Jerry was pounding my back, and I his, and both of us were yelling. There was a flask in my pocket. We each took a short, quick nip from it.
They lined up. The ball was on the thirteen-yard line. We tried a tackle slant that didn’t gain a thing, and then on the next play Mortenson started around right end. He was a beautiful ball-carrier, always driving fast with his knees high. He went over the line standing up; not a State man even touched him. There was so much noise on our side of the field that I could not hear myself yelling.
“Jesus!” Jerry bawled into my ear. “Was that sweet!” Even though he’d made his Phi Bete key junior year, Jerry’s language at such moments was always unacademic.
While Hewitt was kicking the goal, I got out the flask again, and we had a stiff one apiece to celebrate. The liquor was warm, but we didn’t care. The score was us—7, State—0, and the band was playing “The Best Old Place of All” as the boys drifted down the field and got ready to kick off again.
The State receiver didn’t fumble the second time. The red and black jerseys were mad. Their line was charging like bulls, the interfering backs were diving at our boys savagely, and little by little the ball worked its way up the field till the two lines were right below us. Jerry was watching the play like a hawk and silently, except for a few profane and professional comments to me out of the side of his mouth. He’d made his own letter senior year, and perhaps he was too technically intent to notice a thing that began to make a curious impression on me. Something was happening to the crowd.
Yard by yard the ball was moving down the field; our team was roused now and fighting. The two lines were meeting on even terms; the tackling was growing more and more savage. The State side of the bowl had been a torrent of noise during that long advance, everybody over there standing up on every play. It was terrific to watch— the two lines taut against each other, the flash of the ball as the center shot it back, the slog! of the lines as they met, and the wedge of red and black jerseys that disintegrated in the welter of our tacklers. Old-fashioned football, perhaps, but it was tremendous drama, and the crowd knew it.
Now, comparatively, it was growing quieter and quieter in the bowl. Even up in our seats we began to hear the hoarse, panting voice of the quarterback calling out the starting numbers, and the thud of the tackles. There were almost no cheers. Seventy thousand people were sitting silent, leaning forward in their seats, welded into one unit, I began to realize. The back of my neck prickled with awareness of the mass emotion focused on the two teams, the game below us. The whole bowl was filled with human excitement, with hope and fear, with longing for triumph or a desperation of defense. Once I’d noticed it, it seemed to me I could almost taste the damn thing in the air. It was more real than the blue haze of tobacco smoke rising lazily up the slope of the stands. And as I became fully aware of that quality, that intensity, it began to make me somehow uneasy. I wondered if it was like that when there was a lynching, or a war. I had an impression of frightening power without control, of a field of force in some other dimension than our usual three. Perhaps in that fourth dimension of time, for I have no idea how long the whole thing lasted. It may have been only a minute or two, possibly no more than a few seconds. Anyway, it ended when Stanwicz, the State halfback, faded back and arched a long pass dead into the hands of his own right end, who scored right then and there.
At once the feeling of tension broke; the State side of the stadium turned into a riot of color and sound, and around us the gloom was thick. But oddly enough, I felt happier than I had the moment before. It was a relief to have the suspense over with, to know the worst, and to be free of whatever it was that I had just been feeling.
“Let’s have a drink,” said Jerry. “We’re always suckers for forward passes. That end ought to have been covered.”
I gave him the flask and took a small one myself after he was through. Just then State missed the try-for-point, and the score was still in our favor, 7 to 6. Jerry grinned. After three years of Bart Wilmuth’s coaching he wasn’t what the English would call “sporting” about football. In the game, his idea was to win, and win by as big a score as possible. No dirty playing, no cheating of any sort, but fight like hell all the time, be on the long end of the score when the timekeeper fires the final gun, and never mind about giving three cheers for the other side when they score on you.
“If Mortenson can get away once more on that 32 play,” he observed, “it’ll just be a question of how big a score we can run up. The State boys have about shot the works.”
But Mortenson didn’t get away. We were crowding them all the rest of the half, and all through the second half as well, but we never quite put the ball across for another touchdown. Up and down the field the two teams surged, and there was a lot of good, hard football played, but it was all an anticlimax after the opening quarter. I kept waiting to feel that sense of crowd unity and mass emotion, but it did not develop again. The game was grand, but it remained a spectacle and nothing more. When the timekeeper’s pistol cracked for the end the score was still 7 to 6.
Before the last half was over, the sun had dropped behind Orchard Hill and it was bitter cold in the stadium. My feet were numb, and even finishing off my flask hadn’t kept us really warm. We didn’t join the snake dance. Neither of us gives a damn for pieces of goal posts, and we felt decidedly let down as we worked our way toward the portal. It hardly seemed to matter that our team had won; there was no exhilaration of victory at all. We were both quiet, and conscious of the fact that the liquor had begun to wear off. I’ve said a good deal about our drinking, but the truth is that we were not drunk, or anywhere near it. For one thing, we had been out of doors all day, and the not-inconsiderable amount of Scotch we’d consumed had all been drunk in the open air, and the cold. We were simply tired and somewhat cold as we waited for the crowd to empty out of the tunnels, and then drifted along through the outer gate of the stadium.
So Jeremiah Lister and Berkeley M. Jones stood outside the gate of the stadium, whence practically all but them had fled. It was nearly dark; the stars were splattering all except the western sky, and it was cold as Siberia. We began to walk back toward the car in silence. After a while Jerry said something under his breath and stopped short in the road.
“Well?” I asked him.
“I just had an idea.”
“No, thanks,” I told him firmly. “I’ve already had all the Scotch I’m having today.”
Jerry laughed. “Yeah. Now that your flask is empty.” “What other idea is there?” “It seems pretty flat, just heading back to New York now. Our first time here in two years.”
There was something in that. “We could drop round and see the boys at the Lodge.” Its members always referred to our fraternity as “the Lodge.”
“No. Let’s go see LeNormand.”
It seemed inappropriate. I thought of that middle-aged, punctilious, intellectual scholar. “In the shape we’re in now?” I asked in surprise.
“Sure. He’ll be just the thing after the emotional debauch of a football game.” He went on with a grin: “My God, I never realized before how hard the crowd at a game has to work. When you’re playing you get pooped, and work up an honest sweat, but when you’re watching a game like that one you’re absolutely all in at the end of it.”
Still I wasn’t too interested in the idea. “What about the liquor on our breath?” I suggested.
“He’ll never notice it. He’s always smoking that smudge-pot of a pipe. Anyway, I haven’t seen him since we got out, and he’s a decent egg. The perfect antidote to the late lamented orgy.” He turned and struck off toward the campus.
I went along. Jerry had always liked LeNormand—he’d been the only man our year to take the course in celestial mechanics—and he and LeNormand used to spend whole nights in the observatory, talking over everything under as well as in the heavens. LeNormand must have been very lonely after he came over to this country. The University had bribed him away from some English col
lege where he’d made a brilliant record. When he got here he found most of us pretty unregenerate, astronomically speaking, and the new equipment he’d been promised somehow never did materialize. So he kept to himself, did what research he could, I suppose, with the inadequate telescope already there, and only let himself go with one or two intimates on the faculty, and with Jerry. He never went out socially, so far as I know, and the rumor was that he hadn’t spoken to a woman since his mother. A silent, reserved, intensely intellectual and hard-working man, as I remembered him.
Our senior year he published something entitled, as near as I can recall it, “A Fundamental Critique of the Einstein Space-Time Continuum.” Maybe that isn’t the exact wording, but it conveys the general idea. I found it unreadable, myself—out of the first fifty words I knew the meaning of only twenty-eight, and it turned out later that I was wrong about one of those. Jerry waded through it, and with the help of his bull sessions with the author, claimed he knew what it was all about. That’s not important, perhaps; what matters is that the article brought down a storm of abuse on LeNormand. Apparently the rest of the boys in the astronomy league doubted everything about it from its mathematics to LeNormand’s sanity. If he hadn’t been such a famous man to begin with, Jerry thought, they’d have asked him to resign from the faculty.
Within a week after the article was published the scientific mud-slinging had begun, and Jerry must have been the only supporter LeNormand had. Probably it was nothing but loyalty on his part, but I could never be sure with Jerry. He had a curious facility for picking out the right answer, for cutting through to the truth even without knowing all the facts. And I know LeNormand wanted him to do graduate work in mathematics. Anyway, it was a case of two of them against the rest of the world, at least as Jerry saw it. LeNormand and he would engage in terrific correspondences with rival astronomers all over the world. Some nights Jerry wouldn’t get back to the room till three or four in the morning; he did all the typing of those letters for the professor. But that business stopped long before graduation. I remember that one night Jerry came back from the observatory about eleven. I was surprised. I hadn’t expected to see him before morning.
“You and LeNormand didn’t run out of words to call the other nuts, did you?” I inquired.
He tossed his hat on the window seat and sat down at his desk. “Yes,” he said.
“You mean,” I asked incredulously, “LeNormand admits he’s licked?”
“Hell, no,” Jerry was irritated. “He’s just not writing any more letters. He told me tonight it would be stupid, and perhaps dangerous.”
“Dangerous? Why? He might lose his job?”
Jerry shook his head, puzzled. “I don’t think that was it.”
“Well, then it must be that he’s afraid of the other guys. I suppose they are hellions when roused.”
I could see I was annoying him a little. “Don’t be a damn fool.” He was silent a moment. “It was a good row while it lasted. I used to enjoy those letters he wrote, you know. He’s got a knack of saying the nastiest things in the most abstract sort of way. And the funny thing about it all—” he paused.
“Is what?” I prompted him.
“Is that he’s just as right as he was originally.”
“Maybe they’ve shaken his faith.” The shot did not seem to penetrate.
“Maybe so.” He was thoughtful. “But I’ll tell you this. He had the answer to everything they wrote to him, and they didn’t have the answers to his stuff.”
I put that down to Jerry’s loyalty. “Probably he got sick of the whole argument.”
“Perhaps,” he said, and began talking about something else. He told me later that LeNormand never brought up the subject of that article again, and he didn’t dare mention it to him. But he puzzled about it a long time after. LeNormand’s attitude was what he couldn’t get over.
The whole episode came back to me as we stumbled up the road to the campus. I turned toward Jerry.
“I suppose you want to find out the latest news in the LeNormand versus Einstein contest,” I suggested.
There was an almost imperceptible pause before he spoke, so I knew I had guessed what he was thinking about. “I dunno. I won’t bring it up right at first.”
“Listen,” I said. “If you two savants are going to sit up till all hours talking mathematics, relativity, or whatever the hell, I’m not coming.”
“We won’t. I just want to say hello to him again. He was damn decent to me, and he’s a lonely man.”
I was undecided. “Maybe I better not butt in on your call.”
“Don’t be a damn fool,” said Jerry.
But I was, and proved it by walking on up the hill beside him. We were on campus now; splashes of warm and cheerful light were coming out of the windows of the dorms, and more than a suspicion of the sounds of revelry by night. Our breaths were dimly white in the air. Jerry was walking briskly; I could tell he was eager to get there, maybe to get there and get it over with. Our shoes made crisp, far-reaching sound on the slate flagging of the walk.
The Eldridge Observatory is on the highest part of the campus. A cube of a building with a white, bulbous dome at the top. It’s one of the simplest structures imaginable, two stories high and with a couple of classrooms on the ground floor. The instrument room, as Jerry called the actual place where the telescope was, occupied the whole of the second floor, and was roofed by the dome. LeNormand used it for his office as well. There was—why do I keep saying “was”?— not everything in this story is in the past tense—there is only one door to the place. We could see it ahead of us at the top of the walk we were on.
“He’s there,” said Jerry with satisfaction. “The light’s on over the door.”
We went on up the walk. There’s an old saying that every step you take is a step toward your grave.
The door was shut. Jerry rapped on it a couple of times, but nobody answered.
“He’s gone home for dinner,” I suggested.
“No,” said Jerry, “he always turns off the light when he leaves. He must be in there.”
He knocked again on the door. It was cold where we stood in the dark, and still except for the faint slither of the wind through the leafless trees. I shivered.
“Let’s go. Let’s go and find a drink.”
Jerry shook his head and put his hand on the knob. “Let’s make sure he’s not here, first.”
The door opened and we went inside quietly. The light in the shallow hall was on. A single raw, yellow globe that left even that small space half dark. The doorways to the classrooms at the right and left were open rectangles of blackness. There wasn’t a sound. I felt my guts contract. It was one of those times when some subconscious part of you is afraid for no reason. A deserted house will give me the same feeling.
“Hello, LeNormand,” Jerry called. I suppose he wasn’t speaking loudly at all, but his voice rang in that little hall.
There was no answer. Or wasn’t there? As I think over it now I am not so sure. Perhaps there was a thin sliver of sound above us. I can’t quite dredge it up out of my memory, but it was as though someone in the room above us had shifted position ever so slightly. Probably it was nothing.
A couple of steps in front of us was the round iron pillar about which revolved a spiral of steel stairs. That was—is—how you get up to the instrument room. We looked at it.
“It’s all dark up there,” I said. “Let’s go find a drink some place and—”
Jerry took a half step forward, looking up to the place where the stair cut through the ceiling like an auger.
“I think he’s up there,” he said with a faintly puzzled tone.
“Nuts. He must have heard you and he hasn’t answered.”
Jerry was obstinate. “Yes, but I think I see a light up there.”
I craned past his shoulder. At first I couldn’t make out what he meant, but then I did notice something. There was a flicker of light filtering through between the treads of the t
wo top steps. That’s just what it was too. A flicker of light, not steady, but wavering from bright to dim and then bright again.
“Hey, LeNormand!” Jerry cried.
Nothing. Not a sound in reply. Only the light kept on flickering.
“Hell,” said Jerry. “I’m going up.”
I was right at his heels as we climbed the curving iron stair, just far enough behind to keep my nose from getting kicked. Jerry kept going round and up faster and faster with an odd urgency, and beyond him the flickering, wavering light grew stronger and stronger till he was nothing but a silhouette in front of me. He took the last few steps two at a time.
“Come on,” he flung at me over his shoulder. “Come on, for God’s sake!”
We burst into the instrument room almost side by side. LeNormand was there, all right.
3. THE STARS ARE FIRE
DR. LISTER interrupted me. “Bark, we’ve all three talked this over so often—”
“Yes,” I agreed, filling my pipe again slowly. “But always as a mystery. A problem of detection. I have begun to wonder if we’ve ever discussed it, ever thought about it in another way.”
He looked hard at me without a word.
“I mean . . . well, I can’t tell you yet just what I do mean. But I want to go over the whole thing just once more, impersonally, narratively. Negative evidence is as important as positive. Listen without thinking of the dozens of theories we’ve formed and discarded in the past two years. And remember”—I felt my voice grow unsteady—“that Jerry, too, is dead now.”
Still he said nothing, though I thought his face had lost a little of its color. Around us and above us the night was black; Orion had swung imperceptibly toward the western horizon. I struck a match and laid it on the tobacco in my pipe bowl; the flame leaped and shrank as I drew on the bit. Its light flickered and wavered, like the light in the instrument room of Eldridge Observatory on that night two years ago when Jerry and I burst into it.
The Rim of Morning Page 4
