“Let the password be anything to do with Noah or his Ark.”
“That seems appropriate,” said J genially. “Well, thanks very much, sir.” Now that he was going along with the gag J began to feel quite some affection for the poor old kook, who must have been quite a fellow in his day.
“I suppose I’ll get an early warning?” he puzzled aloud. “When do you expect … Or don’t you, really? This is just in case, I guess.”
“My foreboding,” said Barkis, “is that the flood will come. My guess is—within the year.”
“As much margin as that?” said J, surprised and wondering what was surprising him.
“A year,” droned Barkis, “is only fifty-two weeks. A week is only seven days.”
“And what’s a day?” supplied J cheerfully, quoting (now that he remembered). “But there’s got to be a gathering place. I mean when you stop to think, it’s going to be mighty tricky.”
“The mechanics will be explained to you,” said Barkis in an exhausted voice. He turned off his lamp abruptly.
J felt sorry that he had pressed unreason with reasonable inquiries. He said in a moment, “Say, why don’t I crank down your bed? You can’t get comfortable sitting up so high.”
He slipped his feet to the floor, moved, and performed the small service. The old man watched him with hooded eyes. His thanks were faint; his voice was feeble.
J climbed back into bed and, in silence, began to try to remember all of the conversation he had overheard. It was pretty mixed up now with this fantastic yarn. He had remembered the word “elite.” And, yes, something about a seat to the moon, by golly! And then he remembered with a lurch of his heart what seemed to have been, there at the last, a discussion of suicide.
J began to think that Barkis believed all this stuff. (Well, he must be crazy!) But who had the visitor been? Had he believed it? No, no, must have been some friend, well-aware of a pitiable obsession, a delusion fallen on a fine mind in its latter days. He must have been playing along in affectionate kindness. J could figure that. A replacement, the visitor had called himself. A scientist of some kind, from his vocabulary. Couldn’t have been faking that, could he? Did he have a seat to the moon?
Ah, come on! The whole thing had to be phony baloney. For all J knew the old man beside him was some kind of two-bit scientist who was dreaming all this up as his ego’s final gasp, just because he had never got anywhere near the top. Grandeur, sure. Thinking he was “watched especially,” for instance.
J began to feel very tense in the muscles. If the other man—mad or not—was falling mercifully asleep, J didn’t want to thresh and turn. But he couldn’t lie still. So he slipped out of the bed and got into his robe. It was still early. In fact, the evening visiting hour must be still in effect. J said very softly, “Just going for a stroll on the premises. Don’t worry.”
His room-mate neither stirred nor replied.
So J went softly out of the room into the brighter corridors, among the sounds of voices, the bustle of people in their grotesque variety. Yet, in the big hospital’s population of visitors, one element was missing. There were no child visitors. J caught himself thinking, The Little kids must go. That’s three seats taken.
He chided himself for this at once. But the trouble was J was in the middle. He didn’t know enough. Had, for instance, no notion by what means or brainy struggle human life could be sustained for years on what he understood to be a barren hunk of rock and dust, hanging in space.
Yet, on the other hand, he knew too much. J wasn’t one who would have laughed when Galileo sat down to his telescope. Or yelled, “Get a horse.” J was a pretty civilized fellow. He was supposed to keep his mind open and so balance along the tight wire of uncertainty, taking care at all times never to be absolutely sure of anything.
J thought wistfully that to be a furious savage, righteous in ignorance, with all his glands pumping away to some single purpose—though that be perilous—would sure be an easier way to live.
When the door to 817 had closed, a thin old hand reached for the telephone.
“Mr. Smith here.”
“Willing.”
“And ready. Go ahead.”
“There’s some trouble. Could be serious.”
“How serious?”
“Abort. Reschedule.”
“What’s to do?”
“Send somebody.”
“Bryce?”
“No, somebody practical.”
“When?”
“Tomorrow. Not too early.”
“Will do, Doctor.”
When J sneaked back three-quarters of an hour later, the room was still, the air fresh. All had been neatened, the window opened. Some nurse had been in.
He crept into the lavatory, brushed his teeth, and otherwise prepared himself for sleep. As he climbed into the bed, his room-mate spoke softly. “Good night, Mr. Little. I hope I won’t disturb you.”
“That’s all right,” said J. “Goodnight,” and added, “sir.”
“This is a burden for a man like you,” said Barkis suddenly. “I’m sorry.” And then he said, as if he didn’t realize he was making sounds, “Oh, God, I’m so tired … so tired … All my fellows?”
“Try to rest,” said J.
His room-mate murmured something. “The rest is silence,” J thought he said.
All night J could only doze. He was terribly conscious of the other man. He could tell at times that there was pain, and he did not think that this was fantasy. But J lay very low. He dared not call a nurse. How could he, J Middleton Little, from Burbank, California, give orders that this man be sedated against his will? And how suggest that he ought to be in a room that had bars on its window?
J didn’t know enough. He knew too much. He might hang onto the old chap’s pajama tails for one night. But J was going home tomorrow. Surely authorities knew the man’s condition. Didn’t they? J hoped. J feared. He was miserable all night long while, in the small breeze, the curtains on this eighth-floor open window moved hypnotically.
When the dusk of the room began to brighten and voices and clatterings began to be heard, Barkis was sound asleep, but J M. Little was feeling pretty darned exhausted.
CHAPTER 3
Sunday
A nurse came and pulled the pink curtain to make a token wall. A doctor came and disappeared behind it. J popped out of bed and trotted off to take his shower down the hall. He wasn’t going to eavesdrop anymore if he could help it.
When he returned, the curtain was out of the way. Barkis was sitting up and looking fairly spry. They exchanged no more than genial good mornings. Breakfast came. J wondered if his elder had already forgotten last evening’s conversation.
He was half-dressed and packing his suitcase when a man’s high-pitched voice said, “Well, well, well! Doctor Livingstone, I presume. Hello there, sir! Now, what’s all this?”
It wasn’t a visiting hour. Maybe this was another doctor. But whoever he was, as the stranger came bounding into the room, making for the other bed, J loathed him on sight. He was the very image of the extrovert. His florid face was arranged in a permanent smile, revealing a set of very large teeth. He had writhing brows the dark color of his stiff, abundant hair, and ice-cold, pale brown eyes.
“What are you doing here?” said J’s room-mate dourly.
“I’m having a baby. Heh, heh,” said the stranger. “Well, I mean my sister is.” He sat down on the foot of J’s bed, as J couldn’t help feeling he ought not to have done.
“Anything serious?” the man inquired of Barkis.
“Not very,” said Barkis coldly. “Mr. Little, this is Barry Goodrick. Don’t trust him an inch.”
“Bygones, bygones,” the stranger chided. “How are you, Mr. Little? Glad to see you!”
(He wasn’t. How could he be?) J muttered something.
“How have you been, Barry?” said Barkis to the rescue.
“Oh, fair. Fair,” said Goodrick. “You leaving us, Mr. Little?” His glance w
as licking instrusively over the open suitcase and J’s dirty underwear.
“I sure am,” said J. “Excuse me.” He went to fetch his things from the lavatory. He tied his tie.
“Well, I’m certainly sorry,” Goodrick was saying to Barkis, “to find you under the weather, sir. Something sudden, was it?”
“Not very,” said Barkis in the same cold way. “I don’t think you are supposed to be in here.”
“Oh, what they don’t know won’t hurt them,” said the stranger, lounging back on his elbow which, to J, was somehow infuriating. That bed was still J’s bed, and even temporary sheets are personal! “Passed any miracles lately? Heh. Heh. How are things going?”
Barkis didn’t answer. His eyes had taken on that fierce light. J, who thought this Goodrick was a real pain in the neck, hated to leave the old man at his mercy, but his suitcase was closed. He picked up his jacket.
“Say … uh … I’ve got a plane to catch,” he said, “and I sure don’t want to miss it this time.”
“When’s it leave?” said Goodrick immediately.
“Two o’clock this afternoon,” said J, deadpan. Goodrick narrowed his eyes. “Well,” said J to his friend, “I’ll say good-bye, sir.”
He moved around the beds to the window side, and the old man gave him his hand. It was very thin and dry. The clasp was firm, and J seemed to feel a second pressure, which was as if to say, “Remember?” He wished this damned other man wasn’t here.
“Nice to have known you,” he said to Barkis, “and I guess we’ll let the Sweet Prince of Denmark have the last word. Okay? Good luck, sir. Good-bye.”
“Good-bye,” sid Barkis bleakly, sadly, without a smile.
J nodded to Goodrick, whose eyes were much narrowed now, although his smile was as wide as ever. J picked up his bag and left the room, feeling that he had just been rather clever. Waiting for the elevator he preened himself to have remembered that Barkis had quoted the works of William Shakespeare several times in his hearing and had even quoted the very line to which J had just so cleverly referred. He felt that the reassuring message had been given and received right under the snooping nose of that snoop-nosed Goodrick, whoever he was.
He rode down, and lo, in the lobby, one of Mrs. Evangeline Burns’ lawyers was waiting with the papers. So J negotiated for his departure at the desk, and then he sat down to sign whatever he’d have to sign to get free and go home.
Up in Room 817 Goodrick said, “What was that all about?”
Barkis said, “What?”
“Something’s, by any chance, rotten in Denmark? Heh. Heh.”
Barkis said testily, “We had a literary sort of chat last night. You wouldn’t understand.”
“That so? Who is the man?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” said Barkis with bad temper. “Some half-educated bourgeois bore. I’m supposed to have peace and quiet in this place, by the way, and I don’t feel like company.”
“Nervous?”
“I can have you put out,” said Barkis. “Don’t tempt me.”
“You shouldn’t carry a grudge, Doctor.”
“I wouldn’t call my intense aversion to your personality a grudge, exactly.”
“I’m just wondering,” said Goodrick, paying no attention to insults but putting his left thumb to his mouth and chewing (between words) on the flesh around the nail, “if there was something in the lab went a little bit whacky? And made you sick? Eh?”
Barkis looked out the window.
“I can’t help it,” said Goodrick, “if I’m imaginative. For instance, what does he know, the Little bourgeois?”
Barkis said thoughtfully, “It’s not so much that I dislike you. Your kind of mind doesn’t interest me.” Then he winced.
“Don’t feel so good, Doctor?” said Goodrick alertly.
An orderly, a scrubwoman, and an aide appeared in the doorway. “Excuse us,” said the orderly sternly. He and the aide grasped J’s bed, preparing to move it out the door. Goodrick got up. It was as if they’d dumped him. The scrubwoman put down her pail and readied her mop. A nurse put her head in. “Excuse me,” she trumpeted. “Sir, visitors are not permitted in a patient’s room at this hour.”
“Well, since I’m outnumbered,” said Goodrick, “I’ll see you later, Doctor.”
“I sincerely hope not,” said Barkis firmly.
Downstairs J saw Goodrick come out of an elevator and go over to the desk. He saw the woman there point with her pencil in his (J’s) direction. But Goodrick neither turned to look nor did he approach. Instead he walked away toward a row of phone booths. J was glad. He had not liked that man.
The session with the lawyer didn’t take long; J was extremely agreeable to suggestions this morning.
As the cab bore him through the bustle of the noisy city, J reckoned up the hours he would have to wait at O’Hare. Well, he didn’t care. He figured to ensconce himself in the Ambassador Club and read the papers.
But once settled down there, he found the newsprint fading in his sight. J couldn’t help thinking abut the dying man he had left behind, the mad plot, the whole bizarre experience. What would he do, he wondered, if somebody did show up one day, give the password, and hand J Middleton Little seven seats to the moon?
Just for the heck of it, who would go?
Well, the three Little kids first, naturally, and then Grosvenor Winthrop Little V, J’s only son and the children’s father. Win was twenty-seven; he must go. And Amy Alice Little Gardner, aged twenty-three? Of course, Amy! J couldn’t bear to think of Amy, destroyed. And Nancy Jo Little, aged sixteen, the apple of J’s eye? She must go, surely. Was that six already? J, himself, must sit in the seventh seat.
But what about Sophia? Or Marion, his son’s wife? Or Avery, his daughter’s husband?
Only mine? he wondered. Me and mine, my own, my blood, my seed?
He felt so depressed and horrified that he forced his attention to the sports page.
In the hospital a young man with a snubbed brown nose on a tanned face was bending over the only bed in Room 817.
“I’ve got all that,” he said. “We’ll fix. I don’t think there’s too much to worry …”
“You know Barry Goodrick, Tony?”
“I’ve met him. Heard some rumors.”
“Somebody got on to my collapse, I suppose, and sent him sniffing around. He saw and he heard this man Little. And I don’t know, Tony, I don’t know. It depends.” The old man threshed.
The young man straightened and said, “Suppose Goodrick does take a notion to worm himself into the Little man’s confidence? What’s he going to make out of that crazy yarn? The Little man doesn’t know the truth.”
“They could put things together.”
“I doubt it, sir.”
“Don’t doubt it. They could, I say!”
“All right, if you say so.” The young man smiled at his elder and thought to himself, Pretty tough if all you’ve got left to do now is worry, after what you’ve done in a lifetime. “What kind of man is this Little chap from”—Tony looked at the slip of paper in his hand—“Burbank, California? You say he promised? How reliably, do you think?”
“Oh, he’s a middling kind of man. Middle-class, middle-income, middlebrow, he said. Bit of a clown. Middling intelligent. Disposed to be honest, I imagine. How strong to keep silent if he was not gulled, I’m not sure. And if he was gulled, he can be gulled again.” The patient groaned.
“Sounds like a type who’d believe almost anything modern science tells him,” said Tony good-humoredly, trying to lighten the tone of the talk. “You gave him quite a pill to swallow, Doctor.”
“Ten members of his immediate family,” said the patient in a patient, weary way. “I counted. So I said six seats besides his own, to occupy his mind, you see? He’d feel, I thought, concerned and, I suppose, torn.”
Tony whistled softly. It might pass for admiration.
“And I was not even middling intelligent, was I?” said the old man
calmly. “Tony, have I already come to the point where I only think I’m thinking?”
“I wouldn’t say so, sir,” the young man soothed. He thought, although I almost could.
“Something disagreeable could happen to that Little man, as well as to all …” The old man’s eyes had grown wide and wild.
“No, no. We’ll keep an eye on …”
The old man’s hand grasped for Tony’s jacket. “Tell the Little man the truth. I should have.”
“Oh, I don’t know, sir. He must be nicely muddled. With a nasty problem for his middle-class conscience to resolve. Ought to keep him busy long enough. It’s only another …”
“Don’t say the time!” said Barkis violently. “Oh, God, he has got the whole thing! He has got the time and the place. And he doesn’t know it! He doesn’t know what he knows.”
“Time and place, but not what,” said Tony sharply. “Or so you just told me.”
“No, no, but they know what,” said Barkis. “Somebody got hold of Etting in that hospital. I’m sure of it. That’s why I … I don’t trust that confounded Goodrick. Don’t you realize … Tell Smith we have to call it off.”
“I really think you are unnecessarily upsetting yourself, sir,” said Tony. “What you ultimately fear has very little chance of happening.”
“It is definitely under consideration by somebody. I know that—will you then tell me, with your brain, that there is no chance?”
Tony said gently, “If the voice on the phone two weeks ago was whose you thought it was, and if the message meant what you thought it meant, and if they do find out what you are afraid they might, then there would be a small chance. Very iffy.”
“Brains,” said the old man. “My whole life has been my faith in the human brain. Can’t you see why I, of all people, can’t bear to think—”
“I suggest that you simply try not to think about it anymore,” said Tony quietly. “Your brain must tell you that it is out of your hands now. That others have just as much concern. You should be resting, sir.”
“So I should,” said the patient. “To eke out my body’s strength to the last syllable. But when my brain goes, I go tumbling after. I’ll say no more. Except good-bye.”
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