The Rim of Morning

by William Sloane

  I couldn’t think of a thing to say. Neither of us could. We stood there, silent, with our eyes on his face.

  Prexy seemed disappointed. “You both came down to the game this afternoon?”

  We nodded.

  “Unless you are extraordinary young men, you have both taken a few drinks. How many?”

  I told him, and he listened, apparently without disapproval. “But we’re not drunk, sir,” I concluded. “The story Lister and I have told you is true, absolutely, in every detail.”

  He frowned. “It can’t be true. However this thing happened, a man would not sit in his chair and allow himself to be burned to death . . .” His voice faded.

  “Unless he was dead already,” Jerry said.

  “Heart failure . . .” Prexy’s voice was doubtful.

  “On the other hand, what about that fire? Does anything about it strike you?” Jerry’s intonation almost demanded an affirmative answer.

  “He always used to smoke a pipe,” I said. “Perhaps he put it in his pocket before it was entirely out, and then his heart failed, and his clothes caught on fire, and—”

  Prexy stopped me with one look. “A wool suit smolders, Mr. Jones. It does not burn like that; it could not have created a fire that must have been as hot as a blowtorch. That is why I wished to make sure that your story is complete. You have left out nothing? You are concealing nothing?”

  “No,” said Jerry flatly.

  Prexy tried again. “It is my duty to report this to the police,” he said, “and the moment I do so there will be an investigation. You must both understand that you will be questioned over and over again. The police will be as dissatisfied with your story as I am.”

  Jerry laughed. A little sharply. “President Murray, we have been over all this together. We debated inventing a more plausible story to tell you and the police. We decided to stick to the truth.”

  Some idiotic impulse made me add: “ ‘Integer vitae, scelerisque purus,’ you know, sir.”

  Prexy smiled faintly. “How these little tags of learning do stick, Mr. Jones! Let me advise you not to try them on Chief Hanlon. I fear that, like Shakespeare, he has little Latin and less Greek.”

  Jerry looked pleased with me. I think he imagined I had made a dint in Prexy’s court-martial calm. But he brought the conversation back at once to the focal point by asking, “Did you look at the chair, sir?”

  “No, I didn’t.” Prexy’s tone was impatient, but at once he went across the room and examined it, just as I had done. As he straightened up he looked at Jerry incredulously and said, “And you are still determined to stick to your evidence that Professor LeNormand was actually sitting in this chair when you found his burning body?”

  “What else can we do?”

  He didn’t seem to have an answer to that. Frowning thoughtfully, he began to inspect the room in detail, staring at its meager furniture and the howitzer barrel of the telescope with puzzled eyes. We watched him apathetically, and when he came back across the room, Jerry said flatly, “Nothing.”

  “Nothing, as you say, Mr. Lister. Nothing at all.”

  It seemed to me that this was going on forever, that the events of this night would slow down the hands of time till all creation stopped. Time was not passing—it was stretching like a gigantic rubber band, it had ceased to exist, it was an illusion accomplished with mirrors and beveled gears, and the machinery had ceased to create the illusion. My thoughts were so many and so confused that they canceled each other; every cell in my brain felt as though it were loaded with a different charge.

  The thing was becoming intolerable, and I knew Jerry was feeling something the same way; his face was set and the gray of his eyes was darker than I had ever seen it. I knew he was intensely nervous by the way he kept sliding the palms of his hands back and forth against each other.

  “You remember that gesture he always had, Dad.”

  “Yes, I remember it.”

  “He used to do it just before the kickoff when he was playing football.”

  “And when he got married, before the ceremony.”

  I went on with my story, quickly.

  Prexy, though, was perfectly self-possessed. He must have been wondering if we were a couple of murderers. He must have been thinking about what all this would mean to the University, about the publicity and the crowds of curiosity seekers that would soon be littering the campus, about the difficulty of keeping his faculty and the student body quiet, and about a thousand and one other things. But he was making his decisions as calmly as though the whole thing was mere routine, like the reading of minutes in a trustees’ meeting.

  “I wish,” he said finally, “that I could spare you two gentlemen something of what lies ahead of you in the next few hours. You can imagine the difficulties in which this places me.”

  We assured him that we could.

  He went on. “The story you have told me is so extraordinary that I believe you are telling the truth. Whether this is a case of accident or murder I cannot decide. Ultimately the police will have to decide it. I must, therefore, telephone them at once and attend to certain other matters as well. I put you both on your honor as University men not to touch anything in this room until I return from the telephone downstairs.” And without waiting for any reply he went down the spiral steps and left us alone in the room.

  “ ‘I pledge my honor as a gentleman,’ ” said Jerry in a low voice, “ ‘that during the course of this examination I have neither given nor received assistance.’ ”

  It was the honor pledge we all used to write at the end of every exam paper. I laughed. “So far as he’s concerned, we’re still undergraduates.”

  We could hear Prexy’s full-throated voice booming in the hall below. He called the police, the Dean’s office, the infirmary, and several other places. After a while we stopped listening to him. Perhaps some other sort of person would have been excited at being thrust willy-nilly into the midst of a disaster like the one of that night, but we could find no stimulus in the situation. We were tired. The game had drained us of emotion. The liquor had worn off, and the adventure was not a nice adventure. If I shut my eyes I could still see LeNormand’s body in its strange, horrible position, the great parasite of fire growing out of it, and the flicker of the eyes as we came into the room. It was frightening. The chill in that observatory chamber came from something colder than the night November air. It went in deeper than my bones. It went into my mind.

  “This is grim,” Jerry observed.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I said with what must have been a feeble effort at jocularity, “to me this is all in the day’s work. I take it in my stride.”

  “Of course, you do.” His face was unsmiling. “Somehow, I’m not quite so much of an iron man. I don’t like it.”

  When Jerry talked that way, it was no use trying to be flippant. I suspected that he saw something more in the situation than I did and that he was alarmed about it. He told me what it was after a while.

  “Bark, listen.” He lowered his voice. “This is a murder, all right. It’s too incredible to think it’s an accident, or the result of heart failure, or anything like that. It’s a cinch the autopsy will prove I’m right.”

  “Admitted.” He added nothing more, so I went on. “And it’s a murder that we didn’t commit, though I bet a lot of people are going to think we did.”

  He shook his head. “I wonder. After all, we haven’t any motive. None whatever. And neither of us has any Leopold and Loeb tendencies. And how did we commit it? No, I think the papers will shy clear of accusing us, even indirectly.”

  “It’s the police that worry me, not the papers.”

  “Don’t fool yourself.” He was positive. “The police won’t be able to find a thing to implicate us, because there isn’t anything to find. In a way, I must have been one of the few friends LeNormand had over here. We’re in for a nasty siege of questioning, but the police will start looking elsewhere pretty soon.”


  “How do you figure that?”

  “LeNormand had some enemies. And we both know who they are.”

  I examined my mind and drew a blank. “I don’t.”

  He was impatient. “Don’t be thick. How about all that correspondence I used to type? The row he had with Trimble and Pforzman and Stanward, and the rest of them? There’s the motive. I’m sure of it.”

  I looked at him in astonishment. “You mean you think those stargazers and atom-busters would kill each other over the Einstein space-time theory? Nuts!”

  Jerry didn’t think it was impossible at all. He insisted that the matter was vital, fundamental, that I had no idea of the importance of LeNormand’s theory, and that if he was proved right it would reveal a lot of his esteemed contemporaries as scientific jackasses. They wouldn’t lose their standing in their own little world without a fight. Jerry thought some one of them might have been desperate enough to kill LeNormand. He pointed out how bitter the letters had been.

  To me the idea was unthinkable, and I said so. I asked him if he had any single man in mind.

  “No.”

  “Then,” I told him, “forget it. Don’t, for God’s sake, uncork that idea on the police. Next thing you know they’ll have Einstein down at headquarters, going over him with a rubber hose. And the poor guy came over here from Germany to get away from all that.”

  He laughed. “Okay. I wasn’t going to tell them anything except what we saw, anyway. If they find out about that old row, though, I may have to tell them the theory. And there is one thing that supports it.”

  I saw that he really was serious. “What’s that?” I asked skeptically.

  “The fire.”

  “What about the fire?”

  “It must have been a chemical—maybe thermite or something of that sort. No ordinary substance would burn into flesh and bone as deep and fast as that did. If you get me, it must have been a scientist’s kind of fire.”

  I took a little time to digest that idea. It was plausible, but I simply couldn’t believe that any of LeNormand’s professional critics and antagonists would want to kill him. Most scientists, in spite of the movies, aren’t murderous mad geniuses at all. There were several other things that were against the theory.

  “And if I’m right about that,” Jerry continued, “the autopsy ought to reveal what the stuff was.”

  “But what about the chair?” I objected. I felt we weren’t getting any place.

  He looked thoughtful. “LeNormand must have been knocked out first. The stuff was put on him, and then he was set in the chair. The murderer must have touched it off as we came up the stairs.”

  “And then he put some more of it on his feet and evaporated himself,” I suggested.

  Jerry pointed to the open slide in the observatory dome. “He must have gone out that way.”

  From his tone it was plain that he wasn’t satisfied with his own theory. Neither was I, but I had no alternative suggestion. We could think of nothing further to say; each of us was trying to find a theory, however vague, to cover the facts and prove we were not the only ones to visit LeNormand in that cold, round room. After a moment we heard Prexy coming upstairs again. As he entered we stood up; it was astonishing how much he made us feel like undergraduates.

  “Sit down, gentlemen. You must both be pretty tired.”

  Obediently we sat.

  “I shall remain here with you until the police arrive. And then,” his face altered, but whether to tenderness or pity, or something subtler, I could not make out, “I shall have the melancholy duty of bringing the news of this tragedy to Mrs. LeNormand.”

  “Mrs. LeNormand!” Jerry’s exclamation was one of incredulity and shock.

  “Yes,” said Prexy, half to himself, “Mrs. LeNormand. You didn’t know he was married?”

  “No . . . And he never told me . . . I saw no announcement . . . I mean, this is absolutely a . . .” Jerry was floundering.

  “We were all surprised,” Prexy admitted. “I don’t believe anyone expected it. He wasn’t the sort of man who gets married ordinarily.”

  “For God’s sake,” I said, “when did it happen?”

  Prexy’s expression as he looked at us was introspective. He must have been thinking fast with most of his mind and answering us with nothing but the top layer of it. “About three months ago. He appeared at one of Mrs. Murray’s summer teas and simply presented her to all of us as his wife. It was quite a sensation.”

  I could imagine that. The microcosm of University society must have been rocked to its center. LeNormand, of all people! Why, it actually amounted to bigamy, the man was so genuinely wedded to his work. He ate with it, lived with it, slept with it. Many a time Jerry had commented on the fact that LeNormand had utterly no use for women. He wouldn’t even employ a secretary, which was one reason Jerry had done so much of his secretarial work for him. He certainly was old enough not to be swept off his feet, and disciplined to the ascetic life he had chosen. I couldn’t imagine what he wanted with a wife, and surprised as I was I could see that Jerry was completely thunderstruck. He was staring at Prexy as though he expected to learn it was all a joke.

  “President Murray,” he said finally, “I wish you’d tell me more than that. Who is she? Where did she come from? Why did LeNormand . . .?”

  Prexy frowned. “I’ve told you almost all that I, or anyone else so far as I know, can tell you. Not one person in the University had ever seen her before. LeNormand was matter-of-fact about it, at least on the surface, but he’s never given us a word of explanation. We couldn’t pry anything out of him. We couldn’t even—” He checked himself. “This is all really beside the point.”

  Jerry was urgent. “No, it isn’t. If LeNormand got married—and I knew him well, sir, I was his friend—there is something strange about it. I can’t think of a thing that would make him want to surrender his . . . his freedom. Why, even the most beautiful woman in the world—”

  With no expression on his face at all, Prexy said slowly, “Some people might say that she is the most beautiful woman in the world.”

  4. INTERREGNUM

  BRAKES squealed on the road outside. We could hear the voices of several men.

  “Ah, the police,” said President Murray. I thought there was a note of relief in his voice, as though he was glad to have an interruption and a termination to our talk.

  Yes, indeed, it was the police. The boys in blue. The guardians of the peace, the representatives of law and order, arriving at the scene of the crime, if crime it was. A little stir of excitement went through me as their steps began to clang on the stairs.

  Chief Hanlon was in the van. A white-haired cockerel of a man with sharp eyes and a bit of the brogue still stuck to the knife-edge of his tongue. I hadn’t seen him since Founders’ night at the Zete house, when a few of us were organizing a little bonfire in honor of the old Lodge. Our mistake was in departing from ancient custom, which dictated the selection of a telephone booth from some farmer’s back yard as the pièce de résistance of the pyre. That night we decided to use the town’s one and only police booth as a variation; who would have supposed the old boy would hear about it at two in the morning? I saw him grin briefly at Jerry and me when his eyes lit on us.

  “Hello, b’ys,” was all he said to us.

  At his heels was young Pudge Applegate. Pudge is the son, and I presume heir, of Collegeville’s former bootlegger, and also Hanlon’s son-in-law. He weighs a scant two hundred and twenty-five pounds, practically all of which he carries below the neck. Although his uniform always looked as though he had had it laundered on him quite some time before, he was not so fat as his nickname suggested. If Chief Hanlon was the brains of the force, he was certainly its brawn.

  And then there was Old Harry. None of us ever knew his last name; he’d been a University proctor till he got too old and philosophical to bear down hard on the pranks and wanton wiles of Young America on the loose. Then the Collegeville police force secured his services.
I don’t know that he ever made an arrest.

  For a minute or two the three of them, after greeting Prexy respectfully, simply stared about them silent in the presence of that round, cold room, the dark hummock of LeNormand’s body stretched out in the shadows on the floor, and the lingering reek in the air. Finally Chief Hanlon made a quick inspection of the body and returned to ask a few questions of Jerry and me. We told our story flatly and briefly, and he did not cross-question us about it. I’ll say to his credit that he realized immediately that he was up against something outside his experience, something uncommonly nasty. Almost at once he scrawled a note to Parsons, head of the county detectives, and sent it off to New Zion, the county seat, by Harry, to whom he gave some whispered instructions. I wondered for a moment why he did not telephone, till I remembered that the switchboard girls would promptly broadcast the story. He kept his own hands and Pudge’s off everything in the room, and after he had heard our story he sent Pudge outside to watch the building. He verified from Prexy the fact that Doc Nickerson at the infirmary had been summoned. Then he simply sat on a chair and whistled between his teeth. Prexy left after a few minutes, promising to return later, and the three of us were left alone in that vault. The silence was oppressive; the only time it was broken was when Hanlon stopped whistling for a moment, stared at Jerry and me with his cold blue eyes, and said:

  “You b’ys seem to be on hand fer the fires.”

  We didn’t know how to take that, so we said nothing. Hanlon grinned after a minute and recommenced his whistling. The machine of the dome kept on ticking. Time went on stretching. I don’t know how many minutes elapsed before Doc Nickerson arrived, but his appearance was welcome. He nodded to Jerry, whom I suppose he remembered from football days, and went right to work. His examination didn’t take long.

  “Don’t move him any more than you can help, doc,” Hanlon cautioned. “Don’t touch nothin’ else.”