I did not see Marcia. I waited all Tuesday and the next day for Harry to phone me. When he failed to call, Thursday morning I got through to his secretary, Mrs. Cunningham.
I told her I didn't know how much longer Mr. Weymouth wanted me to stay up here in Pubs Sec as a technical writer. While I knew he was busy with more important matters, I'd appreciate it if he'd let me know how soon he wanted me to take over planning the first issue of the quarterly journal. Mrs. Cunningham said yes, he'd been terribly busy die last month; but she'd place a memo on his desk. She was certain he'd want to have a talk with me early next week. I thanked her and hung up and after hanging up I became aware of George watching me with the strangest expression.
I said, "You weren't supposed to hear that, George. Don't say anything, will you, until Harry announces I've been appointed the editor?"
George stood up. He said in a hollow sort of voice to come on, we'd have a coffee break, and when I protested it was too early in the morning he repeated more forcefully, "Come on, will you?" very urgently.
So we signed out. Downstairs we found a nook to ourselves. Coffee cups in our hands, George said severely, "You're not falling for old Harry's guff, I hope, after all these years? Weren't you in one of his classes? You haven't a chance at being editor of the new publication."
"What makes you say that?"
"You've been too long in the hospital. Everyone knows Sid Horrabin's going to get the job."
"Don't kid yourself, George. I'm in the running."
George stuffed the empty coffee cups into the container ALL REFUSE HERE KEEP OUR CORRIDORS CLEAN and filled his meerschaum pipe. "Al," he said, lighting his pipe, "you haven't a prayer. The quarterly's already been announced, with a. publication date provisionally set for the end of June, at the beginning of the third quarter."
"Good."
George looked at me as if he thought I was out of my mind. 'Good?" he said. "Don't you know Horrabin's a retired naval captain? He's got Washington connections. Damn it to hell, there are more than two thousand retired army and navy officers up here in the Park, all ready to lobby and pull their strings at the Pentagon. I don't know what's gotten into you since you got out of the hospital. You begin to worry me. I'm giving it to you straight: Horrabin's grabbed off the editorship..."
There wasn't too much for me to do that morning so I began reading an accumulation of scientific magazines in my In basket. In Pacific Journal of Sciences I read a piece by a Dr. William Whitmore, Deputy Chief Scientist at one of the big aerospace establishments, that questioned the increasing use of technical writers, too often failed engineers with no competence as writers or ex-newspapermen with little or no scientific understanding, to bolster up the papers and reports issued by second-and third-rate commercial scientists. When I finished the piece I then happened to notice an advertisement for a Japanese-made miniaturized pocket-sized tape recorder. The recorder came equipped with a button-size mercury battery, a two-hour tape, was less than three inches in diameter, and cost $250. It looked like a buy; I wrote to the San Francisco supply house for it.
It was not too far before the lunch break so I checked myself out and went down to the mail room on the first floor to get the letter out in a hurry. Returning along the lower corridor, I happened to run into Marcia. We both stopped. Marcia's crescent eyes were enormous m a face that looked very pale to me as she said, "Hi-" and I had a feeling of my heart being about close to bursting. I explained I'd phoned her house half a dozen times to ask her to have dinner with me at L'Omelette but her housekeeper each time said she was still in New York.
Marcia hastily explained, "I got back only this morning. I had accrued vacation tune and I flew East to get away from you and Paul and Old Horror and think a few things out." She then gave me one of her quick darting looks and said in a breath, "Sorry, but I've got to run, I'm meeting Paul in the parking area to drive to the city with him for the weekend- but I’ll be home Sunday afternoon, late, around five or six-" and away she bolted.

3.
Saturday, in accord with a resolution I'd made at the hospital, I enrolled in a course of elementary electronics at the adult night school in Palo Alto High, picked up a month's supply of lessons, and in the afternoon went over to the Palo Alto public library, pulled down more books on electronics, tried to read some of them, and started asking myself just what I thought I was doing. Walt Abbot and his wife eased me through Sunday. When Monday came around, there wasn't any work for me on my desk and I still waited for Harry's phone call.
At coffee break that morning, I caught sight of Marcia in the lower corridor about the same instant she saw me. She waited until I came up to her and said, "Oh, hi" very coldly-and then asked, "You still working here?"
"You know I am. That's a hell of a question, Marcia."
"I wondered because I got back early from the city yesterday, by three in the afternoon, and waited for you to phone me."
"I wanted to phone you but I decided it was only fair to you if I waited until after I saw Weymouth-"
"Oh, my God, Al!"
"I meant every word I said in the hospital."
"You're not going to be appointed as editor of even a roll of toilet paper here at SMC. Weymouth won't do anything for you. Old Horror's going to edit SMC's new quarterly. I've had a row with Paul because he claims it's Weymouth's prerogative to select the editor, not his, and Paul refuses to interfere in your behalf."
"Paul doesn't have to interfere in my behalf. Please don't worry. I'll put Weymouth in my pocket, once I have the chance to talk to him."
Marcia's gray-green eyes pierced me with a hard bright look that now seemed to say, "Oh, won't you wake up? I've done all I can." And she gave her head a toss, said, "You make me sick!" and walked away.
In the Monday afternoon mail delivery my pocket tape recorder was delivered to my basket. Later that afternoon, I tried it out on one of the physicists while he was attempting to explain the simple principles to me of a cesium ion engine.
I hurriedly typed him a rough draft of his explanation; he read it. From Ned, just before quitting time, I heard he went to Ned and threatened to resign, either that, or I'd have to be fired if ever again as a tech writer I offered him such garbage and pretended it was a verbatim report of what he'd said.
On Tuesday morning I again phoned Mrs. Cunningham to ask if Mr. Weymouth had possibly forgotten me. It was over a week now since I'd returned to work. Was he leaving me up here, high and dry, in Pubs Sec? Oh, no, Mr. Durango, she assured me; she would not be surprised if Mr. Weymouth might have time to see me later this morning.
He didn't see me that morning, but immediately after lunch Ned called me to his office and informed me Mr. Weymouth had only a moment ago personally spoken to him on the intercom, asking to see me whenever it was convenient.
"Right now, Ned, is convenient."
Ned got to his feet to peer uncomfortably at me through his thick glasses as might a large and surprisingly distressed toad:
"Al-I'd better tell you before you see Mr. Weymouth. I have to make out my regular fitness reports to the top brass on all my people in here. I don't like telling you, but I did not give you a good one, Al. I couldn't. I'm sorry. I know you tried hard. I know how hard you tried."
I told Ned not to worry about it. We shook hands. Ned said I could take the rest of the day off, if I wished, after seeing Mr. Weymouth. After thanking him, I returned to the bullpen where George silently watched me replace tonight's electronic lesson in its folder, and take that and some equipment with me as I prepared to leave.
George said, "You're seeing Weymouth?"
"Wish me luck."
"Al, I like working here. They've got good people working here. Paul's turning into one of those rare scientists with executive capabilities that fire up hundreds of other scientists. Don't do anything to upset the applecart here at SMC, if Weymouth won't give you what you want. Take a bonus. You'll get a bonus-"
I said screw a bonus to George, feeling a heat beginning to glare inside myself, like a small furnace, at the thought of Harry or Paul or anyone else getting ahead of me on a rough track; and left George standing there, still wanting to argue. Downstairs, by the escalator. While I was at it, before I saw Harry, I changed into my street clothes in the Security locker room and went around by visitors entrance, with a messenger kid once more conducting me through the labyrinth of corridors into Mrs. Cunningham's office and then into Harry's office where he rose up, greeting me good-naturedly.
"Al, sit down, won't you? Take a pew. I meant to see you much sooner but I've been loaded to the eyebrows this last month or so. How are you feeling? How's your health these days?"

Chapter 12

1.
"Sit down," Harry repeated, very cordially, and nodded his iron-gray thatch toward one of the big green leather chairs drawn up at the right-hand side of his kidney-shaped desk.
Although outside it was at least 90° on this April afternoon, in here he had a fire burning in the big brick fireplace behind him. As I sat down, Harry swung his own chair around so he could face me. He rubbed his big muscular hands briskly together, asking, "It's not too coolish in here, is it? I like a fire burning. So I've got the cold-air system turned on full force to keep my office cool enough to let me have a comfortable fire going."
I said no, it wasn't too cool. I could hear the fire crackling in the oak logs at one side of me, and the cold air whistling softly through the overhead vents somewhere in the ceiling. After offering me an open box of cigars, they were English Jamaicans, said Harry, myself saying, "I'm not a cigar man, thanks," he lit one, long, thin, and of a greenish-brown shade; and then leaned back in his chair, his hands clasped behind his head. He began talking. I guess he must have spoken to me for nearly fifteen minutes.
The sum and substance of all of it was that Harry had decided he wasn't being fair to me to ask me to keep my promise to help him out by taking over as the editor of SMC's new aerospace and electronics quarterly. He said how intensely grateful he was to me for offering to accept such a burdensome task at a time when he hadn't known which way to turn for help; but he now wanted me to know he was in a position to assure me he could relieve me of my promise. I didn't need to feel obligated to go on with it, he explained. Fortunately, Sid Horrabin at last had shoved his nose to the grindstone. Sid had finally organized his Public Relations department to allow some of the very brilliant younger people to handle most of the routine tasks. Sid himself was now going to find the time to grasp the editorial tiller and guide the new ship, so to speak.
"I see," I said.
"I know you've been unhappy in this sort of work. I blame myself entirely for not sooner realizing it's been only your loyalty-your friendship to me-that's held you here.
"Thank you."
"I've talked it over with Ned. I don't advise you to leave us precipitately. No," Harry said in a deep voice, "no, stay on. Take two or three more weeks while you look around for an opening more suitable to your own unique talents. Take a month. Yes, take a month, why don't you? That's what you must do. I've told Ned if you wish to make an early-morning job interview, you're to feel free to do so. Come in late. Don't worry, about keeping a regular schedule. Or take a whole day off, any day at all, if you like, to go into the city. You could see some of your old newspaper friends, for example. They might know of newspaper openings for you.
"And remember, boy," Harry said, even more cordially, "we'll back you up. You bet. If anyone asks you for a job reference, have them phone me-or if I'm not in my office ask them to leave word with Mrs. Cunningham. I'll give you the damndest finest job reference anyone could have. We owe you a lot, boy! We owe you a great deal-"
He got to his feet. Reaching a hand into his top desk drawer he brought out a strip of paper. He offered it to me; it was a check, I saw. I took it and discovered it was made out to me and for $500. He watched me fold it and stow it away in my wallet.
"It's not a bonus, Al. We can't call it a bonus. We're not quite yet in a position to give bonuses to our employees until this summer, after NASA comes through with the first payments on the Skyjack contract. But we'll call it an honorarium-a token of our esteem for your loyalty and your efforts to help build up this research center as a top research center."
Then Harry put his left arm tinder my right elbow. He shook my right hand vigorously with his right hand. At the same time he began very gradually to walk me in the direction of the door as again he urged me to take all the time I needed to find a job that was more in line with what I was trained for than technical writing. No hurry, he repeated.
I had to stiffen up and balk, to prevent being edged out through the door before I knew it.
Weymouth's about-face in regard to the editorship of the quarterly hadn't surprised me. As I say, I'd known I could count on him. I'd counted upon him proceeding exactly as he had done with me at present, for Harry had always been a most affable man, full of promises, and ambitious, and ever willing to advance you as long only as you were useful to his purposes.
I wasn't giving up hope, either. Nothing like that. But months ago in the hospital I foresaw if I wanted the editorship I'd better follow two courses of action.
First, I'd show confidence in my future at SMC with Marcia, George, and everyone else in order that my eventual transmogrification from a $400-a-month tech writer upwards to the higher level of editorship might cause less gossip and appear as a step fully anticipated by both Weymouth and myself. Secondly, months ago, I'd also realized I'd have to convince him I could be of far more use to him as an editor of the new quarterly than any retired navy captain.
"Before I go," I asked hastily, "I'd like your advice on something, if you can spare the time?"
"Yes, of course-" Harry hesitated, glanced down at his wrist on which was strapped a Longines chronometer. "I can easily spare another five minutes." He walked behind his desk and dropped into his own chair. "Well, now?"
I returned to the chair by the desk. "It's a little awkward to say-"
"We're old friends, Al. Say it out."
"During the latter part of last year, were you convinced that the San Jose parent corporation meant to close down SMC Electronics the first of this year?"
Harry's black eyebrows lifted in surprise at my question.
"At the time, yes, but what's the point of your question?"
"When I came here, even as a tech writer I had to sign an agreement to give up all rights to SMC in any inventions or discoveries made while employed."
"That's a routine agreement. What's all this about, Al?"
"Paul signed one?"
"Every employee signs one." Harry got on his feet with another glance at his chronometer. "Look here, I'm sorry. I've got an appointment-"
"My point is," I said, also getting to my feet, "if San Jose closed this plant, what would become of Paul's ion propulsion system? He'd lose it, wouldn't he? Yet it's the heart and key to the Skyjack sixty-million-dollar government contract."
"What the hell are you getting at?"
"You've tied your career to Paul's coattails, Harry. Sometime last fall didn't you decide to protect yourself and get Paul's discoveries in the application of ion mechanics, one way or another, away from here before San Jose took over?”
I watched Harry's long, wrinkled face at first drain out to a color about the color of his thick iron-gray hair and then a tide of red flamed into his cheeks. He said with an effort and thickly, "I've always known you were an unprincipled blackguard, Durango, and it serves me right for bringing you from Mexico-"
"Didn't you bring me here because you thought I was unprincipled enough to jump into a scheme with Hodges, your cousin, to steal a big-money proposal?"
"Who told you Hodges was my cousin?"
"You did."
He growled and I saw him glance sideways at the big cut-glass inkwell on his desk. Then he cast a threatening look at me as if the thought had crossed his mind of slamming the inkwell over my head. I went at him as hard as I could by saying, "Harry, you had an almost insoluble problem. You'd designed a security setup that would stop anyone-even yourself as general manager-from stealing any new specifications or developments, made by your scientists, and passing them out to another research center. At the same time, you had a second problem. How could you prevent the parent corporation in San Jose from selling the rights to Paul's ion prototype engine to General Dynamics or Aerojet, let's say, ...if SMC Electronics was shut down? When I wrote you that letter from Mexico for a job, my guess is, suddenly I became your best bet as cat's-paw-"
"Hogwash."
"You had your cousin, Hodges, to help you. Hodges needed money and it wouldn't surprise me if you hadn't bought a controlling interest in Wendy and Phillips, through Hodges or dummies, after their shares dropped almost to nothing."
Harry gave a start. Immediately controlling himself, he stated flatly, "You're out of your head. Poor Yvor always said you were unbalanced."
"No, I doubt if Yvor ever said anything like that. If he did, why were you eo quick to offer me a job?"
“I offered you a job because I was sorry for you."
"You offered me a job because I could be useful to you as someone who'd been operated upon once by Hodges and who'd go back, like a sheep to the slaughter, for more surgical work by Hodges without questioning him!"
I remained by the desk as Harry with a sudden and abrupt movement went to the fire. He poked at it with the poker, sparks flying, flames making a roaring noise, his face crimson in the burning light; and then, still with the poker in his hand, he swung around at me, a tall glowering figure, ten or fifteen feet from me. After a moment of irresolution he then put the poker into the brass coal scuttle, banging it.
"Look here," he said, coining forward in a rush and again stopping, "I'll admit you might make a nuisance of yourself if you went to newspapers with that cock-and-bull story. But you'd never have a chance of linking me with Hodges. Never. He's dead, don't forget-"
"Laurel isn't."
"Even if the FBI manage to catch up with her, they'll get nothing out of her. Nothing. She'll never talk."
"I believe you."
"You'd better."
"Hodges was busted. You gave her the getaway money-"
"The hell I gave her any money."
"Laurel did everything you told her to do except for one thing-she fell for Paul. That wasn't in your plans, was it? You didn't want Paul in any way involved. He was to be kept out of it until you moved over to Wently and Phillips, wasn't that it? But Laurel had an affair with Paul and it left me wondering about Paul until I gave myself a kick. I realized that while Paul might sleep with Laurel, he wouldn't besmirch his whole professional career by stealing. You had more to gain and less to lose-"
Harry laughed at me. Then he said roughly, "You're wasting my time," and sat down. "I've work to do. Get out."
"Goddamn it, Harry, I phoned you that night from the Blue Barn-"
"I didn't get your phone call."
"But you got it on a recording."
"What are you trying to prove?"
"When you got back to your office and listened to the recording you were the only person who knew I was at the Blue Barn. How did Fritz Gormerly know where to find me? You told Gormerly or you phoned Hodges to have him tell Gormerly where I was."
Harry came up heavily on his feet, leaning forward with his hands splaying out on his desk. I saw his own body betray him. His neck grew swollen, a look of rage swept across his face, and as he towered over the desk there was a frightening aspect about him as of a man, able, accustomed to command, and ambitious, suddenly discovering himself forced into a corner.
"As long as we're alone in this room, between us two," Harry said, his voice again thickening, "I don't mind informing you there's no evidence whatsoever of you giving me any message that night. When you were at the Blue Barn and phoned in, I’ll deny I got your message. I’ll deny there was any recording made. Understand?"
"As a matter of fact, we're not entirely alone."
"What the hell do you mean, we're not entirely alone?"
"I've a miniaturized tape recorder in my pocket, switched to On. It's recording every word of our conversation-"
Harry lunged at me.
I jumped back, seizing the heavy inkwell from his desk. I raised it, ready to hit him.
Harry stopped short, breathing heavily. His whole face seemed to swell thickly. The veins on his forehead throbbed. He opened and clenched his hands. For as long as perhaps the space of half a minute neither one of us moved or spoke.

2.
I heard the fire crackling in the logs and the soft hiss of the cooling system and grew aware of the inkwell tightly clenched in my hand. I placed the inkwell back on the table. I saw Weymouth's face lose its swollen look and next he faintly smiled as might a man with a toothache.
"Albin-Al, I must confess, this example of your initiative and spirit reminds me of that strong competitive quality in you that I overlooked, didn't I?"
Weymouth waited for me to reply and when I didn't, he rattled the loose change irritably in his pocket and asked, "Suppose I give you that editorship?"
I heard my own voice say, "On a contract?"
Weymouth threw me a hard glare. "Will you shut off that confounded tape recorder in your pocket?"
I nodded. He watched me shove my hand in my pocket and I didn't fool around or try to do any pretending. I switched off the recorder. I felt a little better but not much. Even with the recorder switched off the situation remained the same: one son of a bitch blackmailing a second. There wasn't any use to kid myself about it.
"That's better," Weymouth said and drew a long breath. "How long a contract?”
"Three years."
"How much?"
"Two thousand a month."
Weymouth gave a bound. “I don't pay Sid Horrabin two thousand a month!"
"Probably Horrabin isn't worth it to you."
Weymouth rattled the change in his pocket. He seated himself. Sitting back in his chair, he considered me. He rubbed his thumb up and down one side of his big thrusting nose and, he smiled more broadly as a man might when a toothache stops. Then he gave a laugh and said, "Al, we're two of a kind. I never thought you had it in you."
Then Weymouth said he'd call in Mrs. Cunningham to dictate a contract that we two could sign but it would be for fifteen hundred dollars a month, not two thousand. If the salary was too far out of line both Paul and the Board Chairman in San Jose might ask questions and we didn't want that, did we? All the time Weymouth was speaking, I was thinking and thinking of how he had let Hodges kill himself; of how he had to be the one to supply Laurel and Gormerly with enough money to get themselves across the border; of those days in the hospital, last January, when for a time it had been touch and go for me; and of how he had laughed, exclaiming that we were two of a kind.
Weymouth was still going on about the contract in the hearty and reasonable voice of a man getting everything back safely under control when suddenly his voice stopped  mid-sentence, he jerked up his big iron-gray head, startled, and sighted on past me toward the door.
"Paul! What brings you down here?"
I looked around as Paul came in, shut the door, and approached us with pipe in mouth and hands in pockets. Paul took the pipe out of his mouth and said, "Hi-" and stopped, appearing mildly embarrassed. "I'm not butting in on any-thing, I hope, Harry."
"Not at all. Glad you dropped in. Al and I've about finished, a long confab and I've come to the conclusion he has, after all, exactly what we want in someone to head up our new publication, allowing us to leave Sid Horrabin strictly to Publicity and Promotion."
"Evidently," said Paul, "I'm redundant if that's your decision-" He glanced wryly at me. "About half an hour ago, George Whitsun got hold of Marcia and the two of them charged into my office. The upshot of their visit was, I agreed to try to persuade Harry that perhaps we owed you at least a try in our Publicity department if Harry'd already filled the slot for the quarterly's editor."
With his head up and appearing a little larger than life to me, Weymouth came grandly around the desk and laid his big hand on my shoulder, giving me an affectionate shake as he assured Paul, "I tell you, we've got the right man right here who'll fill the bill for the editorial slot for our quarterly--"
It must have been that big sweaty hand clamping on my shoulder and giving it another shake in that crappy show of false-friendliness that turned the tide in me, that jumped up my blood pressure, and heaved a revulsion in my stomach against both myself and Weymouth as two of a kind. I knocked his hand off my shoulder, surprising myself as much by my own actions as Weymouth. "Why, Al--" Weymouth began.
"What's happening around here, anyway?" I heard Paul say; and by then I was tugging the little tape recorder out of my pocket. Weymouth saw what I was doing and anticipated my intentions and stepped in, trying to grab the recorder from my hand. With my other hand, my free hand, I reached out and lifted the heavy inkwell off the desk and said, "Let go, damn you, or I'll split open your head," and I meant it and evidently Weymouth knew I meant it for he eased away a little, swaying dangerously on his feet, looking at me and then at Paul and Paul again asked, "Goddamn it, what's happening around here, anyway?"
I put the tape recorder on the desk and told Paul, "I want you to listen to the conversation Weymouth and I just had.'
Weymouth said with sweat starting out on his face, “You can't do that to me, Al-"
"Listen to this, Paul."
"He's out of his mind," Weymouth said hoarsely to Paul. "Stop him, get hold of the Security guards-"
"What've you got here?" Paul asked me.
“The man behind Hodges. Listen to him."
"I'm not going to listen to this stuff," Weymouth said hoarsely from the other side of the desk.
"Stick around, Harry." Paul turned to me. "I'm beginning to get interested. Switch it on."
Still holding the heavy inkwell in one hand as a weapon, if I had to use it, I switched on the recorder.

3.
Afterwards I was lucky, picking up a ride in a trash truck that got me out of the Park and into South Palo Alto and to the Bank of America branch, on the comer, about ten minutes before closing time. I cashed the $500 check, figuring that that much was coming to me, drew out all the money from my account, and then spent a good half hour or so in my apartment motel packing up, one suitcase and a footlocker, paying my bill, and giving the manager an extra ten dollars to hold on to my footlocker until I sent him a letter telling him where to send it on to me, charges collect. I then got on the phone to the bus station a couple of miles to the north, in Palo Alto proper; and the man there said that the next express bus, leaving for Carmel and points south, left at 4:48 this afternoon.
That gave me still about an hour to spare. I picked up my suitcase and went out to the street with the intention of hunting up a cab, because the way I was feeling, I didn't think much of the idea of walking the two miles on north up the highway into the main center of Palo Alto where the bus station was located. I couldn't see any cabs, it was the wrong time of afternoon to pick up a cab in South Palo Alto, so I walked to the El Camino highway, deciding I'd have to go by foot, and waited for the green light. A small red Lotus eased along to my left, its disk brakes bringing it to a whispered stop. A girl's high-pitched voice called, "Going back to the Park?"
"No, thanks, I'm going to the bus station."
"Get in, I'll take you."
So I got in and it was very kind of her, thanks; and I noticed this afternoon she was in a cotton print dress with the neck cut too low, and I had an instant's impression of a pair of oval and painted eyes sliding at me, voluptuous and luminous, like Renoir liked to paint on his nudes.
She said, "Both Paul and the Board Chairman want to see you about offering you a job."
"No."
"Paul says he's willing to try you at editing a scientific quarterly but you have to help temporarily in Publicity. God knows Old Horror needs help with the Board Chairman backing up Paul in forcing Weymouth to resign and next thing Weymouth smashing his car and breaking his leg trying to make a break for it before the Security guards clamped down on him. There's hell to pay up at SMC and somebody's got to try to explain to the newspapers-"
"No."
"Anyway, I told Paul you wouldn't take anything they offered. I'm slightly fed up with the aerospace racket and the big grab for government goodies myself-"
The light changed. The bare brown legs and flat heels released the brakes and stepped on the gas. The little red Lotus shot forward and then turned to the left, south, on the El Camino Real.
"Marcia," I said, "you're going in the wrong direction. The bus station-"
"Where do you want to go?" asked Marcia.
"The Palo Alto bus station."
"I mean, when you get on the bus?"
"Carmel, first stop."
"I’ll take you."
For a while in silence we continued south on the El Camino, toward Los Altos and Mountain View, with Sunnyvale, and then San Jose, eighteen miles away, coming up. I could remember when the road on south from Stanford and Palo Alto to San Jose was a two-lane highway running through green orchards of apricot and prune trees. We were now driving on an eight-lane highway filled with a dense traffic of cars and buses. The late afternoon sky and sun, overhead, were heavily hazed by a leaden-colored and cancerous smog with a smell like burning chicken feathers stinging up our noses, and smarting tears in our eyes. The apricot and prune orchards were all gone.
On either side of the eight-lane highway I watched the garish honkey-tonk signs of a continuous strip city: Jack's Nearly-New Car Lot & Garage Moderne-Time-payment Guaranteed Repairs; Try our ONE-yard Malted Milks & Cheeseburgers; Madame Lovely's Chez-Her Beauty Salonne; Out-of-This-World Discount House, Cheap Rates Cheaper; Standard Oil, Free Service, We Keep Our Toilets Clean; Union Oil, Freer Service, Help Our Management Keep America Politically Clean; Impeach Justice Warren-Vote for Bob Candymaker, Los Altos School Board; View Lots Here, $25 Down, Vets No-Down-Payments; The Cabana, Doris Day's Own Beautiful Hotel-Motel, Swankiest for Weekends; Bob's Cut-rate Gas, No Toilets Just Plain Gas; Fat-Girl Chile House, 14 Hostesses, Count 'Em; The Caravan, the Peninsula's Most Swankiest Beautiful Hotel-Motel; Dad's No-Fee Employment Agency; McGruder's Drive-in, Hostesses, Free Gifts; Mom's Employment Agency, Hostesses; Dave's Biggest Yamburgers with Malteds & Real Estate Listings, View Lots $15, Hostesses; Sister's Employment Agency-Pay No Fee, 21 Curvaceous Hostesses-buildings of concrete slabs and glass, blacktop parking lots, more employment agencies, more movie drive-ins, more motels with hostesses, more slabs, more concrete, more, more, more of everything to crush out grass and trees and sky and sun and birds and all that once lived and grew in the vanished fields and meadows.
I looked forward with all my heart to Carmel. Here, tomorrow, Marcia and I could watch the gray sea roll in from halfway round the world upon a white beach. Here, no smog. If there was a fog, it would be a bracing sea fog blowing in, though I knew most likely at this season of the year we could anticipate seeing a blue California sky and a sun, again burning brightly. And sitting beside Marcia in her red Lotus, on our way at last to Carmel, suddenly I realized with a flash of clarity that everything else, where I'd go from Carmel, what I'd do, whether to Guaymas to night-clerk at a hotel, or to try to hit Yancy Smith and Fred Storm at the News-Call-Bulletin or Scotty Newhall at the Chronicle to back me for another chance in San Francisco at being a newspaperman-all of that seemed irrelevant.
I felt Marcia turn against my shoulder. She glanced at me an instant as she said, "Once we're south of San Jose and into the mountains we ought to be away from most of this damned smog."
"I feel like I've been in it too long," I said.
"I do, too. It was about time we headed for Carmel, don't you think?" Marcia asked, and I looked at her and saw she was smiling and I thought, yes, it was about time, we'd almost been too late, we'd almost missed it, but we were going to make it now.

THE END

Version 1.0 scanned and proofed November 2003.