“Eh—yes. Among other things, the usual and attractive physical attributes, a man wants a smart and very intelligent wife, a woman possessing sufficient mental abilities to understand him and his world. A woman who can stride alongside him, who can understand his problems and to a degree, help him solve them. But still—and this is a paradox, I will admit—a woman who is necessarily inferior to him, just a trifle inferior. A sort of delicate balance to the male ego. For a man also wants a woman who needs his advice, who must lean on him, who has need of his greater reasoning powers as well as his mechanical knowledge. That is the kind of woman every healthy man desires, Mr. Nash. I fully believed I had found such a woman in Carolyn.”
Nash nodded again, seeing the image of Hodgkins’s desired woman on his inner eyelids. He thought he knew what was coming.
“Just how old is your wife, Mr. Hodgkins?”
The question was met with a small silence, and when the answer finally came it was in an embarrassed tone. “I—we don’t know really. She is an orphan you see, and we were unable to locate the birth certificate. The situation stirred up a bit of fuss when I first took a job with the Manhattan people, as you can imagine. They delve into everything, but they couldn’t find a certificate either. Carolyn and I finally agreed that she was about five years younger than myself—that needed bit of inferiority, you must understand.”
“I understand. And you are . . .?”
“Forty-six, now. So by our agreement she would be forty-one—we think. Sometimes I am not sure. She hasn’t grown much older than the day I married her.”
The yellow eyes snapped open to fasten on him. “What?”
“She never changed much.” Hodgkins smiled with the memoiy of her. “I liked that, really. What man in love doesn’t prefer his wife to cling to her youth and beauty? She was a handsome, striking woman on the day we were married, and still is. She could have easily passed herself off as being in the middle twenties then; today, I would judge, she could get by very well indeed in the early thirties. Her youth seemed to cling to her.”
“Did she use anything to maintain that youth?” Nash asked curiously.
“What do you mean?”
“Creams, lotions, the usual jars in her bedroom?”
Hodgkins was embarrassed again. “I don’t know, Mr. Nash. We had separate bedrooms. Oh—I don’t mean by that, that we—well—but we always had separate bedrooms. She wanted it that way.” He shrugged. “Offhand, I don’t recall seeing such jars around. I suppose she kept them out of sight. Carolyn was very tidy—marvellous wife and housekeeper.”
“Yes, I can imagine.” Nash’s gaze lifted above the man’s head and climbed the wall, absently speculating. “All right, she was your perfect companion. And you are a success in your field.”
Hodgkins fingered his lapel pin and nodded, unaware that Nash was no longer watching him. He began talking about himself, about his schemes and plans and desires upon leaving college, about the lean days that closed in on him toward the end of the depression years, about his frantic struggles in the early days of the war and how he saw it coming long before the tide actually lapped American shores. He told the investigator about the day that strange men approached him on an even stranger subject, and how he eventually found himself working in a concrete cell which was a part of many other cells, the whole making up an organization called the Manhattan Project. That name in itself meant next to nothing to him, for he was aware only of what he was doing and some of the work in process of those nearer cells around him. In time, of course, he guessed what was building.
He recounted to Nash his later days, after he was transferred to Oak Ridge and the superior position gained there, recounted the full and fruitful years of labour when his problems were knotty but which almost always seemed to solve themselves with short passages of time. He mentioned in passing his hurried journey to New Mexico and the explosive miracle witnessed that chill July dawn, his return to Oak Ridge a stunned man. And he told of the slowly growing strain of unhappiness between his wife and himself, despite his recognition of it and the striving to overcome it. He wanted desperately to wipe out the menace for he remained deeply in love with her.
Hodgkins wound up by asserting, “I consider myself an intelligent man, Mr. Nash. You’ll grant me that, leaving false modesty aside.”
“Easily granted,” Nash said again. “But back to your wife . . .”
“Yes—Carolyn.”
He lapsed into what was obviously a painful silence while his memory skittered back over those years, tracing again the days of his ripening love for her.
“In the evenings after work,” he finally broke his silence, “I studied the technical books and journals I could not then afford. Censorship had not become so effective and so widespread until 1940 or shortly thereafter, and one could still find the desired studies in some of the libraries, or could borrow them from some of the universities. Some of those early reports aroused my first active interest in nuclear physics, I remember. The Germans had access to heavy water but didn’t quite know what to do about it. Well, anyway—I wanted to climb as rapidly and as safely as possible, and I realized that if I waited until I could afford the publications it might be too late. I had a poor job, and the desire for a brighter future, a future with security and a wife. Then I discovered Carolyn in the library.
“Oddly enough, I first saw her looking at a schematic drawing in a radio magazine. She was tracing it with her finger. It startled me, and when I looked closer to discover what she was really doing it pleased me. You must realize it was—and is—a very unusual thing to find a woman interested in such technical details. But she was. Have you ever read a schematic? It is done in two ways: either you have a surface interest in the drawing and you follow each line from origin to terminus, with your interest being in that line alone; or you attempt to grasp the plan as a whole and retain the mental impression of each circuit, enmeshing it with the next circuit as you trace it. The end product is that you have a fairly cohesive picture of the scheme by holding the image of each circuit in your mind, meanwhile interlacing them all. I stood behind her chair and watched her finger; I don’t know that she was reading the drawing as a whole, but I think she was.”
“You couldn’t judge by her finger?”
“No, of course not. The finger was merely a guidepost to the mind behind it. She went along splendidly for a few moments and then she seemed to run into trouble.”
Nash nodded. “Yes, I was expecting that.”
“You were? Oh, my. Well—I don’t recall at this late date what it was, but some difficulty arose that threw her completely from her train of thought. It may have been my presence behind her. And when you lose the thread of thought in a schematic, Mr. Nash, you may as well begin all over again. She was annoyed.”
“I can well understand. Go on.”
He did so. “Well, she pushed the magazine away with a little sound under her breath and started to get up. And I, like a damned fool, had to butt in; without thinking of what I was doing, I leaned over her shoulder to point to the trouble spot.”
“You did as expected.”
“I did?” Hodgkins was uncertain whether to be pleased or confused. “Not that way, I remember saying to her impulsively, and then I rather choked up and could say no more. She threw me one withering glance over her shoulder and I hurriedly left the library, in some confusion I must admit. She had created quite a disturbance within me.”
Nash turned his bemused attention to the man. “Was it an act?”
“Do you mean, was she pretending to something false? No, I can’t believe that. She was an utter stranger to me before that evening and I can’t imagine why she would pretend to something, merely to gain my attention. I must remind you, Mr. Nash, that I was nobody at the time. I hadn’t even a decent job. My clothing couldn’t have been too acceptable.” Hodgkins shook his head. “However, I avoided the library on the next few nights because I still felt some embarrassment over the incident, but le
ss than a week later I had to go back. My studies were suffering—and the overpowering desire to see her again swept away any misgivings I may have had. The desire amounted almost to a pull, a compulsion. The memory of her continued to haunt me, disturb my days and nights, and I realized I could never rest until I was near her once more.”
Nash regarded him silently and with calculation. He was beginning to learn vast things about Carolyn Hodgkins.
The physicist said, “I finally returned to the library . . .”
“. . . and there she was,” Nash finished the sentence for him. “You might say, waiting for you.”
“Yes, really!” Hodgkins missed the intended irony. “I found her studying a book that I had turned in only a few weeks before.
It dealt with a field closely allied with my own, can you understand that? It had not been easy studying for me, that particular volume, but there she sat almost swimming through it! I was both astonished and delighted! But still, I carefully avoided , her that evening, preferring to sit in another part of the room just watching her.—her profile was wonderful. Well, eventually the attraction of her body, her personality, overcame my reticence and I—that is, we—I don’t quite know how to explain it,” he finished lamely.
“No need to,” Nash assured him in what he hoped was a sympathetic rather than an amused voice. “Easily understandable, it happens all the time. Mutual interest in your sciences, each of you obviously alone . . .” He let it hang there, casually watching Hodgkins.
“Yes, yes, of course. You do understand. So then I finally summoned the courage to approach her and introduce myself. She was not angry at all, she was most friendly.” He closed his eyes for a brief moment of retrospective dream. “In time we became fast friends. We met again at the library several times, and then elsewhere; in a very short while I began entertaining ideas. I surprised myself, Mr. Nash, with the quickness and audacity of those ideas, for until then I had been something of a backward man half afraid of a woman’s shadow. But you must understand, Carolyn’s presence seemed to invite ideas.”
“I’ll just bet,” Nash mumbled.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Go on with it, please.”
“I thought,” Hodgkins said after a small pause, “she was—or rather she would be what any intelligent man might call a perfect, wife. The woman was beautifully endowed with everything I could possibly ask in a mate, including the remarkable intelligence I had always desired in my dream woman. A hundred enchanting little things came to light about her as we spent many pleasant evenings together. I had fallen in love of course. I still am. And I may as well make this brief, Mr, Nash. We were married.” Hodgkins came to a full emotional stop, expecting some reaction to his tale. He got it.
Gilbert Nash stood up from the chair, stretched his arms lazily above his head and took a turn about the little room. He came back to stand beside the window overlooking the street, his back to his client. His voice, when he spoke held a strange and muffled quality as though he were vocally hiding something.
“Hodgkins, can you stand a jolt?”
“A jolt? Well—I suppose so.”
“All right, here it is. Just about any other man in the world who had his feet on the ground instead of in the air would know what happened to you. Quite plainly and frankly, you were taken in.”
“Taken in?”
“Hooked. And if you aren’t familiar with current slang, you were baited and trapped in a fine-mesh net. The net was that schematic drawing. But don’t be alarmed”—Nash waved a negligent hand—“that happens all the time, too. A million women employ a million ways to catch a million men. Yours was the technical touch. Quite common, Mr. Hodgkins.”
Hodgkins stammered, “I see.”
“I wonder?” Nash asked under his breath. He remained at the window looking down into the street.
Behind him, half oblivious to any other presence in the room, Hodgkins was tightly wrapped in the warm memories of his wife. He had married Carolyn because he was madly in love with her, in love with her seductive body, her unusual beauty, her personality and her intelligence quotient, in love with the complete woman. Overwhelmed with love of her because she had noticed him and had not passed on, had paused to look. He was positive theirs was the greatest love since time’s birth, all unaware that others without number thought the same. He had married her because he would possess something few other men could boast: an alert, brainy woman who was nearly his equal in any field he chose to explore. Nearly. He had married her because she could read a schematic drawing but encountered trouble on certain parts of it. That iota of necessary inferiority was present. He had married her because she would be a most valuable asset to his own standing and mentality. As she had been—for a time. But somewhere, somewhen along that golden line between the honeymoon and the ill day three weeks ago, the bubble had burst. Or half burst. He still loved her, if only she would continue to love him. If.
Nash turned around to find the man slouched in the chair, dreaming his dreams. “Which brings us to the present,” he suggested briskly.
“What?” Hodgkins sat up. “Oh, yes—the present.”
“You’re still married, still in love?”
“Yes indeed!”
“But your wife has walked out on you?”
“I’m afraid she has.”
“Has this ever happened before?”
“Why—no. Not like this.”
“What do you mean, not like this? Has she or hasn’t she?”
“I meant to say, she took vacations. Without me. She thought it best, you understand.” He seemed embarrassed. “Carolyn would go away for a time—perhaps a week or so, perhaps a month. She thought we should have separate vacations.”
“Where’d she go?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I didn’t ask that.”
“And now she has gone again and you want me to find her?” He paused. “This isn’t just another vacation?”
“Not—not this time.”
“Are there any other men?”
Hodgkins visibly cringed from the thought. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. I’ve never seen them.”
Nash felt a fleeting moment of wonder at the man’s startling naiveté. Gregg Hodgkins—scientist, scholar, valuable enough to be invited into the Manhattan District, naive enough to be roped into marriage by a woman who carefully used his own special knowledge to lure him.
Nash said, “If your wife were only half as smart as you claim, friend, you still would not see the other man. You never do, believe me; he’s always standing behind your back. But in the meantime there are some muddy points in your tale of woe which need clearing up. What was the cause of your separation?”
Hodgkins stared at him, sudden anguish in his eyes. The crisis had been forced upon him with those few words, a crisis he had clumsily tried to avoid all during his recital. Why had he split with Carolyn—or rather, why had she run away from him? The answer was painted on his face and written between the lines he had spoken earlier, but Nash waited for him to spell it out with harsh words. What had caused the sudden separation after long years of married bliss?
“Because she has surpassed me!” Hodgkins cried at last, half ashamed to be admitting it.
“Surpassed you?” Nash prodded relentlessly.
“She is an unimaginable distance ahead of me! No, please—don’t mistake me. I’m not mad, not angry. Jealous—yes, I’ll admit to that. But I’m not angry at her for what she has done. Carolyn has passed me by! During all the years we have lived together, she sucked my mind of knowledge the way a vampire bat is said to suck blood.”
Nash sat down abruptly to stare at the physicist. “What?”
“Everything I’ve learned in the past ten years,” the man cried, “everything I’ve gained by hard work and sweat, Carolyn knew the next day! Will you believe me when I say she plucked from me every iota of knowledge I have, pulled it piece by piece from my poor head without my uttering a word!”
“
Carolyn Hodgkins did that?” Nash reached out to grip the edges of the desk. “You say she pulled you back into that library with a physical compulsion, you say she hasn’t grown much older than the day she married you, you say she takes separate vacations and you don’t know where she goes, and now you tell me that she ransacks your mind of knowledge? Carolyn Hodgkins has done that? Your wife?” Hodgkins nodded miserably. “Yes.”
“Well!” Gilbert Nash exclaimed in mild wonder. “Well—finally.”
III.
The corridor outside was fairly quiet with only an occasional passerby stepping out of the elevator and clacking ids heels on the hard, flooring as he sped for some remote room in the depths of the building There weren’t many public offices on the seventh floor, one of the reasons Nash had chosen the location. He desired privacy above all else, despite his indicated profession, and the one room high on the. seventh floor was ideally situated.
Nash stood at the partly opened window overlooking the city, overlooking the smallish cars and still smaller people crawling the pavement below. The sunlight slanted past, leaving that side of the building and his single window in shade. Nash batted his eyes at the warm, sunlit city and turned about to face the room, his face an expressionless mask and his voice a flat monotone.
“Let’s go into that more fully,” he suggested.
“About Carolyn?”
Nash nodded. “About Carolyn.”
“I warned you—you might laugh at me.”
“I’m not laughing,” Nash pointed out.
“Well, I’ve formed a theory.”
“I want to hear it,” Nash said.
“I’m a careful man—by training and habit. I must be careful in my work. I proceed on a theory someone else has assigned to me, following it to its ending whether that ending is a success or a failure.
Or I formulate my own theories based upon previous knowledge and observation and then proceed in the same manner. I have formed a theory about Carolyn.” He looked up, somewhat confused. “But you must understand I still love her. I do—to this day!”
The Time Masters Page 3
