The Rim of Morning

by William Sloane

  Sometimes a man’s craft obtrudes itself upon him without warning or welcome. It was so with me at that moment. Hearing Julian speak, watching the tense way he was leaning forward in his chair, noticing the way the tendons ridged his throat I caught the outlines of what was not less than hysteria and more likely a deranging obsession of the mind. The thought made me miserable. I looked away from him so as not to see any more of it, but he did not notice. His voice, dry, strained, hurrying with an unnecessary urgency, went on.

  “Yes,” he was saying, “I’m on to something, my boy. I’m on to something that nobody since time began has found the real key to. Oh, a lot of them have worked on it, one way and another. Even inventors like Edison, I understand. But he didn’t have the . . .” for the first time the spate of his words slowed and he hesitated. Some of the unnatural brightness in his eyes faded. He licked his lips and found a word that I felt was not the whole of his meaning. “The incentive that I have. I’ve got to succeed. Everything depends on it, everything. One more step, one small step, and I’ll have it. You can help me make that step.”

  “I hope so,” I said. “What is it you’re working on, Julian?”

  He leaned back in his chair and looked away from me. There was stubbornness in the set of his jaw. “That I can’t tell you. It isn’t wholly my secret, for one thing. For another, I’d rather not discuss it. I want only the answers to a few questions.”

  Here, I decided, was the place to call a halt to the vaguenesses and ambiguities in which we had been dealing. “Julian,” I said firmly, “you know very well that I’ll do almost anything for you. I’d be an ungrateful so-and-so if I didn’t. But you’ve been talking in large terms. I think I ought to know what you’re after before I give you any dope I may have, for your own sake as well as mine.”

  “Nonsense,” he retorted. “You ought to be willing to trust me.”

  I decided to let him have it straight. “I would, under ordinary circumstances. But these aren’t ordinary circumstances. You must see that. What sort of thing is it that you have to come to this God-forsaken place to work on? None of us has heard from you in years. This whole business is strange, Julian. Knowing you, I assume that everything is all right, but I’ve got to assure myself of that fact.”

  “Is that all?” he asked quietly when I had finished.

  “Not quite,” I answered. “I think you’ve been working too hard, Julian. I honestly believe you ought to take a rest. Anne thinks so, too. I’d much sooner persuade you to relax for a while than I would help you go on killing yourself by overwork.”

  He waved my words away with a gesture of one hand. “Come out with it, boy. What you really mean is that you think I am unbalanced and you don’t want to encourage me in my insanity. That’s in your mind, isn’t it?”

  “Well, you used some extreme words a minute ago, Julian. This thing of yours must be important, but you make it sound earth-shaking. Maybe you’ve brooded on it till you’ve lost some perspective.”

  His face was set and white when he turned it on me. “You’re wrong, Richard. You’re entirely wrong. As for my taking a rest, there will be time enough for that when my work is finished, and finished it is going to be, perhaps in a week, certainly in a month. I’m not crazy, my boy, but even if I were it wouldn’t matter because the thing is done, anyhow. It works!” His voice, which had reached a crescendo, faltered. “That is, it works in a way, but not as I want it to do, and that is where I know you can help me. I’ve got to get the rest of it. Otherwise it means making my results public without the final step. Someone else will make that.” The tension went out of his voice and he began to sound old and weak. “I don’t want to wait any longer, my boy. I’m tired.”

  “Julian . . .” The distress in my heart was clouding my judgment and I knew that I ought to be on my guard, “I’ll help you, of course. I don’t want to know anything about the details of what you’re doing. Just the general idea, that’s all I ask.” Doubtless this project of his was a legitimate, valid enterprise. In five years he must have found out the impossibility of what he had been planning when he left the university. But if he were still obsessed with it, I was not going to help him further into madness. “I don’t think I’m asking anything unreasonable,” I told him.

  He shook his head. “Perhaps not. But if I tell you what it is, you will want to argue about it and I haven’t strength nor time for argument now.” He hesitated and drummed his long fingers uncertainly on the arm of the chair. Finally he said, “I’ll strike a bargain with you. If you answer my questions—give me the data and references I need if you haven’t the material yourself—then I’ll tell you what I’m doing. But only afterward, and only if you promise me you will tell no one and do nothing. That’s fair enough, isn’t it?”

  Without being able to see clearly why I thought so, I knew this was a moment of danger. His unwillingness to confide in me could mean only one thing—that he was still determined to reach Helen, assure himself that somewhere she still existed. If I refused to help him find her—or pretend to help him because, of course, no one could do more than that—would it not be more dangerous to his sanity than if I answered his questions and let him do what he liked afterward? My loyalty was to Julian, but which course would help, and which injure, him I could not tell.

  The room seemed to close in on me. Between pity and doubt I could not decide what to do, and in that moment of indecisiveness I lost my last chance to checkmate Julian. Like a fool, I attributed the apprehension I felt to a mere personal concern over my friend, over his health and happiness. I should have known better. There was more in the warning my mind was giving me than could be accounted for in any such personal way. Behind the screen of my concern for Julian lurked thoughts that I did not dare allow to come forward, for fear of their implications. There was, for instance, the vague perception that Julian talked like a nervous man, obsessed by a tragic delusion, but still able to perceive reality from shadow; and the positive knowledge that he was a great man, too brilliant not to be able to complete almost any enterprise to which he had set that terrific mind of his. His own confidence in what he had accomplished so far should have impressed me more than it did.

  For all that, I think anyone in my position would have done what I did. I decided that the only thing I could do was to humor Julian, be sympathetic, and do what he asked until the situation was plainer to me.

  “All right, Julian. I’ll help you any way I can. Though what I know that will be of any use to you . . .”

  He smiled again, momentarily, and leaned forward in his chair. “Good,” he said, “good.” His face was terrifyingly intent. “What I am after is this . . . you have been doing certain work in your field that has interested me very much. I want to ask you some things about it.”

  Although I had expected something of the sort, I was surprised all the same. “I’ve done very little research these last years, Julian.”

  “That piece of yours in the Journal suggests otherwise, my boy. Now about these brain currents that you’ve been measuring . . .”

  In the last few years a handful of doctors and experimental psychologists have been measuring the minute electric impulses which the living brain gives out. We have developed a machine which records these pulsations on a ribbon of paper that resembles a ticker tape. Each brain seems to produce a certain distinctive pattern of its own, and there are rhythms characteristic of sleep, concentration, or various kinds of emotions. Furthermore it appears that fatigue, various drugs, and many other things may influence those patterns.

  Bill Rogers and I had got interested in the subject as a sort of hobby. At first we’d done little more than talk the subject over from the medical and psychological approaches. Then Bill had suggested that his hospital work gave him some unique opportunities for experimentation, and we had taken all sorts of brain records in the various wards there. One thing that excited Bill was the idea that pain might someday be “damped out” electrically in cases where drugs were dangerou
s. I was more interested in the phenomena as a whole, and particularly as they appeared in infants and in moribund cases. Some of my dope had been published later in the Journal, but of course I am a teacher and not a research man except incidentally. Still it’s a new field and something may come of it in time and when we’ve accumulated a lot more data. Already we have got something, particularly in the case of measurements taken of schizophrenics and epileptic cases.

  It was not altogether surprising that Julian should be interested in the thing, though it had all come up since he had withdrawn from active work. These minute, rhythmic impulses are electrical, as I’ve said, and Julian was an electrophysicist. His radio tube improvements, the Blair Wave Trap, and a lot of other things he worked out are still in use. But as he went on questioning me, I began to feel that his interest was not as abstract and coldly scientific as I should have liked.

  All the while I was answering Julian’s questions I had an inkling of that. I felt progressively more and more uncomfortable as his delight at my answers mounted. He kept nodding his head and jotting down notes in the shabby memorandum book he always carried. When I opened my suitcase and found an envelope of the encephalograms—the ribbons of paper tape marked with the trembling, jagged lines which depicted the electric pulses of the brain—about which I had been speaking, his excitement was close to frightening. He pored over those things, holding them close to his eyes and moving his lips soundlessly as he looked. Now and again a question came from him abruptly, and it is a measure of Julian’s genius that whatever he asked went straight to the heart of some difficulty or other which Bill Rogers and I had debated fruitlessly. In half an hour, or perhaps a few minutes more, he had sucked me dry, of what I knew.

  7.

  THAT CONVERSATION with Julian has a fantastic quality as I look back on it. There in that faded magnificence of a room, with the running sweep of the river beyond its windows, we talked in the dry phrases and formulations of science. But all the time we were, between us and without knowing what we did, creating a horror. The sequence of our words was like an irrevocable syllogism, building step by step to a conclusion which was neither rational nor, in the abstract, credible. It was deadly just the same.

  Something was born in that hour, something that Julian’s mind had conceived years before and which was now in the very moment of parturition. He must have known, partly at least, what was happening, for the gathering triumph in his face and words gradually conveyed itself to me. At first I felt excited by his excitement, swept along by his enthusiasm. Then misgiving began to creep again into my mind and it seemed not so much strange as alarming that I should be telling this man things which appeared to possess some significance to him which they lacked for me. Finally he closed his notebook with a snap and put the encephalograms into the envelope again.

  “I want to look these over with more care,” he said. “I’ll return them to you in a day or so. Perhaps I shall need to ask you something on one or two more points. But I think not.” He spoke with a confidence which I found disquieting.

  For a moment I was tempted to demand the graphs from him at once. The abnormal brightness of his eyes, the way his hand trembled when he put the envelope in his pocket, the feverish intensity of his examination of me had showed that far from pacifying the demon which was driving him, I had merely goaded it on. “I’m damned if I see what all this proves, Julian,” I told him. “If you can make something out of that stuff I’ve told you, you’re way ahead of the rest of us.”

  “Perhaps,” he said slowly, “I am not looking for quite the same thing.”

  “You haven’t told me yet what you are after,” I reminded him. “Don’t forget your promise.”

  “I haven’t,” he said absently and then was silent for a time. His eyes wandered to the door and I knew that having got what he wanted from me, he was impatient to be out of the room and away, working on it. “Richard, I am afraid I should not have made that promise.”

  This was certainly not the old Julian, who would as soon have falsified an experiment as gone back on a promise. It gave me an unpleasant jolt. “Don’t back down,” I said. “You don’t get out of this room until you tell me what you’re after.” My tone didn’t sound as jocular as I’d intended.

  His eyes swung back from the door and rested on me thoughtfully. “Very well,” he said finally and with regret in his voice. “A promise is a promise, I suppose.” He licked his lips and went on in a matter-of-fact tone which made what he said all the more insane. “I am working on the problem of immortality.”

  I cursed myself for every kind of fool in the calendar. “I see,” I said, trying to sound noncommittal. “How are you tackling it, exactly?”

  He shook his head. “I can’t tell you that, my boy. Scientifically, of course. The way that men of reason and intelligence should have approached it centuries ago. I have constructed an apparatus which I shall give to the world when it is completed.”

  “Then it isn’t finished?”

  He looked uncomfortable for the first time. “Not wholly. I find that I have omitted an important element, a factor of control. Your answers to my questions, though, ought to give me what I need there.”

  “But you believe this thing of yours is going to work?” I could not keep the incredulity out of my voice. It was difficult to remember that he was not, could not be, rational. Since he was not a sane human being, of course he felt sure his device, whatever it was, would work.

  To my surprise he hesitated. Finally he looked away from me and said, “In a way, Richard, it is already successful. But as I say, the element of control is lacking. Your data should—must—supply that. I think I shall be able to report success in a week or so. Perhaps even sooner.” I saw the hands, linked in his lap, tremble as he spoke.

  The monstrousness of what he was claiming swept over me and I forgot all discretion. “God in heaven, Julian!” I burst out. “You mustn’t do that . . . you mustn’t talk this way. Listen to me. You’ve got to listen to me. This is a mad project. It’s blasphemous. It’s impossible.” As I spoke I wished that I were absolutely sure that it was impossible, but though every atom of sense and reasonableness in me affirmed that Julian was simply crazy, a cold dread that he wasn’t fastened on me. “Even if it isn’t impossible,” I went on as earnestly as I knew how, “have you stopped to think what such a thing as you are trying to do would mean, Julian? What its effect would be?”

  His thoughts seemed miles removed from my outburst. When he answered, his tone was quiet and gentle—I felt ashamed and confused by it because it made me wonder which of us was outside the normal pale. “I was afraid you would take it that way, Richard,” he told me. “It is not my business to speculate what the effect of a discovery will be. Every new instrumentality of the human search for truth can be used or abused. You know that.”

  “But this is different. This is dynamite.” A thought struck me. “I’m assuming that you think you can prove immortality?”

  “Yes.” That single syllable fell into the room with unarguable finality. In spite of myself I was impressed with the way he said it, momentarily completely convinced. Julian Blair was a great man and he made no positive affirmations unless he was sure. Time after time he had done impossible things. His theories, when he enunciated them, might sound radical and extreme to his contemporaries, but the event had invariably justified him and them. All that prestige was behind his single word of affirmation. Now of course he was old—senile. Something had slipped in that delicate and brilliant mind of his. But I could not be sure.

  It never occurred to me that Julian could be both right and wrong.

  After a long pause I said something that was foolish because I knew the answer to it already. I asked the question only because I wanted to put some words into the pit of silence that lay between us. What I said was, “But Julian, why? Why should you want to . . . to do this thing?”

  He brought his eyes back to me with an expression of faint surprise around them. “Surely
I don’t have to tell you that?” he said. And then I knew that what I feared was true: this work of his was not a labor of research, of pure science applied to an enigma presented by the physical universe. It was, instead, something intensely personal and urged upon him by emotion. I remembered the day when he had begun on it. For five years it had been in his mind, growing, spreading, burgeoning, until finally it had crowded out everything else. It was, if you like, a cancer of the mind.

  8.

  NOT MANY of us had come to the cemetery that day, partly because of the weather. But Helen and Julian had always preferred few friends and close ones, so that her funeral would not have been large under any circumstances. Julian, Anne, and I had driven out together, after the church service, and watched in numb silence the end of that torturing ritual with which we dispose of the bodies of our dead. I remember that the rain made a drumming noise on the roofs of our umbrellas and that the grave was a brown scar on the green of the cemetery lawn. Looking into it, I had seen the standing water at its bottom. It seemed to me a sacrilege to put any part of Helen into such a pit. . . . Anne’s hand was cold and hard in mine as we stood there, and I doubt if she, or I, or Julian even heard the minister’s well-thumbed phrases.

  Helen Blair, who had been Helen Conner, was the only woman I had ever loved. I went right on loving her after Julian and she were married; I was too fond of him, and she was too necessary to me, for any complete severance of our relationships. Anyhow, I had been in love with her before Julian had even met her and she had refused me twice before he had proposed to her. That she had preferred a man twenty years older than herself was natural enough under the circumstances, but the wonder was that Julian, with his enormous indifference to the ordinary human experiences and his relentless urge toward work and discovery, should ever have fallen in love.