6 Great Short Novels of Science Fiction

MATURITY By Theodore Sturgeon

Dr. Margaretta Wenzell, she of the smooth face and wise eyes and flowing dark hair, and the raft of letters after her name in the medical “Who’s Who,” allowed herself to be called “Peg” only by her equals, of whom there were few. Her superiors did not, and her inferiors dared not. And yet Dr. Wenzell was not a forbidding person in any way. She had fourteen months to go to get to her thirtieth birthday; her figure hadn’t changed since she was seventeen, and her face, while hardly suited for a magazine cover, was a natural for a salon study. She maintained her careful distance from most people for two reasons. One was that, as a gland specialist, she had to make a fetish of objectivity; and the other was the fact that only by a consistent attitude of impersonality could she keep her personal charm from being a drawback to her work. Her work meant more to her than anything else in life, and she saw to it that her life stayed that way.

And yet the boy striding beside her called her “Peg.” He had since he met her. He was neither her superior nor her inferior, and he was certainly not her equal. These subconscious divisions of Dr. Wenzell’s’ had nothing to do with age or social position. Her standards were her own, and since Robin English could not be judged by any of them—or by anyone else’s standards, for that matter—she had made no protest beyond a lift of the eyebrow. It couldn’t be important.

He held her arm as they crossed the rainy street. He always did that, and he was one of the half-dozen men she had met in her life who did it unconsciously and invariably.

“There’s a taxi!” she said.

He grinned. “So it is. Let’s take the subway.”

“Oh, Robin!”

“It’s only temporary. Why, I’ve almost finished that operetta, and any day now I’ll get the patent on that power brake of mine, and—” He smiled down at her. His face was round and ruddy, and it hadn’t quite enough chin, and Peg thought it was a delightful face. She wondered if it knew how to look angry or—purposeful.

“I know,” she said. “I know. And you’ll suddenly have bushels of money, and you won’t have to worry about taxis—”

“I don’t worry about ‘em anyhow. Maybe such things’ll bother me when your boy friend gets through with me.”

“They will, and don’t call him my boy friend.”

“Sorry,” he said casually.

They went down the steps at the subway terminal. Sorry. Robin could always dismiss things with that laconic expression. And he could. Whether he was sorry or not wasn’t important, somehow; it was the way he said it. It reduced the thing he was sorry for to so little value that it wasn’t worth being sorry about.

Peg stood watching him as he swung up to the change booth. He walked easily, with an incredible grace. As graceful as a cat, but not at all like a cat. It was like the way he thought—as well as a human being, but not like a human being. She watched the way the light fell on his strange, planeless, open face, and his tousled head of sandy horsehair. He annoyed her ever so much, and she thought that it was probably because she liked him.

He stood aside to let her through the turnstile, smiling at her and whistling a snatch of a Bach fugue through his teeth. That was another thing. Robin played competent piano and absolutely knocked-out trumpet; but he never played the classics. He never whistled anything else.

There was no train in. They strolled up the platform slowly. Peg couldn’t keep her eyes off Robin’s face. His sensitive nostrils dilated, and she had the odd idea that he was smelling a sound—the echoing shuffle of feet and machinery in the quiet where there should be no quiet. As they passed the massive beam-and-coil-spring bumper at the fold of the track, Robin paused, his eyes flicking over it, gauging its strength, judging its materials. It had never occurred to her to look at such a thing before. “What does that matter to you, Robin?”

He pointed. “First it knocks the train pigeontoed. Then she’ll nose into the beam there and the springs behind it will take up the shock. Now why do they use coils?”

“Why not?”

“Leaf springs would absorb the collision energy between the leaves, in friction. Coil springs store the energy and throw it right back… oh! I see. They took for granted when they designed it that the brakes would be set. Big as those springs are, they’re not going to shove the whole train back. And then, the play between the car couplings would—”

“But Robin—what does it matter? To you, I mean. No,” she said quickly as a thick little furrow appeared and disappeared between his eyes. “I’m not saying you shouldn’t be interested. I’m just wondering exactly what it is about such devices that fascinates you so.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “The… the integration, I suppose. The thought that went into it. The importance of the crash barrier to Mrs. Scholtz’s stew and Sadie’s date, and which ferry Tony catches, and all the other happenings that can happen to the cattle and gods that use the subways.”

Peg laughed delightedly. “And do you think about all of the meanings to all of the people of all of the things you see?”

“I don’t have to think of them. They’re there, right in front of me. Surely you can see homemade borscht and a good night kiss and thousands of other little, important things, all wrapped up in those big helical springs?”

“I have to think about it. But I do see them.” She laughed again.

“What do you think about when you listen to Bach?”

He looked at her quickly. “Did I say I listened to Bach?”

“My Gestapo told me.” She looked at him with puzzlement. He wasn’t smiling. “You whistle it,” she explained.

“Do I? Well, all right then. What do I think of? Architecture, I think. And the complete polish of it. The way old J. S. burnished every note, and the careful matching of all those harmonic voices. And… and—”

“And what?”

He laughed, a burst of it, a compelling radiation which left little pieces of itself as smiles on the faces of the people around them. “And the sweating choirboys who had to pump the organ when he composed. How they must have hated him!”

A train came groaning into the station and stopped, snicking its doors open. “Watch them,” said Robin, his quick eyes taking inventory of the people who jostled each other out of the train. Not one in fifty is seeing anything. No one knows how far apart these pillars are, or the way all these rivets are set, or the cracks in the concrete under their feet. They’re all looking at things separated from them in space and time—the offices they have left, the homes they’re going to, the people they will see. Hardly any of them are consciously here, now. They’re all ghosts, and we’re a couple of Peeping Toms.”

“Robin, Robin, you’re such a Child!”

“To you, of course. You’re older than I am.”

“Four days.” It was a great joke between them.

“Four thousand years,” he said soberly. They found a seat. “And” I’m not a child. I’m a hyper-thymus. You said so yourself.”

“You won’t be for very much longer,” said Dr. Margaretta Wenzell. “Dr. Warfield and I will see to that.”

“What are you doing it for?”

“You’ll find out when we send the bill.”

“I know it isn’t that.”

“Of course not,” she said. Her remark tasted badly in her mouth. “It’s just… Robin, how long have you had that suit?”

“Uh… suit?” He looked vaguely at the sleeve. “Oh, about three years. It’s a good suit.”

“Of course it is.” It was, too. She remembered that he had gotten it with prize money from a poetry contest. “How many weeks room rent do you owe?”

“None!” he said triumphantly. “I rewired all the doorbells in the apartment house and fixed Mrs. Gridget’s vacuum cleaner and composed a song for her daughter’s wedding reception and invented a gadget to hold her cook book under the kitchen shelf, with a little light that goes on when she swings it out. Next thing I knew she handed me a rent receipt. Wasn’t that swell of her?”

“Oh,” said Peg weakly. She clutched grimly at the point she was trying to make. “How much are you in debt?”

“Oh, that,” he said.

“That.”

“I guess ten-twelve thousand.” He looked up. “Kcans Yppans. What are you driving at?”

“What did you say?”

He waved at the car card opposite. “Snappy Snack. Spelled backwards. Always spell things backward when you see them on the car cards. If you don’t, there’s no telling what you might miss.”

“Oh, you blithering idiot!”

“Sorry. What were you saying?”

“I was getting to this,” she said patiently. “There doesn’t seem to be anything you can’t do. You write, you paint, you compose, you invent things, you fix other things, you—”

“Cook,” he said, as she stopped for breath; and he added idly, “I make love, too.”

“No doubt,” said the gland specialist primly. “On the other hand, there doesn’t seem to be anything you’ve accomplished with all of these skills.”

“They’re not skills. They’re talents. I have no skills.”

Peg saw the distinction, and smiled. It was quite true. One had to spend a little time in practice to acquire a skill. If Robin couldn’t do promisingly the first time he tried something, he would hardly try again. “A good point. And that is what Dr. Warfield and I want to adjust.”

“Adjust, she says. Going to shrivel up all the pretty pink lobulae in my thymus. The only thymus I’ve got, too.”

“And about time. You should have gotten rid of it when you were thirteen. Most people do.”

“And then I’ll be all grim and determined about everything, and generate gallons of sweat, and make thousands of dollars, so that at age thirty I can go back to school and get that high school diploma.”

“Haven’t you got a high school diploma?” asked Peg, her appalled voice echoing hollowly against her four post-graduate degrees.

“As a senior,” smiled Robin, “I hadn’t a thing but seniority. I’d been there six years. I didn’t graduate from school; I was released.”

“Robin, that’s awful!”

“Why is it awful? Oh—I suppose it is.” He looked puzzled and crestfallen.

Peg put her hand on his arm. It had nothing to do with logic, but something in her was wrenched when Robin looked hurt. “I suppose it doesn’t matter, Robin. What you learn, and what you do with it, are really more important than where you learn.”

“Yes… but not when. I mean, you can learn too late. I know lots of things, but the things I don’t know seem to have to do with getting along in the world. Isn’t that what you mean by ‘awful’? Isn’t that what you and Dr. Warfield are going to change?”

“That’s it. That’s right, Robin.

Oh, you’re such a strange person!”

“Strange?”

“I mean… you know, I was sure that Mel Warfield and I would have no end of trouble in persuading you take these thymus treatments.”

“Why?”

With a kind of exasperation she said, “I don’t think you fully realize that the change in you will be drastic. You’re going to lose a lot that’s bad about you—I’m sure of that. But you’ll see things quite differently. You… you—” She fought for a description of what Robin would be like without his passionate interest in too many things, and her creative facilities bogged down. “You’ll probably see things quite differently.”

He looked into her eyes thoughtfully. “Is that bad?”

Bad? There never was a man who had less evil about him, she thought. “I think not,” she said.

He spread his hands. “I don’t think so either. So why hesitate? You have mentioned that I do a lot of things. Would that be true if I got all frothed up every time I tried something I’d never tried before?”

“No. No, of course not.” She realized that it had been foolish of her to mix ordinary practical psychology into any consideration of Robin English. Obviously gland imbalances have frequent psychological symptoms, and in many of these cases the abnormal condition has its own self-justifying synapses which will set up a powerful defense mechanism when treatment is mentioned. Equally obviously, this wouldn’t apply to Robin. Where most people seem to have an inherent dislike of being changed, Robin seemed to have a subconscious yearning for just that.

He said, “We get off at the next station.”

“I know.”

“I just wanted to tell you.”

“Where to get off?”

In utter surprise, he said “Me?” and it was the most eloquent monosyllable she had ever heard. For the first time it occurred to her to wonder consciously what he thought of her. It hadn’t seemed to matter, before. What was she, in his eyes? She suddenly realized that she, as a doctor meeting a man socially, had really no right to corner him, question him, analyze and diagnose the way she had over the past few weeks. She couldn’t abide the existence of a correctible condition in her specialty, and it was probably the essence of selfishness for her to do it. He probably regarded her as meddling and dominating. She astonished herself by asking him, point-blank.

“What do I think of you?” He considered, carefully. He appeared not to think it remarkable that she could have asked such a question. “You’re a taffy-puller.”

“I’m a what?”

“A taffy-puller. They hypnotize me. Didn’t you ever see one?”

“I don’t think so,” she breathed. “But—”

“You see them down on the boardwalk. Beautifully machined little rigs, all chrome-plated eccentrics and cams. There are two cranks set near each other so that the ‘handle’ of each passes the axle of the other. They stick a big mass of taffy on one ‘handle’ and start the machine. Before that sticky, homogeneous mass has a chance to droop and drip off, the other crank has swung up and taken most of it. As the crank handles move away from each other the taffy is pulled out, and then as they move together again it loops and sags; and at the last possible moment the loop is shoved together. The taffy welds itself and is pulled apart again.” Robin’s eyes were shining and his voice was rapt. “Underneath the taffy is a stainless steel tray. There isn’t a speck of taffy on it. Not a drop, not a smidgin. You stand there, and you look at it, and you wait for that lump of guff to slap itself all over those roller bearings and burnished con rods, but it never does. You wait for it to get tired of that fantastic juggling, and it never does. Sometimes gooey little bubbles get in the taffy and get carried around and pulled out and squashed fiat, and when they break they do it slowly, leaving little soft craters that take a long time to fill up; and they’re being mauled around the way the bubbles were.” He sighed. “There’s almost too much contrast—that competent, beautiful machinist’s dream handling what? Taffy—no definition, no boundaries, no predictable tensile strength. I feel somehow as if there ought to be an intermediate stage somewhere. I’d feel better if the machine handled one of Dali’s limp watches, and the watch handled the mud. But that doesn’t matter. How I feel, I mean. The taffy gets pulled. You’re a taffy-puller. You’ve never done a wasteful or incompetent thing in your life, no matter what you were working with.”

She sat quietly, letting the vivid picture he had painted fade away. Then, sharply, “Haven’t I!” she cried. “I’ve let us ride past our station!”

Dr. Mellett Warfield let them in himself. Towering over his colleague, he bent his head, and the light caught his high white forehead, which, with his peaked hairline, made a perfect Tuscan arch. “Peg!”

“Hello, Mel. This is Robin English.”

Warfield shook hands warmly. “I am glad to see you. Peg has told me a lot about you.”

“I imagine she has,” grinned Robin. “All about my histones and my albumins and the medullic and cortical tissues of my lobulae. I love that word. Lobulae. I lobule very much, Peg.”

“Robin, for Pete’s sake!”

Warfield laughed. “No—not only that. You see, I’d heard of you before. You designed that, didn’t you?” He pointed. On a side table was a simple device with two multicolored disks mounted at the ends of a rotating arm, and powered by a little electric motor.

“The Whirltoy? Robin, I didn’t know that!”

“I don’t know a child psychologist or a pediatrician who hasn’t got one,” said Warfield. “I wouldn’t part with that one for fifty times what it cost me—which is less than it’s worth. I have yet to see the child, no matter how maladjusted, glandular, spoiled, or what have you, who isn’t fascinated by those changing colors. Even the color-blind children can’t keep their eyes off it because of the changing patterns it makes.”

Peg looked at Robin as if he had just come in through the wall. “Robin… the patent on that—”

“Doesn’t exist,” said Warfield. “He gave it to the Parent’s Association.”

“Well, sure. I made mine for fun. I had it a long time before a friend of mine said I ought to sell the idea to a toy manufacturer. But I heard that the Parent’s Association sent toys to hospitals, and I sort of figured maybe kids that needed amusement should have it, rather than only those whose parents could afford it.”

“Robin, you’re crazy. You could have—”

“No, Peg,” said Warfield gently. “Don’t try to make him regret it. Robin… you won’t mind if I call you Robin… what led you to design the rotors so that they phase over and under the twentieth-of-a-second sight persistence level, so that the eye is drawn to it and then the mind has to concentrate on it?”

“I remember Zeitner’s paper about that at the Society for Mental Sciences,” said Peg in an awed tone. “A brilliant application of optics to psychology.”

“It wasn’t brilliant,” said Robin impatiently. “I didn’t even know that that was what it was doing. I just messed with it until I liked it.”

A look passed between Warfield and Peg. It said, “What would he accomplish if he ever really tried?”

Warfield shook his head and perched on the edge of a table. “Now listen to me, Robin,” he said, gently and seriously. “I don’t think Peg’ll mind my telling you this; but it’s important.”

Peg colored slightly. “I think I know what you’re going to say. But go ahead.”

“When she first told me about you, and what she wanted to try, I was dead set against it. You see, we know infinitely more about the ductless glands nowadays than we did—well, even this time last year. But at the same time, their interaction is so complex, and their functions so subtle, that there are dozens of unexplored mysteries. We’re getting to them, one by one, as fast as they show themselves and as fast as we can compile data. The more I learn about the ductless glands, the less I like to take chances with them. When Peg just told me about you as a talented young man whose life history was a perfect example of hyper-thymus—immaturity, I think was the word she used—”

“Da! Also goo!” laughed Robin. “She might have been kind enough to call it, say, a static precociousness.”

“Please don’t tease me about it, Robin.”

“Oh. Sorry. Go on, Mel.” Peg smiled at the way Warfield’s eyebrows went up. She had done the same thing, for the same reason, the first time Robin called her “Peg.”

“Anyhow, I certainly had no great desire to follow her suggestion—shoot you full of hormones and sterones to help you reorganize your metabolism and your psychology. After all, interesting as these cases are, a doctor has to ration his efforts. There are plenty of odd glandular situations walking around in the guise of human beings. In addition, I had no personal interest in you. I have too much work to do to indulge a Messiah complex.

“But Peg got persistent. Peg can be very persistent. She kept bringing me late developments. I didn’t know whether you were a hobby or an inverted phobia of hers. With some effort I managed to remain uninterested until she brought me those blood analyzes.”

“I’ll never get over my disappointment about what she did with those blood specimens,” said Robin soberly.

“Disappointment? Why?”

“I had hoped she was a vampire.”

“Go on, Mel. Don’t try to keep up with him.”

“It wasn’t until I found out that you wrote ‘The Cellophane Chalice’—and mind you, I never did like poetry, but that was different—and that you also”—he ticked them off on his fingers—”wrote the original continuity for that pornographic horror of a comic strip ‘Gertie and the Wolves,’ did the pipe-cleaner figurines that were photographed to illustrate ‘The Tiny Hans Anderson,’ dropped a sackful of pine oil into the fountain at Radio City purely because you wanted to see thirty thousand gallons of bubbles, got thrown in the pen for it and while there saved the lives of two prisoners and a guard by slugging it out with a homicidal maniac in the bull pen; composed ‘The Lullaby Tree’… by the way, how was it Rollo Vincente got all the credit—and the money—for that song? It was Number One on the hit list for sixteen weeks.”

“He did a swell job,” said Robin. “He wrote it down for me.”

“Robin can’t read music,” Peg said tiredly.

“Oh Lord,” said Warfield reverently. “I also learned that you invented that disgusting advertising disease ‘Stoplight Acne’ and gave it for free to an advertising copywriter—”

“Who is now making twenty thousand a year,” said Peg.

“The guy was desperate,” said Robin. “Besides, he gave me my gold trumpet.”

“Which is in hock,” said Peg.

“Oh, why go on?” said Warfield. “Most important, I learned that you didn’t eat regularly, that you suffered from recurrent eviction, that you continually give away your possessions, including your overcoats, with such bland illogic that once you spent four months in the hospital with pneumonia and complications—”

“Four winter months, I might point out,” said Robin. “So help me, I don’t know how I’d have gotten through that winter otherwise. That was well worth the price of an overcoat.”

“So Peg began to make a social issue of it. She said that you were a fountainhead of art, science, and industry and that the dispersal of your talents was a crime against humanity. At this stage I would be inclined to agree with her even if she weren’t Peg.” Warfield looked at the girl, and the way he did it made Robin raise his eyebrows.

“So now that we have your cooperation, we’ll go ahead, for the greater honor and glory of humanity and creative genius, as Dr. Wenzell here once phrased it. But I want you to thoroughly understand that although there is every chance of success, there might be no result at all, or… or something worse.”

“Like what?”

“How do I know?” said Warfield sharply, and only then did Peg realize what a strain this was to him.

“You’re the doctor,” said Robin. Suddenly he walked up to Warfield and touched his chest gently. He smiled. He said, “Mel, don’t worry. I’ll be all right.”

Peg’s emotional pop-valve let go a hysterical giggle. Warfield turned abruptly away and roughly tore a drawer open and pulled out a thin sheaf of documents. “You’ll have to sign these,” he said roughly. “I’m going to get the solutions ready. Come on, Peg.”

In the laboratory, Peg leaned weakly against the centrifuge. “Don’t worry, Mel,” she quoted mistily.

“From the time of Hippocrates,” growled Warfield, “it has been the duty and practice of the physician to do everything in his power to engender confidence in the patient. And he—”

“Made you feel better.”

After a long pause Warfield said, “Yes, he did.”

“Mel, I think he’s right. I think he will be all right. I think that what he has can’t be killed. There’s too much of it!”

She suddenly noticed that Warfield’s busy hands had become still, though he didn’t turn to look at her. He said “I was afraid of that.”

“What?”

“Oh, I—skip it.”

“Mel, what’s the matter?”

“Nothing of any importance—especially to you. It’s just the way you talk about Robin… the way your voice sounds—”

“That’s utterly ridiculous!”

Warfield chuckled a little. “Not that I can blame you. Really I can’t.

That boy has, without exception, the most captivating—”

“Mel, you’re being offensive. You certainly know me well enough to know that my interest in Robin English is purely professional—even if I have to include the arts among the professions. Personally he doesn’t appeal to me. Why, he’s a child!”

“A situation which I shall adjust for you.”

“That was the n-nastiest thing anyone ever said to me!” she blazed.

“Oh, Peg.” He came to her, wiping his hands on a towel. He threw it away—a most uncharacteristic gesture, for him—and put his hands gently on her shoulders. She would not meet his eyes. “Your lower lip is twice as big as it ought to be,” he said softly. “I am sorry, darling.”

“Don’t call me darling.”

“I lost my good sense. May I ask you to marry me again?”

“M-marry me again?”

“Thank the powers for that sense of the ridiculous! May I ask you again? It’s about time.”

“Let’s see—what is the periodicity? You ask me every nineteen days, don’t you?”

“Aloud,” he said gravely.

“I—” At last she met his eyes. “No. No! Don’t talk about it!”

He took his hands off her shoulders. “All right, Peg.”

“Mel, I wish you wouldn’t keep bringing this up. If I ever change my mind, I’ll speak up.”

“Yes,” he said thoughtfully. “I believe you would.”

“It’s just that you—Oh Mel, everything’s so balanced now! My work is finally going the way I want it to go, and I just don’t need anything else.” She held up a hand, quickly. “If you say anything about ductless glands I’ll walk out of here and never see you again!”

“I won’t, Peg.”

There was a strained silence. Finally Peg said, “Are you almost ready?”

Mel nodded and went back to the bench. “You can bring him in now.”

Peg went out into the reception office. Something white and swift swished past her face, went rocketing up into the corner of the ceiling, hovered, and then drifted down to the floor in slow spirals. “What in—”

“Oh—Sorry, Peg,” Robin said, grinning sheepishly. He went and picked up the white object, and held it out to her. “Tandem monoplane,” he explained. “The Langley principle. If Langley had only had a decent power plant, aviation history would have been drastically different. The thing is really airworthy.”

“Robin, you’re impossible. Mel’s ready. Where’s the thing he asked you to sign?”

“Hm-m-m? Oh, that—this is it.”

“You made that airplane out of it?”

“Well, I wanted to see if I could do it without tearing the paper. I did too.” He disassembled the aircraft busily, and smoothed the papers. “They’re all right, see?”

“I ought to make you stand in the corner,” she said, half angrily.

“O.K. It’s a long time till Christmas. You won’t hold that over my head.”

She looked at him and suddenly, violently, resented Mel for what he had intimated. “Come on, Robin,” she said softly. She took his hand and led him into the laboratory.

“Sit down, Robin,” said Warfield without looking up.

“Per—dition!” said Robin, wide-eyed. “You’ve got more glassware here than the Biltmore Bar. As the hot, cross Bunsen said to the evaporator, ‘Be still, my love.’”

Peg moaned. Warfield said “And what did the evaporator say to that?”

“‘Thank you very much.’ You see,” said Robin solemnly, “It was a retort courteous.”

“Do you think,” gasped Peg, “that we’ll be able to put a stop to that kind of thing with these treatments?”

“I’m afraid not,” said Robin instantly. “The generation of puns is not a phenomenon of the immature mind. The repetition of them is.”

“There is probably a flaw in that,” said Peg. “I have my hopes, anyway.”

“Of course there’s a flaw in it. But didn’t it sound nice?”

“Here,” said Warfield, handing him a glass. “Bottoms up.”

Robin rose, accepted the glass, bowed from the waist, and said, “Well, here’s to champagne for my real friends and real pain for my sham friends. Exit wastrel.” And he drained the glass.

“Now if you’ll rope him and throw him,” said Warfield, approaching with a hypodermic.

Robin sat, quite relaxed, as the needle sank into his arm.

“Never felt a thing,” he said briskly, and then collapsed on the floor. Peg caught his head before it could strike, and lowered it gently. Kneeling beside him, she took his wrist. His pulse felt as if it had lost its flywheel.

“Post-pituitary syncope,” said Warfield. “I half expected that. He’ll be all right. It’s compensated for. There just isn’t any way of slowing down neopituitrin. Watch what happens when the pineal starts kicking up.”

Peg suddenly clutched at the limp wrist. “He’s… he’s—Oh Mel, it’s stopped.”

“Hang on, Peg. Just a few more seconds, and it should—”

Under Peg’s desperate fingers, the pulse beat came in full and strong, as suddenly as if it had been push button tuned. With it, Peg began to breathe again. She saw Warfield wipe his eyes. Sweat, probably.

Robin’s eyes opened slowly, and an utterly beatific expression crossed his face. He sighed luxuriously. “Beautiful,” he said clearly.

“What is it, Robin?”

“Did you see it? I never thought of that before. It’s the most perfectly functional, aesthetically balanced thing produced by the mind of man.” Sheer wonder suffused his face. “I sawone!”

“What was it?”

“A baseball bat!”

Warfield’s chin came up. “Well I’ll be… Peg, don’t laugh.” Peg was hardly likely to. “You know, he’s about right?”

“I’ll think about aesthetics later,” said Peg with some heat. “Is he going to be all right?”

“That’s all of the immediate reactions that I suspected. There’ll be some accelerated mental states—melancholia and exuberance alternating pretty rapidly and pretty drastically. He’ll have to have some outlet for stepped-up muscular energy. Then he’ll sleep.”

“I’m glad it’s over.”

“Over?” said Warfield, and went out. She called after him, but he went straight out the office door.

Robin sat up and shook his head violently. “How did—”

Peg took his upper arm. “Sit up, Robin. Up and go.” She raised him, but instead of regaining the chair he rose and pulled away from her. He paced rapidly down the laboratory, turned and came back. His face held that pitiable, puzzled look, with the deep crease between his brows. He walked past her, his eyes distant; then he whirled suddenly on her. His smile was brilliant. “Peg!” he shouted. “I didn’t expect to see you here!” His eyes drifted past her face, gazed over her shoulder, and he turned and looked around the walls. “Where, incidentally, is ‘here’?”

“Dr. Warfield’s. Mel’s laboratory.”

“Mel. Oh… Mel. Yes, of course. I must be getting old.”

“Perhaps you are.”

He put his hand on his chest, just below his throat. “What would my thymus be doing about now? Trying to think of something quotable to say as its last words?”

“It may be some time,” she smiled. “But I imagine it’s on its way out. Get your coat on. I’ll go home with you.”

“What on earth for?”

She considered, and then decided to tell him the truth. “You’re full of sterones and hormones and synthetic albuminoids, you know. It isn’t dangerous, but glandular balance is a strange thing, and from the treatment you just got you’re liable to do anything but levitate—and knowing you,” she added, “even that wouldn’t surprise me.”

“Gosh. I didn’t realize that I might be a nuisance to people.”

“You didn’t realize… why, there was a pretty fair list of possibilities of what might happen to you in that release you signed.”

“There was? I didn’t read it.”

“Robin English, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with you.”

“Haven’t you already done it?” He shrugged. “What’s the odds? Mel said I’d have to sign it, and I took his word for it.”

“I wish,” said Peg fervently, “that I could guarantee the change in your sense of values the way I can the change in your hormone adjustment. You’re going to have to be educated! And let this be the first lesson—never sign anything without reading it first! What are you laughing at, you idiot?”

“I was just thinking how I would stall things if I go to work for some big outfit and have to sign a payroll,” he chuckled.

“Get your coat,” said Peg, smiling. “And stop your nonsense.”

They took a taxi, after all. In spite of Robin’s protests, Peg wouldn’t chance anything else after Robin:

Nearly fainted on the street from a sudden hunger, and when taken to a restaurant got petulant to the point of abusiveness when he found there was no tabasco in the place, advancing a brilliant argument with the management to the effect that they should supply same to those who desire it even if what the customer had ordered was four pieces of seven-layer cake.

Ran half a block to give a small boy with a runny nose his very expensive embroidered silk handkerchief.

Bumped into a lamp-post, lost his temper and swung at it, fracturing slightly his middle phalanx annularis.

Indulged in a slightly less than admirable remorseful jag in which he recounted a series of petty sins—and some not so petty at that—and cast wistful eyes at the huge wheels of an approaching tractor-trailer.

Went into gales of helpless laughter over Peg’s use of the phrase “Signs of the times” and gaspingly explained to her that he was suffering from sinus of the thymus.

And the payoff—the instantaneous composition of eleven verses of an original song concerning one “Stella with the Springy Spine” which was of a far too questionable nature for him to carol at the top of his voice the way he did. She employed a firmness just short of physical force and at last managed to bundle him into a cab, in which he could horrify no one but the driver, who gave Peg a knowing wink which infuriated her.

After getting in his rooms—a feat which required the assistance of Landlady Gridget’s passkey, since he had lost his, and the sufferance of a glance of wild surmise from the good lady—Robin, who had been unnaturally silent for all of eight minutes shucked off his coat and headed for the studio couch in one continuous movement. He rolled off his feet and onto the couch with his head buried in the cushions.

“Robin—are you all right?”

“Mm-m-m.”

She looked about her.

Robin’s two-and-kitchenette was a fantastic place. She had never dreamed that the laws of gravity would permit such a piling-up of miscellany. There were two guitars on an easy-chair, one cracked across the head. A clarinet case with little holes punched in it lay on the floor by the wall. Curious, she bent and lifted the lid. It was lined with newspaper, and in it were two desiccated bananas and a live tarantula. She squeaked and dropped the cover.

Leaning against the far wall was a six-foot square canvas, unfinished, of a dream-scape of rolling hills and pale feathery trees. She looked away, blinked, and looked back. It could have been a mistake. She sincerely hoped that it was; but it seemed to her that the masses of those hills, and the foliage, made a pretty clear picture of a… a—

“No,” she whispered. “I haven’t got that kind of a mind!”

There was a beautifully finished clay figurine standing proudly amongst a litter of plasticine, modeling tools, a guitar tuner and a flat glass of beer. It was a nude, in an exquisitely taut pose; a girl with her head flung back and a rapt expression on her face, and she was marsupial. On the bookcase was a four-foot model of a kayak made of whalebone and sealskin. Books overflowed the shelves and every table and chair in the place. There were none in the sink; it was too full of dishes, being sung to by a light cloud of fruit flies. It was more than she could stand. She slipped out of her coat, moved a fishbowl with some baby turtles in it, and an 8 mm projector, off the drainboard and went to work. After she had done all the dishes and reorganized the china closet, where ivy was growing, she rummaged a bit and found a spray gun, with which she attacked the fruit flies. It seemed to be a fairly efficient insecticide, although it smelled like banana oil and coagulated all over the sink. It wasn’t until the next day that she identified the distinctive odor of it. It was pastel fixatif.

She tiptoed over to the arch and looked in at Robin. He had hardly moved. She knew he was probably good for twelve hours sleep.

She bent over him and gently pushed some of his rough hair away from his eyes. She had never seen eyes, before, which had such smooth lids.

Robin smiled while he slept. She wished she knew why.

Carefully she removed his shoes. She had to step very close to the couch to do it, and something crunched under her foot. It was a radio tube. She shook her head and sighed, and got a piece of cardboard—there was no dustpan—and a broom and swept up the pieces. Among them she found a stuffed canary and a fifty-dollar bill, both quite covered with “Aug,” or dust whiskers. She wondered how many times Robin had sat on that couch, over that bill, eating beans out of the can and thinking about some glorious fantasy of his own.

She sighed again and put on her coat. As she reached the door she paused, debating whether, if she left a note anywhere in this monumental clutter, he would find it. She wanted him to call her as soon as he awoke, so she could have an idea as to his prognosis. She knew well that in his condition, with his particular treatment, that the imbalances should be all adjusted within twelve hours. But still—

Then why not wake him and remind him to call?

She suddenly realized that she was afraid to—that she was glad he was asleep and… and harmless. She felt that she could name what it was she was afraid of if she tried. So she didn’t try.

“Blast!” she, said half aloud. She hated to be hesitant, ever, about anything. She hated to be puzzled, or afraid.

She would leave word with the landlady to wake him early in the morning, she decided abruptly.

She felt like a crawling coward.

She turned to the door, and Robin said brightly, “Good-by, Peg darlin’. Thanks for everything. You’ve been swell. I’ll call you when I wake up.”

“You young demon!” she ejaculated. “How long have you been awake?”

“I haven’t been asleep,” he said, coming to the archway. He chuckled. “I’m sorry to say you are right about the canvas. I forgot about the disgusting thing’s being so conspicuous.”

“Oh, that’s all… why did you pretend to be asleep?”

“I felt something coming and didn’t want it to.”

“I… don’t know what you mean; but why didn’t you let it come?”

He looked at her somberly. Either it was something new, or she had never noticed the tinge of green in his eyes. “Because you wouldn’t have fought me.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

The lower half of his face grinned. “You like most of the things I do,” he said. “I like you to humor me in those things. Those things are”—he put his fingertips to his chest, then flung them outward—”like this—fun, from here out. I don’t want to be humored from here in.”

Over his shoulder she saw the big canvas. From this distance it was even more specific. She shuddered.

“Good-by, Peg.”

It was a studied dismissal. She nodded, and went out, closing the door softly behind her. Then she ran.

Dr. Margaretta Wenzell was highly intelligent, and she was just as sensitive. Twice she appeared at Mel Warfield’s laboratory at the hour appointed for Robin’s succeeding treatments. Once Robin did not speak to her. The second time she went, Robin did not show up. On inquiry, she learned from the information desk at the medical center that Robin had been there, had asked if she were in Dr. Warfield’s office, and having been told that she was, had turned around and walked out. After that she did not go again. She called up Warfield and asked him to forward Robin’s case history and each progress report. Mel complied without asking questions; and if Dr. Wenzell spent more time poring over them than their importance justified, it was the only sign she gave that it mattered to her.

It mattered—very much. Never had Peg, in consultation or out, turned a patient over to another doctor before. And yet, she was conscious of a certain relief. Somehow, she was deeply certain that Robin had not ceased to like her. Consciously, she refused to give any importance to his liking for her, but in spite of that she derived a kind of comfort from an arduously-reached conclusion that Robin had reasons of his own for avoiding her, and that they would come out in good time.

She was astonished at the progress reports. She could deduce the probable changes in Robin from the esoteric language of the reaction-listings. Here a sharp drop in the 17-kesteroids; there a note of an extraordinary effect of the whole metabolism, making it temporarily immune to the depressing effect of the adrenal cortices in colossal overdoses. An entry in the third week of the course caused Peg two sleepless nights of research; the pituitrin production was fluctuating wildly, with no apparent balancing reaction from any other gland—and no appreciable effect on the patient. A supplementary report arrived then, by special messenger, which eased her mind considerably. It showed a slight miscalculation in a biochemical analysis of Robin’s blood which almost accounted for the incredible activity of the pituitaries. It continued to worry her, although she knew that she could hardly pretend to criticize Mel Warfield’s vast experience in the practice of hormone therapy.

But somehow, somewhere deep inside, she did question something else in Mel. Impersonality had to go very closely with the unpredictable psycho-somatic and physiological changes that occurred during gland treatments; and in Robin’s case, Peg doubted vaguely that Mel was able to be as detached as might be wished. She tried not to think about it, and was bothered by the effort of trying. And every time she felt able to laugh it off, she would remember Mel’s odd statement in the laboratory that day—but then, he had taken such a quick and warm liking to the boy. Could he possibly resent him on her behalf? Again she felt that resurgence of fury at Mel—and at herself; and again she wished that she could be left alone; she wanted to laugh at herself in the rôle of femme fatale, but laughter was out of order.

The progress reports were by no means the only source of information about Robin, however. In the tenth day of his treatment, she noticed an item in the “Man About Town” column in the Daily Blaze:

Patrons of the Goose’s Neck were treated to a startling sight this a.m. when Vincent (The Duke) Voisier came tearing into the place, literally bowling over a table-full of customers—and their table—in the process of hauling Vic Hill, song writer extraordinary, out to the curb. The center of attention out there seemed to be a tousle-headed character by the name of Robin English, who told this snooper mildly that Mr. Voisier was going to produce his show. At that moment The Duke and Hill came sailing out of the bistro, scooped up this Robin English and hurled him into a taxicab, leaving your reporter in a cloud of carbon monoxide and wild surmise. Now followers of this column know that Brother Voisier is usually as excitable as the occupant of Slab 3 at the City Morgue. My guess is missed if show business isn’t about to be shown some business. Voisier is a rich man because of his odd habit of taking no wild chances…

And then there was a letter from a book publisher tactfully asking for a character reference prior to giving one Robin English an advance on an anthology of poems. She answered immediately, giving Robin an A-l rating, and only after sending it off did she realize that a few short weeks ago she would not have considered such a thing. Robin’s reliability was a strange and wonderful structure, and his record likewise.

At long last, then, came his phone call.

“Peg?”

“Wh… oh, Robin! Robin, how are you?”

“Sharp as a marshmallow, and disgustingly productive. Will you come over?”

“Come over?” she asked stupidly. “Where?”

“Robin’s Roost,” he chuckled. “My McGee hall closet and bath. Home.”

“But Robin, I… you—”

“Safe as a tomb,” he said solemnly.

“Don’t intimate anything otherwise,” she said as sharply as she could; but something within her rose delightedly at the overtones of amusement in his voice.

“I’m a big grown-up man now,” he said. “Restrained, mature, reliable and thoroughly unappetizing. Come over and I won’t be anything but repulsive. Impersonal. Detached. No… say semi-detached. Like a brownstone front. A serious mein. Well, if it’s before dinner I’ll have a chow mein.”

“Stop!” she gasped. “Robin, you’re mad! You’re delirious!”

“Delirious and repressing, like a certain soft drink. Four o’clock suit you?”

It so happened that it did not.

But “All right, Robin,” she said helplessly, and hung up.

She discovered that she had cleared her afternoon so efficiently that she had time to go home and change. Well, of course she had to change. That princess neckline was—not daring, of course, but—too demure. That was it; demure. She did not want to be demure. She wanted to be businesslike.

So she changed to a navy sharkskin suit with a wide belt and a starched dicky at the throat, the severest thing in her wardrobe. It was incidental that it fitted like clasped hands, and took two inches off her second dimension and added them to her third. As incidental as Robin’s double-take when he saw it; she could almost sense his shifting gears.

“Well!” said Robin as he stepped back from the door. “A mannequin, kin to the manna from heaven. Come in, Peg!”

“Do you write your scripts out, Robin? You can’t generate those things on the spur of the moment!”

“I can for moments like this,” he said gallantly, handing her inside.

It was her turn for a double-take. The little apartment was scrupulously clean and neat. Books were in bookcases; it had taken the addition of three more bookcases to accomplish that. A set of shelves had been built in one corner, very cleverly designed to break up the boxlike proportions of the room, and in it were neatly stacked manuscripts and, up above, musical instruments. There was more livestock than ever, but it was in cages and a terrarium—she wondered where the white rats had been on her last visit. Imprisoned in the bathtub, no doubt. There was a huge and gentle pastel of a laughing satyr on the wall. She wondered where the big oil was.

“I painted ol’ Splay-foot over it,” said Robin.

“You include telepathy among your many talents?” she asked without turning.

“I include a guilty conscience among my many neuroses,” he countered. “Sit down.”

“I hear you’re getting a play produced,” she said conversationally, as he deftly set out a beautiful tray of exotic morsels—avocado mashed with garlic juice on little toast squares; stuffed olives sliced paper-thin on zwieback and chive cheese; stems of fennel stuffed with blue-cheese; deviled eggs on rounds of pimento, and a strange and lovely dish of oriental cashews in blood-orange pulp.

“It isn’t a play. It’s a musical.”

“Oh? Whose book?”

“Mine.”

“Fine, Robin. I read that Vic Hill’s doing the lyrics.”

“Well, yes. Voisier seemed to think mine were—Well, to tell you the truth, he called in Hill for the name. Got to have a name people know. However, they are my lyrics.”

“Robin. Are you letting him—”

“Ah—shush, Peg! No one’s doing anything to me!” He laughed. “Sorry. I can’t help laughing at the way you, looking like a Vassar p.g., ruffle up like a mother hen. The truth is that I’m getting plenty out of this. There just don’t seem to be enough names to go around on the billing. I wrote the silly little thing at one sitting, and filled in the music and staging just to round it off—sort of an overall synopsis. Next thing you know this Voisier is all over me like a tent, wanting me to direct it as well; and since there’s a sequence in there—sort of a duet between voice and drums in boogie-beat—that no one seems to be able to do right, he wants me to act that part too.” He spread his hands. “Voisier knows what he is doing. Only you can’t have one man’s name plastered all over the production. The public doesn’t take to that kind of thing. Voisier’s treating the whole deal the way he handles his trucking concern and his insurance business and his pharmaceutical house—like a business. Show business is still business.”

“Oh—that’s better. And what about this anthology of poems?”

“Oh, that. Stuff I had kicking around the house here.” His eyes traveled over the neat shelves and bookcases. “Remarkable what a lot of salable, material I had here, once I found it by cleaning up some.”

“What else did you find?”

“Some gadgets. A centrifugal pump I designed using the business end of a meat grinder for the impeller. A way to take three-dimensional portraits with a head clamp and a swivel chair and a 35 mm camera, A formula for a quick-drying artist’s oil pigment which can’t contract the paint. A way to drill holes through glass—holes a twenty-five thousandth of an inch or less in diameter—with some scraps of wire and a No. 6 dry cell. You know—odds and ends.”

“You’ve marketed all these?”

“Yes, or patented or copyrighted them.”

“Oh Robin, I’m so glad! Are you getting results?”

“Am I?” The old, lovely, wondering look came into his face. “Peg, people are crazy. They just give money away. I honestly don’t have to think about money any more. That is, I never did; but now I tell people my account number and ask them to send their check to it for deposit, and they keep piling it in, and I can’t cash enough checks to keep up with it. When are you going to ask me why I’ve been keeping away from you?”

The abruptness of the question took Peg’s breath away. It was all she had been thinking about, and it was the reason she had accepted his invitation. She colored. “Frankly, I didn’t know how to lead up to it.”

“You didn’t have to lead up to it,” he said, smiling gravely. “You know that, Peg.”

“I suppose I know it. Well—why?”

“You like the eatments?” He indicated the colorful dishes on the coffee table.

“Delicious, and simply lovely to look at. But—”

“It’s like that. This isn’t food for hungry people. Canapes like these are carefully designed to appeal to all five senses—if you delight in the crunch of good zwieback the way I do, and include hearing.”

She stared at him. “I think I’m being likened to a… a smorgasbord!”

He laughed. “The point I’m making is that a hungry man will go for this kind of food as happily as any other. The important thing to him is that it’s food. If he happens to like the particular titillations offered by such food as this, he will probably look back on his gobbling with some regret, later, when his appetite for food is satisfied and his psychic—artistic, if you like—hungers can be felt.” Robin grinned suddenly. “This is a wayward and wandering analogy, I know; but it does express why I kept away from you.”

“It does?”

“Yes, of course. Look, Peg, I can see what’s happening to me even if I am the patient. I wonder why so many doctors overlook that? You can play around with my metabolism and my psychology and ultimately affect such an abstract as my emotional maturity. But there’s one thing you can’t touch—and that is my own estimate of the things I have learned. My sense of values. You can change my approach to these things, but not the things themselves. One such thing is that I have a violent reaction against sordidness, no matter how well justified the sordidness may have been when I did the sordid thing, whatever it was. In the past, the justification has been the important thing. Now—and by ‘now’ I mean since I started these treatments—the reaction is more important. So I avoid sordidness because I don’t want to live through the reaction afterward, and not so much because I dislike doing a sordid thing.”

“That’s a symptom of maturity,” said Peg. “But what has it to do with me?”

“I was hungry,” he said simply. “So hungry I couldn’t see straight. And suddenly so full of horse sense that I wouldn’t reach for the pretty canapes until I could fully appreciate them. And now—sit down, Peg!”

“I… have to go,” she said in a throttled voice.

“Oh, you’re wrong,” he said, not moving. He spoke very quietly. “You don’t have to go. You haven’t been listening to me. You’re acting defensive when I’ve laid no siege. I have just said that I’m incapable of doing anything in bad taste—that is, anything which will taste bad to me, now or later. And you are acting as if I had said the opposite. You are thinking with your emotions instead of your intellect.”

Slowly, she sank back into her chair. “You take a great deal for granted,” she said coldly.

“That, in effect, is what the bread and cheese and pimentos and olives told me when I told them about these trays,” he said. “Oh, Peg, let’s not quarrel. You know that all I’ve just said is true. I could candy-coat all my phrases, talk for twice as long, and say half as much; and if I did you’d resent it later; you know you would.”

“I rather resent it now.”

“Not really.” He met her gaze, and held it until she began to smile.

“Robin, you’re impossible!”

“Not impossible. Just highly unlikely.”

He sprang to pour coffee for her—and how did he know that she preferred coffee to tea? he had both—and he said, “Now we can talk about the other thing that’s bothering me. Mel.”

“What about Mel?” she said sharply.

He smiled at her tone. “I gather that it’s the other thing that’s been bothering you?”

She almost swore at him.

“Sorry,” he said with his quick grin, and was as quickly sober. “Warfield’s very much in love with you, Peg.”

“He—has said so.”

“Not to me,” said Robin. “I’m not intimating that he has poured out his soul to me. But he can’t conceal it. What he mostly does is avoid talking about you. Under the circumstances, that begins to be repetitious and—significant.” He shrugged. “Thing is, I have found myself a little worried from time to time. About myself.”

“Since when did you start worrying about yourself?”

“Perhaps it’s symptomatic. This induced maturity that I am beginning to be inflicted with has made me think carefully about a lot of things I used to pass off without a thought. No one can escape the basic urgencies of life—hunger, self-preservation, and so on. At my flightiest moments I was never completely unaware of hunger. The difference between a childish and a mature approach to such a basic seems to be that the child is preoccupied only with an immediate hunger. The adult directs most of his activities to overcoming tomorrow’s hunger.

“Self-preservation is another basic that used to worry me not at all as long as danger was invisible. I’d dodge an approaching taxi, but not an approaching winter. Along comes a few gland-treatments, and I find myself feeling dangers, not emotionally, and now, but intellectually, and in the future.”

“A healthy sign,” nodded Peg.

“Perhaps so. Although that intellectual realization is a handy thing to have around to ward off personal catastrophies, it is also the raw material for an anxiety neurosis. I don’t think Mel Warfield is trying to kill me, but I think he has reason enough to.”

“What?” Peg said, horrified.

“Certainly. He loves you. You—” he broke off, and smiled engagingly. She felt her color rising, as she watched his bright eyes, the round bland oval of his almost chinless face.

“Don’t say it, Robin,” she breathed.

“—you won’t marry him,” Robin finished easily. “Whom you love needn’t enter into the conversation.” He laughed. “What amounts of wind we use to avoid the utterance of a couple of syllables! Anyway, let it suffice that Mel, for his own reasons, regards me as a rival, or at least as a stumbling block.” His eyes narrowed shrewdly. “I gather that he has also concluded that your chief objection to me has been my… ah… immaturity. No, Peg, don’t bother to answer. So if I am right—and I think I am—he has been put in the unenviable position of working like fury to remove his chief rival’s greatest drawback. His only drawback, if you’ll forgive the phrase, ma’am,” he added, with a twinkle and the tip of an imaginary hat. “No fun for him. And I don’t think that Brother Mel is so constituted that he can get any pleasure out of the great sacrifice act.”

“I think you’re making a mountain out of—”

“Peg, Peg, certainly you know enough about psychology to realize that I am not accusing Mel of being a potential murderer, or even of consciously wanting to hurt me. But the compulsions of the subconscious are not civilized. Your barely expressed annoyance at the man who jostles you in a crowded bus is the civilized outlet to an impulse for raw murder. Your conditioned reflexes keep you from transfixing him with the nearest nail file; but what about the impulses of a man engaged in the subtle complexities of a thing like the glandular overhaul I’m getting? In the bus, your factor of safety with your reactions can run from no visible reaction through a lifted eyebrow to an acid comment, before you reach the point where you give him a light tap on the noggin and actually do damage. Whereas Mel’s little old subconscious just has to cause his hand to slip while doing a subcutaneous, or to cause his eye to misread a figure on the milligram scale, for me to be disposed of in any several of many horrible ways. Peg! What’s the matter?”

Her voice quivering, she said quietly, “That is the most disgusting, conceited, cowardly drivel I have ever had to listen to. Mel Warfield may have the misfortune to be human, but he is one of the finest humans I have ever met. As a scientist, there is no one in this country—probably in the world—more skilled than he. He is also a gentleman, in the good old-fashioned meaning of the word—I will say it, no matter how much adolescent sneering you choose to do—and if he is engaged on a case, the case comes first.” She rose. “Robin, I have had to take a lot from you, because as a gland specialist I knew what an advanced condition I had to allow for. That is going, to stop. You are going to find out that one of the prices you must pay for the privilege of becoming an adult is the control of the noises your mouth makes.”

Robin looked a little startled. “It would be a little dishonest of me to think these things without expressing them.”

She went on as if she hadn’t heard. “The kind of control I mean has to go back further than the antrums. All of us have mean, cowardly thoughts from time to time. Apparently the maturity you’re getting is normal enough that you’re developing a man-sized inferiority complex along with it. You are beginning to recognize that Mel is a better man than you’ll ever be, and the only way you can rationalize that is to try to make him small enough to be taking advantage of you.”

“Holy cow,” breathed Robin. “Put down that knout, Peg! I’m not going to make a hobby of taking cracks at Mel Warfield behind his back. I’m just handing it to you straight, the way I see it, for just one reason—to explain why I am discontinuing the course of treatment.”

She was halfway to the door as he spoke, and she brought up sharply as if she had been tied by a ten-foot rope. “Robin! You’re not going to do anything of the kind!”

“I’m going to do exactly that,” said Robin. “I’m not used to lying awake nights worrying about what someone else is likely to do. I’m doing all right. I’ve come as far in this thing as I intend to go. I’m producing more than I ever did in my life before, and I can live adequately on what I’m getting and will get for this music and these patents and plays and poems, to live for the rest of my life if I quit working tomorrow—and I’m not likely to quit working tomorrow.”

“Robin! You’re half hysterical! You don’t know what you’re talking about! In your present condition you can’t depend on the biochemical balance of your glandular system. It can only be kept balanced artificially, until it gradually adjusts itself to operation without the thymus. In addition, the enormous but balanced overdoses of other gland extracts we have had to give you must be equalized as they recede to normalcy. You simply can’t stop now!”

“I simply will stop now,” he said, mimicking her tone. “I took the chance of starting with this treatment, and I’ll take the chance of quitting. Don’t worry; no matter what happens your beloved Mel’s nose is clean, because of that release I signed. I’m not going to sue anybody.”

She looked at him wonderingly. “You’re really trying to be as offensive as you possibly can, aren’t you? I wonder why?”

“It seems the only way for me to put over a point to you,” he said irritably. “If you must know, there’s another reason. The stuff I’m producing now is good, if I can believe what I read in the papers. It has occurred to me that whatever creativeness I have is largely compounded of the very immaturity you are trying to get rid of. Why should I cut off the supply of irrationality that produces a work of art like my musical comedy? Why should I continue a course of treatment that will ultimately lead me to producing nothing creative? I’m putting my art before my course, that’s all.”

“A good pun, Robin,” said Peg stonily, “but a bad time for it. I think we’ll let you stew in your own juice for a while. Watch your diet and your hours, and when you need professional help, get in touch with me and I’ll see what I can do about getting Mel to take you on again.”

“Nice of you. Why bother?”

“Partly sheer stubbornness; you make it so obvious you want nothing of the kind. Partly professional ethics, a thing which I wouldn’t expect a child, however precocious, to understand fully.”

He went slowly past her and opened the door. “Good-by, Dr. Wenzell.”

“Good-by, Robin. And good luck.”

Later, in her office at the hospital, Peg’s phone rang. “Yes?”

“Peg! I’ve just received a note, by messenger, from Robin English.”

“Mel! What did he say?”

“He inclosed a check for just twice what I billed him for, and he says that he won’t be back.”

“Mel, is it safe?”

“Of course it’s not safe! The pituitary reactions are absolutely unpredictable—you know that. I can’t prognosticate anything at all without the seventy-two-hour checkups. He might be all right; I really wouldn’t know. He’s strong and healthy and tremendously resilient. But to stop treatment now is taking unfair advantage of his metabolism. Can’t you do anything about it?”

“Can’t I do anything?”

“He’ll listen to you, Peg. Try, won’t you? I… well, in some ways I’m glad to have him off my neck, frankly. It’s been… but anyway, I’ll lose sleep over it, I know I will. Will you see if you can do anything with him?”

A long pause.

“Hello; Peg—are you still there?”

“Yes, Mel… let him go. It’s what he wants.”

“Peg! You… you mean you won’t see him?”

“N-no, I—can’t, Mel. I won’t. Don’t ask me to.”

“I hardly know what to say. Peg, what’s the matter?”

“Nothing’s the matter. I won’t see him, that’s all, and if I did it wouldn’t do any good. I don’t care what hap—Oh, Mel, do watch him! Don’t let anything… I mean, he’s got to be all right. Read his stuff, Mel. Go see his plays. You’ll be able to f-find out that way.”

“And if I don’t like the looks of what I find out, what am I supposed to do about it?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know. Call me up whenever you find out anything, Mel.”

“I will, Peg, I’m—sorry. I didn’t realize that you… I mean, I knew it, but I didn’t know you felt so—”

“Good-by, Mel.”

She hung up and sat and cried without hiding her face.

Robin’s first novel was published five months later, while his musical, “Too Humorous To Mention,” was eight weeks old and just at the brilliant beginning of its incredible run, while “The Cellophane Chalice,” his little, forgotten book of verse, went into its sixth printing, and while three new songs from “Too Humorous” were changing places like the shells in the old army game, on the Hit Parade in the one-two-three spots. The title of one of them, “Born Tomorrow,” had been bought at an astonishing figure by Hollywood, and royalties were beginning to roll in for Robin’s self-tapping back-out drill bits.

The novel was a strange and compelling volume called “Festoon.” The ravings of the three critics who were fortunate enough to read it in manuscript made the title hit the top of the best-seller lists and stay there like a masthead. Robin English was made an honorary doctor of law by a college in Iowa, a Kentucky Colonel, a member of the Lambs Club and a technical advisor to the American Society of Basement Inventors. He dazedly declined a projected nomination to the State Senate which was backed by a colossal round robin; wrote a careful letter of thanks to the municipality of Enumclaw, Washington, for the baroque golden key to the city it sent him because of the fact that early in his life he had been born there; was photographed for the “Young Men of the Month” page of Pic, and bought himself a startlingly functional mansion in Westchester County. He wrote a skillful novella which was sold in Boston and banned in Paris, recorded a collection of muezzin calls, won a pie-eating contest at the Bucks County Fair, and made a radio address on the evolution of modern poetry which was called one of the most magnificent compositions in the history of the language. He bought a towboat and had a barge built in the most luxurious pleasure-yacht style and turned them over to the city hospitals for pleasure-cruises to Coney Island for invalid children. Then he disappeared.

He was a legend by then, and there was plenty of copy about him for the columnists and the press agents to run, so that in spite of his prominence, his absence was only gradually felt. But gradually the questions asked in the niteries and on the graveyard shifts at newspaper offices began to tell. Too often reporters came back empty handed when assigned to a new R. E. story—any new R. E. story. An item in the “Man About Town” column led to a few readers’ letters, mostly from women, asking his whereabouts; and then there was a landslide of queries. It was worth a stick or two on the front pages, and then it suddenly disappeared from the papers when all the editors were told in a mimeographed letter that Mr. English’s business would be handled by his law firm, which had on proud exhibition a complete power of attorney—and which would answer no queries. All business mail was photostated and returned, bearing Robin’s rubber-stamped signature and the name of his lawyers. All fan mail was filed.

The categories of men who can disappear in New York are extreme. The very poor can manage it. The very rich cannot; but those richer than the very rich can manage it, with care. Robin did it.

And then the rumors started.

The role of “Billy-buffoon” which he had taken in his musical was a mask-and-wig part, and it was said that his understudy didn’t work at every performance. English was reported to have been seen in Hollywood; in Russia; dead; and once even on Flatbush Avenue. Robin’s extraordinary talents, in the gentle hands of idle talk, took on fantastic proportions. He was advisor to three cabinet members. He had invented a space drive and was at the moment circling Mars. He was painting a mural in the City Morgue. He was working on an epic novel. He had stumbled on a method for refining U-235 in the average well-equipped kitchen, and was going crazy in trying to conceal that he knew it. He was the author of every anonymous pamphlet cranked out to the public everywhere, from lurid tracts through political apassionatae to out and out pornography. And of course, murders and robberies were accredited to his capacious reputation. All of these things remained as engagingly fictional as his real activities had been; but since they had nothing like books and plays and inventions to perpetuate them, they faded from the press and from conversation.

But not from the thoughts of a few people. Drs. Wenzell and Warfield compiled and annotated Robin English’s case history, with as close a psychological analysis as they could manage. Ostensibly, the work was purely one of professional interest; and yet if it led to a rational conclusion as to where he was and what he was doing, who could say that such a conclusion was not the reason for the work? In any case, the book was not published, but rested neatly in the active files of Mel Warfield’s case records, and grew. And then there was one Voisier, himself a mysterious character about whom little was known except his aquiline features and unbuttoning eyes and his wealth, all of which were underestimated. Voisier thought about Robin a great deal; and because he was Voisier, he was able to gain scraps of information not available to most people. The conclusions he drew from two or three of these, one afternoon, led to the ringing of Peg’s phone.

“Dr. Wenzell?”

“Yes?”

“Voisier speaking. Do you know Robin English?”

“Voisier, the producer? Oh, how do you do? Yes, I—have met Robin English.”

“Do you happen to know where he is?”

“Does anyone?” she countered. “I understand that his lawyers—”

Voisier’s soft chuckle slid over the wire and came out of the receiver like little audible smoke rings. “I have encountered his lawyers. Dr. Wenzell, I have to find out where he is.”

“What has that to do with me?” Peg asked cautiously.

“There is some connection between you and Robin English,” said Voisier smoothly. “Just a moment—I’m not trying to find out what it is, and I don’t care. I know only that it is a matter of professional interest to you and a Dr. Mellet Warfield; and I don’t care what it is. I’ll be frank with you; I must see him purely on a business matter. It will be to his advantage—all of his dealings with me have been, you know. After all. I discovered him.”

“You discovered him the way the atom bomb was discovered by the mayor of Hiroshima,” said Peg tartly.

Voisier laughed urbanely. “Very good.” Peg was figuratively conscious of the swing of his boom as he changed his conversational tack. “Please, Dr. Wenzell—let’s not get off on the wrong foot. I’m sorry if I seem to pry. Will you take lunch with me tomorrow?”

“I’m sorry. I’m busy tomorrow.”

“Dinner this evening, then. That would be better.”

“I am completely tied up, thank you,” said Peg, over the rustle of silk in his voice. “And besides, I do not know where Robin English is or what he is doing. Good-b—”

“I know what he is doing,” said Voisier quickly.

“You—”

Through a smile, Voisier’s easy voice said, “Of course. I don’t know where he is, that’s all. I thought that with what I know and what you know we might be able to locate him. For his own good, of course. I gather that you would like very much to know where he is.”

“What’s he doing?”

“I can’t tell you over the phone!” he said, in the voice in which one says “You mustn’t play with Daddy’s watch!”

“I wish you—” said Peg sharply, and then sighed. “When can I see you?”

“Thank you very much, doctor,” he said abjectly, and was that a touch of relief in his voice? “Dinner tonight, then—unless you are busy, in which case… ah… cocktail time is practically here. I could meet you this afternoon, if you could—”

“Thank you,” she said, and startlingly, she blushed at the eagerness she heard in her own voice. “How soon can you get here?”

“Very soon. I know where it is. I’ll see you in a moment. And thanks again.”

He hung up, and Peg sat looking at the bland cornerless bulk of her cradled telephone. Robin, Robin English. She formed his name with silent lips, and smiled a little. “Robin,” she whispered, “I’m going to catch you by the ear and stand you in a corner for doing this to me.” Robin was a child—such a child.

Her assistant came in. “A Mr. Voisier to see you doctor.”

“Thank you, Helen. Ask him—Voisier! Good heavens, I didn’t expect him so quickly! Yes, show him in. Show him right in!”

Voisier appeared at the door, rather as if he had been projected there. He looked over the office, more rapidly than he appeared to be doing it, and then let his gaze slide to rest on her face. He smiled.

“Mr. Voisier?”

“‘I am very glad to meet you, doctor.” He came forward, and she noticed that the Homburg he carried was not black, but a very dark brown. Like his eyes.

“You got here very quickly, Mr. Voisier.”

“I was just downstairs when I called.”

She frowned briefly, realizing that she had been told that he had come to the hospital perfectly confident that he could talk her into seeing him. She wondered why she didn’t mind too much. “Sit down a moment,” she said. “I’ll be ready to leave in a second.”

He thanked her, and surprised her by not taking the chair she indicated at the end of her desk and close to her, but one in the corner. He sat down, ignoring the magazines on the end table next to him, and rested a part of the weight of his eyes on her as she worked, stacking the reports on her desk and putting them away.

When her desk was clear she paused a moment, thinking, and then dipped into the file drawer and brought out her copy of Robin’s case history. She did not open it—she knew every line in it—but sat running her fingers over the binding, wondering whether to bring it with her.

“Bring it along,” said Voisier, his eyes on the ceiling.

“I knew someone else who acted telepathic,” said Peg with a little quirk of the lips. “All right.”

The way he helped her on with her coat and handed her through the door made her feel like reaching for a lace train to drape over her arm as she walked. They did not speak as they went down in the elevator. She wanted to study his face, but he was studying hers, and strangely, she did not want to meet his eyes.

Parked in front of the hospital was a low-slung limousine, beautifully kept, not too new. A chauffeur with a young, impassive face opened the door and Peg got in, feeling the lack of a velvet carpet and a fanfare or two. Voisier followed, and the car slid silently into traffic. Voisier gave no orders to the chauffeur, which was another indication to Peg of how sure he had been that she would come out with him. She wondered if he had made reservations wherever they were going. She never knew, because they pulled up in front of Lelalo’s, and both the doorman and the head waiter greeted Voisier effusively and she realized that they would at any time, reservation or no reservation. They were shown to a very comfortable corner table. Peg asked for an Alexander; Voisier did not order at all, but a silvery cocktail was brought and set down before him.

Finally she met his eyes. He seemed relaxed, but watchful, and his gaze was absolutely unswerving. She gritted her teeth and said lightly, “Have you read any good books lately?”

His eyes dropped to the case history lying on the table between them. “No,” he said.

“Tell me what you know.”

He drummed idly on the table with long, flexible fingers. “Robin is in the trucking business,” he said.

“Oh?”

“Yes. And in insurance. Air freight. Distilling. Drugs. A few others.”

“For goodness’ sake! But that doesn’t sound like Robin!”

“What doesn’t sound like Robin?”

“Robin is almost exclusively a creative person. Business—organizing, money-making itself—these have never had any interest for him.”

“They have now,” said Voisier in a slightly awed tone.

“If he did go into business,” said Peg carefully, “it would be like that—diversification, and excellent results in everything he tried. That is, if he’s still… I mean, if he hasn’t changed. How do you know this?”

“I can’t understand how he’s doing it,” Voisier said, ignoring her question. “He has bought out a bunch of independent truckers, for example. Standardized their equipment, rerouted and scheduled them, put in the latest equipment for servicing all the way, so that he has practically delay-proof service. He pays his employees eight per cent more than… than other firms, and works them four less straight-time hours per week. Yet his rates are twelve per cent per hundredweight under those of any of his competitors. Am I boring you?”

“You are not.”

“He has hit the insurance business in an unusual way. He has a counseling service made up of insurance men so carefully chosen and so highly paid that his agency is a factor to be reckoned with by every company in the East. His specialty is in advising clients—the thousand-dollar policyholder to banking insurance—on ways and means of combining policies to get the maximum coverage from the smallest premium. His charge is nominal; it doesn’t seem to be a money-making proposition, much, at all. But he is getting an increasing power to throw large blocks of insurance business any way he wants to. He does it to the benefit of the policyholder and well within the law. In other words, what he is machinating for is influence. And since nobody can possibly predict what he is going to do next, the agency is a Damocletian sword over us… uh… over the insurance companies.”

“Mr. Voisier—wait. How do you know all this?”

“The most amazing thing of all is what he is doing in the drugs business. He has tapped a source of hard-to-get biochemicals that is something remarkable. Some sort of synthesis… nerve mind. I’m running along like a Wall Street Journal excerpt and I’m not going to start reciting things from the Journal of the Chemical Institute.”

“Have you seen him?”

“I have a picture of him. He spoke at a trucker’s union meeting with his independent chain proposal recently. It’s a good shot, and though he’s changed a little since I last saw him, there’s no mistaking him. He was using the name of Reuben Ritter—not that that’s a matter of any importance, since elsewhere he is known as Schwartz, Mancinelli, Walker, Chandler, and O’Shaughnessy. Where he goes after the meetings and an occasional dinner he attends, no one knows. He only goes out on business and he always leaves a highly competent authority behind to handle the details.”

“May I see the picture?”

“Certainly.” Voisier took out a fine-tooled Moroccan wallet and leafed through it. He pulled out a four-by-five print and handed it to her.

“It is Robin,” she said instantly, shakily; and then she pored over the picture, her eyes tearing down into it. A slight sound from Voisier made her look up; he was regarding her with a quizzical grin. She went back to the picture.

It was Robin, all right; and he stood before a flat table obviously in a loft which was converted to a meeting hall. He was half-leaning against the table, and his head and one arm were raised, and his face was turned to the right of the camera.

Yes, it was Robin, all right; but Robin subtly changed. His features were—was it older? They were the features of a young man; but there was a set of purpose about the profile that was unfamiliar to her. Two slightly out-of-focus faces in the background, watching him with something approaching raptness, added to the completely authoritative, unselfconscious pose of the speaker. And Peg knew that from that picture alone, something within her would never again let her speak of Robin as “that child.” It was a jarring realization, for “Robin” and “Childishness” were all but inseparable associations in her mind.

She became conscious of Voisier’s long white hand hovering in front of her. She looked up and clutched the picture. “You want it back?”

“I’d… oh, I have the negative. Go ahead.” The quizzical smile appeared again.

Peg slipped the picture into her pocketbook, closed it tightly, and only when she felt Voisier’s amused eyes on her hands did she relax her grip on the clasp. She said, “How do you think I can help you locate him?”

Voisier put the tips of his fingers together and eyed her over them. “In that book of yours,” he said, indicating the thick binder of prognosis carbons, “you probably have information which would help us to predict at least what sort of surroundings Robin English would find for himself. I know what businesses he’s in, and pretty much how he’s conducting them. Certainly we could draw some pretty shrewd conclusions.” He paused, and looked thoughtfully at the second joints of his fingers, one after the other. “All I have to do is see him once. Just once,” he said as if to himself. When I do, I can find out where he is living, what he is doing every hour, where he is liable to str… ah… jump next.”

“You almost said ‘where he will strike next,’ “ Peg said.

“Did I? I didn’t know. That’s ridiculous, of course.”

“I suppose it is,” she said slowly, watching his face. “Mr. Voisier, you have a remarkably easy way about you.”

“I? Thank you.”

“You’re easy to talk with, and you talk easily. You divert the conversation to your chosen ways so very easily. You have still not told me why you want to locate Robin English.”

“Everyone wants to know where Robin English is. Don’t you read the papers?”

“I doubt, somehow, that you are motivated by intellectual curiosity. I don’t think you want to produce another play of his, particularly, or sell a story to the press and scoop the town, or—obviously not this—give him pointers on his new business ventures. I hate to be blunt with anyone,” she said with a sudden rush of warmth, “but I must ask you—what are you after?”

He spread his hands. “I like the boy. Brilliant as he is, he is getting himself into a little hot water with certain of the interests with which he is competing. In the business world, as in the world of nations, there is room enough for everybody, providing everybody will co-operate. It is impossible to co-operate with a man who cannot be reached.”

“It is impossible to retaliate, also.”

Voisier held up a deploring hand. “Retaliate is too strong a term. Active as he is, it is inconceivable that he can keep himself hidden much longer. It is infinitely more desirable that I get to him before any of the others—I who have demonstrated so conclusively that I have his interests at heart. I like the boy.”

“You like the boy.” The picture of Robin in the union hall rose before her eyes. That was no boy. “Mr. Voisier, you are telling me that he is in danger, aren’t you?”

He shrugged. “He is playing a dangerous game.”

“Dangerous game? Danger from what?”

“I have not made up a roster, doctor.”

She stared at him. “Mr. Voisier—just what business are you in?”

“I’m a producer. Surely you know that.”

“Yes. I have just remembered that I heard you once mentioned in connection with the trucking business, and again, there was something to do with drugs—”

“You have a proclivity,” said Voisier casually, “of connecting yourself, in one way or another, with remarkable people. I, like Robin English, am a man of some diversification.”

She sat quietly for a moment, and thought. As Voisier had predicted, little pieces were beginning to fit here and there. Robin’s progress had been so carefully charted, and prognosis made in such detail, that the information Voisier had given her was highly indicative. If she could talk it over with Mel—

“I can’t piece all this together on the spot,” she said.

“Why don’t you get in touch with your associate, Dr. Warfield?”

“You must be psychic,” she said wryly. “Let me phone him.”

Without seeming to move quickly, Voisier was on his feet and assisting her out of the chair before she knew she was moving. “By all means,” he said. “And if you can impress the urgency of the matter on him, it will be to Robin’s benefit.”

“I’ll see,” she said.

She went to the phone booth and called, and Mel was out, and when she returned to the table Voisier was gone. So was his limousine. So was Robin’s case history.

“Mel, I don’t know how I could have been such a fantastic idiot,” she said brokenly.

She was in his office, hunched up in a big wing chair, and for the first time in years looking small and childish and frightened.

“Don’t blame yourself, Peg,” said Warfield gently. “No one would expect that kind of prank from a man like that.”

“It w-was awful,” she almost whispered. “He made such a fool of me! I called the waiter immediately, of course, and he acted surprised to see me at all. He absolutely denied having seen such a thing as that case book at all. So did the head waiter. So did the doorman. They simply looked at me as if I were crazy, exchanging wondering glances at each other in between times. Mel… Mel, I don’t like that man, that Voisier!”

“I wouldn’t wonder.”

“No—aside from that slick little piece of larceny. There’s something evil about him.”

“That’s an understatement, if ever I heard one,” Mel said. “I don’t know much about that man—no one does—but the things I know aren’t too good. I wonder if you knew that Chickering Chemical was his?”

“That drug firm that was peddling hashish as a tonic?”

“Not a tonic. A facial—mud pack, I think it was. It didn’t harm the skin. Didn’t do it any good, either. It was sold in small and adulterated quantities at a fantastic price, but it was hashish all right.”

“But all the officers of that company are in jail?”

“All they could get anything on.”

“How do you know this?”

“One of their lab assistants went to pharmaceutical school with me. Silly fool, he was, but a very likable character. He could be bought, and he was. He was paid well, and he didn’t care. I did what I could to help him when the whole mess happened, but he was in too deep. He had no cause to lie to me, and he told me that Voisier was the man behind the whole rotten deal.”

“Why didn’t he give some evidence against Voisier?”

“No evidence. Not a scrap. Voisier’s much too clever to leave loose ends around. Witness the trick he pulled on you. And besides—my imbecile of a friend rather admires him.”

“Admires him—and Voisier got him into the penitentiary?”

“He blames only himself. And it seems that Voisier has a certain likable something about him—”

Peg thought of that saturnine face, and the compelling eyes of the man. She remembered his tactile glance, and the incredible flexibility of his voice. “Oh.” She shook herself. “I can’t afford the luxury of sitting here and saying how awful it all is,” she said firmly, putting away her handkerchief. “What are we going to do?”

“Why do anything? Robin English is no longer our responsibility, if it’s Robin you’re worried about. As far as the book is concerned, I have the original, so that’s a small loss.”

“When does your responsibility to a person end?” she demanded hotly.

“That depends,” he said, looking at the ceiling, “on what the person in question means to you. If it’s a patient, and that patient, of sound mind, decides to go to another doctor or to stop treatment altogether, there is no law or ethic which demands that I try to hold him. If, on the other hand, the person is a… well, of personal interest, it’s a different matter.”

“And you feel that Robin can look out for himself?”

“He’s demonstrated that pretty well so far. He must include self-preservation and the ability to act on it among his other talents.”

“Mel—this isn’t like you!”

“Isn’t it, though!”

“Mel!” she cried, shocked, “If it weren’t for us he wouldn’t be in this trouble! He’s hooked up with Voisier in some way, and—”

Mel put his hands on her shoulders and pushed her back in her chair. He looked at her somberly and then sighed. “Peg,” he said finally, “I’ve got to say this. I deeply regret the day I ever set eyes on Robin English. You haven’t been yourself since the day you met him.”

She thought of the extraordinary statement Robin had made at tea that day, about Mel Warfield’s desire to kill him. She looked up at Warfield with horror in her face.

“Listen to me,” he said. “You’re all tangled up in your emotions, and you can’t think straight. You think Robin’s mixed up with Voisier in some business way. Isn’t it obvious what Robin is doing? You know that Voisier is mixed up in a dozen different businesses, two-thirds of which are shady in some way or another. You were told by Voisier himself that Robin is engaged in some of these same fields. I think you’ll find that Robin is engaged in all of them. I think that if you are fool enough to mix yourself into anything this big and this dirty, you’ll discover that Robin is out to undercut Voisier in everything the man is doing.”

“Why? Why on earth should he do that?”

“I wouldn’t know. Probably because he recognizes Voisier as his own brand of genius, with many years’ start on him. Without doubt he feels crushed by Voisier—feels that the world isn’t big enough for both of them. The ‘why’ of it isn’t important. The fact remains that if he is not doing such a fantastic thing, he isn’t in any danger and you needn’t worry about him. If he is, then he must be outdoing Voisier on the dirtiest of his rackets.”

“No, Mel—no! Robin wouldn’t do that!”

“Someone is. How many new addiction cases has your hospital admitted in the past three months?”

“Well, there is a decided upswing, but what has that—”

“Robin could be responsible. It would have to be a one-source deal—someone previously unknown, without a record that can be checked, with a tremendous organizing ability and personal compulsion, and a lot of scientific skill. Most of the drugs found on these poor devils are synthetic.”

“But Robin never did an evil thing in his life!”

“He has done many things recently he never did in his life. I tell you, Peg, the responsibility I feel in this matter is a far greater one than anything that could happen to Robin English. If I’m right in all this, I have been instrumental in loosing something rather terrible in the world. And if I’m right and he’s tackling Voisier by playing the man’s own game, the odds are pretty strong that Voisier’s too big for him. In which case—good riddance.” He lowered his voice. “I’m sorry, Peg. Truly I am. I’ve been going round and round in smaller and smaller circles over this thing, and I’ve had enough.”

Peg was feeling absolutely bewildered. “But I have only just told you about Voisier and this—”

“I’ve known about it for weeks, Peg. Let the thing take its course.”

She rose, trembling. “You’re wrong, Mel,” she whispered. “You’ve got to be wrong.”

“I’m afraid not,” he said sadly. “I sincerely wish I were.”

“I’ve got to see him.”

“No, Peg! He might… he… can’t you see that he’s turned into a man who takes what he wants?”

“Does that make a difference?” Peg asked in a strange voice. “I can’t let this happen to him. I’m going to find out where he is and see him. I’m responsible for this whole horrible thing and so are you. But through your stupid mulish jealousy you’ve argued yourself into blaming him!”

Warfield went white. “Responsible? He had the seeds of this in him all along. He simply never had the courage to do an honestly evil thing until we so generously matured him. Maturity is a strange thing, Peg. Like other riches, it is dangerous in unskilled hands. It isn’t something that can be achieved all in a lump. We gave him a kind of maturity which gathered all the loose threads of his personality into something monolinear—something productive. But we didn’t give him the power to use the years of experience he had had before we got to him. He’s a bulldozer with a skilled idiot at the controls. But he is no longer a glandular case. If you want me to change my attitude at all, prove to me that he is still suffering from imbalance of any kind. That’s in my field. That I can handle.”

“I’ll have to see him.”

“Do you know where he is?”

“Nobody does. But I’ll find him.”

“I know where he is. But I will certainly not tell you.”

“You know?”

“He came to see me four months ago.” Warfield wet his lips. “He—had a word or two to say about you. He was apparently suffering from some sort of a delusion. He explained carefully to me that he had no use for you, that there was no longer any reason for me to want to… to kill him, and… you don’t seem surprised.”

“He told me about that the last time I saw him,” she said, shaken.

“You knew about that?”

“Did you try to kill him, Mel?”

“It was an accident, Peg. Really it was. And he compensated for it. Splendidly. I don’t know how he found out about it—the man’s incredibly sharp.”

Peg felt turned to ice, and her voice was ice as she said, “It was the post-pituitrin excess, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, but that couldn’t have anything to do with this Voisier business. I tell you it was an accident. I didn’t realize that I’d made a mistake in the solutions until after he’d left the office that particular day. It didn’t affect his progress, except temporarily; and when he stopped his treatments, he was practically normal.” He stopped and wet his lips again, and then suddenly ran to her. “Peg! Peg, what’s the matter?” For she had suddenly turned white, and was rocking on her feet. He put an arm about her shoulders and led her back to her chair. She slumped down, shook herself, and looked up at him with a swift, scornful glance that was almost a physical force.

“How do you dare to call yourself a doctor?” she breathed. She opened her handbag with shaking lingers and took out the photograph Voisier had given her. She handed it to him without glancing at it. “Look at that and tell me he’s not still glandular,” she said.

He looked, and then stared. “It’s Robin, all right,” he said, and then, with a ghost of his old grin, “Getting to be quite a glamour boy in his old age, hm-m-m?”

“He is? Have you noticed why?”

“What am I supposed to look for?”

“Look at his jaw.”

“Nice jaw.”

“You don’t remember Robin. You don’t remember that round baby face?”

“I wasn’t in love with the man,” Warfield said nastily.

“He didn’t have much jaw,” she said, her voice quivering. “Can’t you see what’s happening? That used to be Robin, with the charming, chinless face!”

Warfield’s breath sucked sharply. He walked over to the window and for a long moment stood with his back to her, staring out.

“What do you diagnose, doctor?” she said acidly.

“Ac—” he began, and couldn’t make it. He swallowed and coughed. He cleared his throat. He said, “Acromegaly.”

“Acromegaly,” she echoed sweetly. “His pre-pituitary has gone wild, he’s suffering from hypertrophy of the chin and probably of the hands, and you say he’s not glandular.” Suddenly she was across the room, had spun him about and was clutching his lapels. “What are you going to do? Are you going to let him go on doing whatever crazy thing a glandular imbalance is forcing him to, so that he’ll be killed by Voisier? Or are you going to stand by while he gets around Voisier some way and then turns into a monster and dies?”

“I have to think,” said Warfield. “Oh, Peg. Peg—”

“You can’t think,” she said wildly. “Why do you suppose Voisier stole that book? With what he knows, and with what that book contains, he’ll track Robin down in a matter of hours! Do you really know where he is?”

“Yes,” Warfield whispered. “A piece of his strange kind of braggadocio. He was defiant, and yet he seemed afraid of me. He promised to keep in touch with me whatever he did, so that if I ever wanted to… kill him I could come and face him with whatever it was. He swore to keep away from you. He has moved four times since he stopped taking the treatments, and each time he has called or written to give me the address. I don’t know why.” Warfield raised his eyes to hers. “I don’t know anything about any of this,” he said brokenly. “It’s all mad. We’re being played like chessmen, Peg, by a lunatic against a devil.”

“Is he in town?”

Warfield nodded.

“Well?”

Warfield looked at her. She was a statue now, a dark-crowned bloodless figure. “I’ll go with you.”

“I’ll see him alone.”

“I’ll go with you all the same, then, and wait.”

“Very well. Only hurry.”

Warfield slipped out of his laboratory smock and into a coat without another word. Outside the office he stopped and said, “Peg…please—” but she walked steadily down to the elevators, and he shrugged and followed her.

They caught a cab almost immediately, and Warfield gave the driver a Riverside address. Peg sat staring blindly ahead of her. Mel slumped in a corner and looked at his wrists, dully.

Peg broke the silence only once—to ask in a deceptively conversational voice if anything had been learned that she didn’t know about the treatment of acromegaly. Warfield shook his head vaguely. She made a sound, then, like a sob, but when Warfield looked at her she still sat, dry-eyed, staring at the driver’s coat collar.

They pulled up in front of one of those stately old cell-blocks of apartment houses that perch on the slanted, winding approaches to the Drive. They got out, and a doorman, a bit over life-size, swung open both leaves of a huge plate glass and bronze door to let them into the building.

“Mr. Wenzell,” said Warfield to a wax-faced desk clerk.

“What?” said Peg.

“He… it amuses him to use your name,” said Warfield, as if he were speaking out of a mouthful of sal ammoniac.

“Mr. Wenzell is out,” said the clerk. “Can I take a message?”

“You can take a message right to Mr. Wenzell, who is not out,” said Warfield. “Tell him his two doctors are here and must see him.”

“Tell him,” said Peg clearly, “that Margaretta Wenzell is here.”

“Yes, Mrs. Wenzell,” said the clerk with alacrity.

“Why must you make this painful as well as unpleasant?” gritted Warfield. Peg smiled with her teeth and said nothing.

The clerk returned from the phone looking as if he had learned how to pronounce a word he had only seen chalked on fences before. “Fourteen. Suite C. The elevators—”

“Yes,” growled Warfield. He took Peg’s elbow and walked her over to the elevators as if she were a window-dummy.

“You’re hurting me.”

“I’m sorry. I’m—a little upset. Do you have to go through with this weird business?”

She didn’t answer. Instead she said, “Stay down here, Mel.”

“I will not!”

She looked at him, and said a thousand words—hot-acid ones—in the sweep of her eyes across his face.

“Well,” he said, “all right. All right. Tell you what. I’ll give you fifteen minutes and then I’m coming up.” He paused. “Why are you looking at me like that? What are you thinking about?”

“That corny line about the fifteen minutes. I was thinking about how much better Robin would deliver it.”

“I think I hate you,” said Warfield hoarsely, quietly.

Peg stepped into the elevator. “That was much better done,” she, said, and pushed the button which closed the doors.

On the fourteenth floor she walked to the door marked “C” and touched the bell. The door swung open instantly.

“Come in!” grated a voice. There was no one standing in the doorway at all. She hesitated. Then she saw that someone was peering through the crack at the hinge side of the door.

“Come in, Peg!” said the voice. It was used gently now, though it was still gravelly. She stepped through and into the room. The door closed behind her. Robin was there, with a gun. He put it away and held out both hands to her. “Peg! It’s so good to see, you!”

“Hello, Robin,” she whispered. Just what gesture she was about to make she would never know for she became suddenly conscious of someone else in the room. She wheeled. There was a girl on the chesterfield, who rose as Peg faced her. The girl didn’t look, somehow, like a person. She looked like too many bright colors.

“Janice,” said Robin. It wasn’t an introduction. Robin just said the one word and moved his head slightly. The girl came slowly across the room toward him, passed him, went to the hall closet and took out a coat and a hat and a handbag with a long strap. She draped the coat over her arm and opened the door; and then she paused and shot Peg a look of such utter hatred that Peg gasped. The door closed and she was alone with Robin English.

“Is that the best you can do,” she said, without trying to keep the loathing out of her voice.

“The very best,” said Robin equably. “Janice is utterly stupid. She has no conversation, particularly when I want none. What she has to recommend her, you can see. She is a great convenience.”

A silly, colorful little thought crept into Peg’s mind. She looked around the room.

“You’re looking for a smorgasbord tray,” chuckled Robin, sinking into an easy-chair and regarding her with amusement. “Why won’t you look at me?”

Finally, she did.

He was taller, a very little. He was much handsomer. She saw that, and it was as if something festering within her had been lanced.

There was pain—but oh! the blessed relief of pressure! His face was—Oh yes, said Dr. Wenzell to herself, pre-pituitary. Acromegaly. She said, “Let me see your hands.”

He raised his eyebrows, and put his hands in his pockets. He shook his head.

Peg turned on her heel and went to the hall closet. She dipped into the pockets of an overcoat, and then into a topcoat, until she found a pair of gloves. She came back into the room, examining them carefully. Robin got to his feet.

“As I thought,” she said. She held up the left glove. The seam between the index and second fingers was split. And they were new gloves. She threw them aside.

“So you know about that. You would, of course.”

“Robin, I don’t think this would have happened if you had continued your treatments.”

He slowly took out his hands and stared at them. They were lumpy, and the fingers were too long, and a little crooked. “A phenomenal hypertrophy of the bony processes, according to the books,” he said. “A development that generally takes years.”

“There’s nothing normal about this case. There never was,” said Peg, her voice thick with pity. “Why did you let it go like this?”

“I got interested in what I was doing.” Suddenly he got to his feet and began to stride restlessly about the room. She tried not to look at him, at his altered face, with the heavy, coarse jaw. She strained to catch the remnants of his mellow voice through the harshness she heard now.

He said, “It was all right during those months when I wrote ‘Too Humorous To Mention’ and ‘Festoon’ and invented the back out drills and all that. But everything got too easy. I could do anything I wanted to do. All of the things I had ever dreamed about doing I could do—and so easily! It was awful. I tried harder things, and they came easy too. I couldn’t seem to apply myself on anything that couldn’t be seen or touched, though perhaps if I had been able to go into higher mathematics or something purely abstract like that, I wouldn’t be—well, what I am now.

“I began to be afraid. The one thing I couldn’t whip was Mel Warfield. I was afraid of him. He hated me. I don’t think he knew it, but he hated me. I wanted you. There was a time when I could have—but I was afraid of him. He had too much power over me. Too much thumb-pressure on that hypodermic of his, or the addition of some little drop of something in a test tube, and he could do anything he wanted with me. I’d never been afraid for myself before. Maybe it was part of that maturity you were talking about.”

“I imagine it was.”

Robin sat down heavily, clasped his hands, stared at them, put them in his pockets again. “I was glad to take the risk, mind you. It wasn’t that. Anything in my condition that was suddenly too much for his skill to cope with—any accident like that couldn’t frighten me. It was knowing that he hated me, and somewhere underneath he wanted me out of the way—preferably dead. Anyway—I got out. I kept him informed as to where I was, because I was ready for him. I was ready to kill him first if he came after me. But no hypodermics. No solutions. So—I went on with my work, and then it all got old, right away. I could do anything I wanted to do. Peg—can you imagine how horrible that can be? Never to know you might fail? To have such a clear conception of what the public wants in a play or a poem or a machine that yon can make it and know from the start that it will be a success? I knew a man once, who had photography for a hobby. He got to be so good that he stopped printing his negatives. He’d know they were perfect. He pulled ‘em out of the hypo and dried ‘em and filed ‘em. Often he sold them without looking at them. It killed his hobby. He took up electronics, which was more his speed. But I’m that way about everything.”

“You got bored.”

“Bored. Oh, Peg, if you only knew the things I tried! Finally I dropped out of sight. I got a kick out of the papers then. For a while. Know what I was doing when the whole world thought I was doing something fantastic? I was reading. I was holed up in the back room of my Westchester place with all the books I had ever wanted to read. That’s all. They let me get out of myself—for a while. For a while.” He stopped and wiped sweat off his lip. “But it happened again. It got so that a page or two would tell me an author’s style, a paragraph or two told me his plot. Technical books the same; once I got the basics the whole thing was there. Or maybe I thought it was. Maybe I just lost interest. It was as if I were being pursued by a monster called Understanding. I understood everything I looked at or thought about. There was nothing I could see or say or do or read or think about where I couldn’t predict the end result. I didn’t want to give anything any more, either, the way I did with the Whirltoy. Do you know what I wanted? I wanted to fail. I didn’t think I could. I don’t think so now. If I purposely botched a thing up, that would be a success of a sort. So for a long time I did nothing.”

He fell silent. Peg waited patiently. She had had dozens of questions to ask, and half of them were already answered.

“Then I began to think about Voisier. You know Voisier?”

She nodded. “Robin—wait a minute. You hate Voisier. I think you’re trying to ruin him. But you hated Mel Warfield. Why didn’t you try to—”

“Warfield? By then, he wasn’t big enough. Voisier was the only man I ever met whom I thought could beat me.” He sighed. “Now I think he won’t do it.” And suddenly, Robin smiled. The smile sat badly on that heavy face. “Peg, there’s an alternative to unquenchable, inevitable success. That is to play a game in such a way that you never can know how it ends. That’s what I’m doing.”

“Voisier’s trying to find you.”

“Is he now? How do you know?” For the first time Robin’s face and voice showed real animation. All the twisted ravings of the past few minutes had come out of him like toothpaste out of a tube.”

Peg told him about Voisier’s calling the hospital, and what had happened at Lelalo’s, where he had stolen the case history.

“Good,” said Robin. “Oh, fine. This means that things are shaping up better than I thought. Faster. Uh—excuse me a moment.”

He went to the desk in the corner, sat down, and began to write rapidly.

“This maturity thing,” he said, phrasing between the lines he was writing, “I think you and Warfield overlooked something. I’m the patient. Do doctors listen to patients?”

“They do.”

“You realize, don’t you, that humans die before they’re fully mature?”

“You mean in the sense that their bones do not completely ossify?”

“That’s it. And there’s a psychological factor, too.” He paused, thought a while, wrote for a moment, and then went on. “Puppies and kittens and lion cubs—they’re terribly foolish, in a pretty kind of way. They have their mock battles and they chase their balls of paper and get wound up in milady’s yarn, don’t they?”

“They do, but—”

“Humans, with few exceptions, always are puppyish, to a degree. There is even a parallel in the proportions of head to body, even allowing for the larger brain pan of homo sapiens. An adult human being has proportions comparable to a half-grown colt or dog in that respect. Now—did you ever hear of a full-grown gorilla acting kittenish? Or a bison bull, or a lion? Life for them is a serious business—one of sex, hunger, self-preservation and a peculiar, ‘don’t tread on me’ kind of possessiveness.

“Peg—let’s face it. That’s what’s happened to me. I can’t go back. I don’t see how I can go on this way. I’m mature now. But I’m mature like an animal. However, I can’t stop being human. A human being has to have one thing—he has to be happy, or he has to think he knows what happiness is. Happiness for me is unthinkable. There is nothing for me to work toward. All of my achievements are here”—he tapped his head—”as good as done when I think of them, because I know I can do them. No goal, no aspiration—the only thing left is that little game of mine, the one where, according to the rules, I can’t ever really know the result.”

“Voisier?”

“Voisier.” He picked up the phone, dialed rapidly. He listened. “Come on back,” he said. He hung up. “That was Janice. She’ll be here in fifteen minutes. You’d better go, Peg.”

The door buzzer began to shrill. Robin leaped across the room; the gun was in his hand again. He opened the door and stood behind it, peering out at the hinge side as he had before. Mel walked in.

“Peg—are you all right?”

“A little bewildered.”

“Of course she’s all right,” said Robin in a tone that insulted both of them. Mel stared at him. Robin went over to the desk, picked up the sheets he had written and, folding them, handed them to Peg. “Promise me you won’t read these until you get back to Mel’s office.”

“I promise.”

Mel spoke up, suddenly—and with great effort. “English—You know what that condition is?” He indicated Robin’s face.

“He does, Mel,” said Peg. “Don’t—”

Warfield pushed her hand off his arm impatiently. “Robin, I’m willing to do what I can to arrest it, and there’s a chance… not much, you understand—”

Robin interrupted him with a sudden, thunderous guffaw—quite the most horrible sound Peg had ever heard. “Why sure, Mel, sure. I’ll be a bit busy this afternoon, but say tomorrow, if we can get together?”

“Robin!” said Peg joyfully. “You will?”

“Why not?” He chuckled. “Don’t make an appointment today. Call me tomorrow.” He took the note back from Peg, and scribbled on it. “Here’s the number. Now go on. Beat it, you two. Maybe I ought to say something like ‘Bless you, my children’ but I—Oh, beat it.”

Peg found herself in the hall and then at the door. “But Robin—” she said weakly; but by then the door was closed and Mel was guiding her into the elevator.

At Mel’s office a few minutes later, she unfolded Robin’s note with trembling fingers. It read:

Peg dear,

Here is where a mature human being gets kittenish, if he has to kill himself in the attempt.

What I have been doing to Voisier is to drive him crazy. He’s a bad apple, Peg. Very few people realize just how bad. I knew today would be the payoff when you told me how he had stolen the book and all that. He played you for bait. I told you he was almost as clever as I am. He knew that if he could worry you enough, you’d find me some way. My guess is that he simply had you followed until you found me. Then he’d wait until you had gone—he’s waiting as I write this. When he’s sure there are no witnesses, he’ll come and finish his business with me.

This is my game, Peg. The only one I can think of where I’ll never know who won. If you call the police about now, chances are they’ll find him here. Make it an anonymous tip, and don’t use this note as evidence of any kind. Voisier is going to get his; Janice is here and besides, the place is equipped with a very fine wire recorder. I’ll handle all the dialogue. I’m sorry about all those dope fiends I had to supply to undercut his rotten racket. Take care of ‘em.

And down in the corner, where he had ostensibly written his phone number, were these words: “Sorry I can’t keep that appointment. The condition is already arrested.”

Peg phoned the police. The police found Robin English dead. Robin English left everything he had to Peg and Warfield equally. And in due course Voisier was electrocuted for the murder. The recording found in his apartment, coupled with the testimony of one Janice Brooks, was quite sufficient. Voisier’s defense, that Robin was torturing him, held no water; for where is a law that specifies mental torture as grounds for justifiable homicide?