“Don’t,” Cummings warned suddenly, whirling from the window. “And be careful! Have you read the reports—oh, yes, you typed them. Well then, study them carefully, and be careful of him. Until we or the police turn up a proven murderer, he’s our suspect—a double suspect for loitering about the Ridge.” He turned on Dikty. “What was it he said to the police yesterday? After the funeral?”
“That he was thinking of moving, that there isn’t much left for him in Knoxville any more.”
“If I thought for a moment he was referring to Hodgkins, I’d nab him now! But he seems to have another purpose now—he’s hunting the Hodgkins widow.”
“Who isn’t?”
Cummings again caught sight of the books stacked atop the girl’s desk. “Why these,” he asked curiously, “why this—this what’s-his-name man?”
“Gilgamesh. Partly to satisfy my curiosity,” she hastened to explain, “and partly to catch him in an error. If that’s possible. He told me things last night about history (or prehistory, rather) that I never dreamed existed, and I’m very eager to learn more. He also told me things that may not be in these books and if that be the case . . .” She let the suggestion hang there.
“If that be the case, we know more that we know less about him.” He flipped open a cover to read the flyleaf.
“Do you know about something or other called the C-14 Method?” Shirley asked.
Cummings shut the book to study her. “Yes. An atomic measurement of time, a by-product of the Ridge you might say. Why?”
“He said, if they find the remains of old Noah’s, Ark, they can measure the passage of time since it was built.”
“That’s right.”
Dikty laughed aloud, a short, chopped, nasty laugh. “Now I’ve got an idea! Let’s cut off one of his fingers and measure his age.”
“That’s revolting,” Hoffman declared.
Cummings turned completely around and then stopped. “Dikty . . .” he said, thumping the topmost book, “Dikty . . .”
“Oh, now really,” the girl protested. “That’s going too far!” Cummings silenced her with one swift glance. “Dikty,” he repeated, “if our subject should turn up dead, if something unfortunate should happen to him, well, you grab that corpse, quick!”
Dikty nodded, slightly astonished that his bad joke had contained a grim morsel of merit. Shirley Hoffman held her shocked silence, sensing the rebuke the supervisor had thrown at her. His callous suggestion had unnerved her.
“I don’t believe in passing up anything,” Cummings continued, “no matter how insignificant or ridiculous it may seem on the surface. That’s why our outfit is in the high and tight position we occupy today. And inasmuch as we can’t locate his date and place of birth, we,—oh, my God!”
“What’s the matter?” Dikty was on his feet in alarm.
“Hodgkins’s wife—I mean widow. We couldn’t find her birth date or birthplace either. When she married Hodgkins she had no past!” Dikty lost only a second in absorbing the statement and then sat down again, to scrabble frantically through the papers in a desk drawer. He finally found those he was searching for and ran his eyes rapidly down the typed lines, coining to rest on two long paragraphs. He read the paragraphs a second time and then looked up at his superior.
“According to the police and the neighbours, a part of the descriptions match: the unusual eyes, the poised swift lines, the long youthfulness . . .”
Cummings hesitated only a moment longer, his face now tightened in a harsh knot of speculative thought, and then he grabbed up his hat. “That plane—” He sped for the outer door.
“Don’t forget Gilgamesh,” Hoffman called after him.
“What?” Cummings jerked around.
“Gilgamesh—my prehistoric man.”
He threw her a fleeting, curious stare and was gone. The corridor door slammed shut behind him.
“I think,” Dikty said quietly, “that something is about to happen to our friend.”
IX.
Nash had slowly become aware that someone was following him.
The disturbing shadow lurking somewhere behind was not the security agent, Dikty. Dikty’s habitual spying on him the past few weeks had easily resolved into a predictable pattern, had become a familiar and routine thing, a known presence he could almost sense whenever the man took up the trail behind him. Dikty would occasionally slip and allow himself to be glimpsed in a mirror, a store window, allow himself to be seen on an abrupt about-face. Dikty knew that Nash was aware of his presence and accepted it; the motions of secrecy were maintained because that was a part of the game, but the actual secrecy had been abandoned when each realized the other was aware of the situation.
And now—this new shadow.
It was not Dikty behind him; Dikty was ahead of him. This day, Gilbert Nash had quietly and with some amusement turned the tables and begun following Dikty, for he saw that the security agent was intent upon Hodgkins’s widow. Nash plodded along behind Dikty, following him on the rounds of several banks, the various utility offices, numberless real estate brokers and some of the automobile agencies. Doubtless the police had already gone over a part or all of the ground during their routine search of the hotels and transportation depots, but still Dikty must go over it again, and Nash curiously followed to see what he might turn up. Hour after hour of the hot afternoon went by and still Dikty searched fruitlessly, still Nash tagged along after him, and still the strange new shadow hung behind them both.
It was not the girl on his trail—Nash realized that. Shirley Hoffman played a different game, had played it well since the day of the funeral. She was not expert enough to keep completely hidden as the stranger was doing, not well enough versed in the art of stalking a man to avoid reflections in store windows, to avoid being caught flat-footed by a quick stop or a turn-around. Too, she would never excel at tailing and roping because there was about her person an aura which gave her away. Her perfume may have been part of it, or her personality, or the mental activity she exuded; but she could not hide herself. Nash would suddenly realize she was somewhere near, would walk around a comer or pass through a doorway and she would be there. It was a compelling, magnetic quality that advertised her presence in advance.
But that was the way she played the game. Instead of attempting to hide from him she placed herself where he might see her, where he might chance upon her as by accident, stop to talk, and end by inviting her to spend an evening. They had dined together several times and twice had gone to a concert; once she offered to take him to a movie but he declined, disliking the idea of wasting several hours in a theatre watching a picture he didn’t care for.
Nash stopped in a drugstore, ordered ice cream, and sat down on a stool where he could watch the doorway of the real estate office across the street. Dikty in his fashion and Hoffman in hers—they had certainly taken an intent interest in him. He grinned briefly. They were unmistakably preparing to close in. And now the new tail.
Idly, he watched the people going by outside the window, wondering if one of them might be his new shadow. A young man sauntering along with a brief case, two women with packages in their hands and inspecting each window as they passed it, a gangling youth reading a science fiction magazine, a man, another man, a young woman, another man, two boys carrying empty newspaper bags, an old fellow wearing a battered straw hat, a man with a brief case—Nash jerked his eyes around to follow the repeater. Brief case entered the drugstore and bought a package of pipe tobacco, left again. He did not reappear. The parade continued past the window. Dikty emerged from the doorway across the street. Nash finished his ice cream and strolled outside, letting Dikty have a lead the length of a full block. As soon as he left the drugstore he again felt the presence of eyes behind him, on him.
The invisible eyes were disconcerting, malignant. They imparted a sense of unease and irritation because they could not be located and identified, because they constantly bored into the back of his head like telescopic sights on
a rifle. Again and again he attempted to locate them without visibly advertising his intention, but without success. The man was damned slick—whoever he was. He briefly considered Dikty’s superior officer, Cummings; it could be Cummings. Or it could be a new man Cummings had assigned to the city.
Dikty continued his hopeless search for some hint or trace of the widow possibly aware of Nash behind him or possibly not, but Nash was certain he did not feel the new shadow there or he would certainly have done something about it. Sudden thought: Dikty might know very well a new man was behind the two of them, and so ignored the matter. In any event, Dikty went on looking for some scrap of information that might point out the hiding place of Hodgkins’s widow, but looked for nothing behind him.
Nash grinned to himself once more as a wry thought struck him. Suppose, just suppose, that every detective or spy or secret agent of whatever authority or source wore some sort of identifying badge or clothing—a long red cloak perhaps. Wouldn’t it be a ludicrous sight for the townspeople to see Dikty slipping along the street in his flapping red cloak, to see Nash tripping along behind him in his, and then by merely turning their heads, to see the third party sneaking along in the rear! A regular parade of spies, each following the other. With now and then perhaps a local plain-clothes man standing idly on some street comer, watching the crowds and watching the first three pussyfooting along.
Nash laughed aloud.
Late in the afternoon, Dikty’s trail led past the public library and Nash felt the sudden intuition that Shirley Hoffman was near by. He abandoned Dikty and turned in the double doors. She was checking out some books at the desk. Nash walked up beside her, watched the librarian punch Hoffman’s card and number through the dating machine, and reached over to pick them up.
“The Oldest Civilization of Greece,” he read after flipping the uppermost volume spine-up. “Badly outdated; fifty years old if it’s a day.”
The librarian looked at him with disapproval.
“Hello,” Hoffman smiled. “You have newer, I suppose?”
“Have, yes. Want to go out and look at them?”
“I’m willing—although I suppose I should have hesitated modestly.”
Nash laughed. “A book has never raped anyone yet.”
The librarian glared.
Hoffman turned with flushed face and made for the door. Outside, she paused. “Now how can I go back in there and face that woman?”
“Oh, she didn’t mind what I said. It was the noise I was making.”
“I can just imagine!” Hoffman retorted, her voice reflecting the fast-fading indignation. “It will be days . . . Oh, I do have something here.” She fingered the books he was carrying and removed one from the stack. “The librarian recommended it after I outlined my wants: Huxley’s “After Many a Summer Dies the Swan.”
He stared at it Curiously. “Why that?”
“I asked for anything on longevity or immortality.”
Nash stopped walking and turned to look at her. People darted impatiently around the small island-obstacle they created on the sidewalk. “Still riding Gilgamesh?”
Hoffman nodded determinedly. “Still Gilgamesh. Mr. Cummings is sending something from Washington.”
“But this isn’t the same,” he protested, tapping the volume in her hands. “This is a dying old man who is determined not to die; he’s willing to spend every million he has to stay alive forever.”
“Does he?” she wanted to know, examining the worn cover of the book.
“That’s the fine point of the story; read it and see. You’ll have to wade through sermons knee-deep, but see for yourself.” He began walking again.
“But he and. Gilgamesh were after the same thing,” she protested. “Yes—in a sense. This old man was fifty or sixty years old and afraid to die because he was also afraid of meeting your God face to face. But Gilgamesh was something else altogether. Gilgamesh was—well, much older, and sought only to prolong his life its natural span, to live out his appointed time. Much the way you would ward off a childhood disease, that you might live to be an adult. He was not afraid of dying, nor afraid to meet his God; when he realized his search for ‘immortality’ was a useless one he abandoned it, resigned himself to dying young.” Nash gave her a sidelong glance. “That’s a relative term; not young in the sense that you are young.”
Hoffman moved her head to catch his eye. “And how young are you?” she asked bluntly.
“Over twenty-one,” he answered promptly and laughed. “I learned that from women who vote.”
“Cheat!” she declared.
“Nosey,” he replied.
They walked slowly with the evening crowd, making no attempt to match its speed and bound nowhere in particular. People hurried past them intent upon their many individual destinations, upon their personal futures. After a silence the girl spoke again.
“How old was Gilgamesh?”
“When?”
“Oh—when he met Noah for instance.”
“I would say many hundreds of years.”
“Really?” She thought about it for a moment. “Then he would be several thousand today?”
Nash inclined his head. “Would, yes.”
“But that’s quite impossible!”
“Yes, isn’t it.”
She looked up at him with mild irritation. “You are saying that just to agree with me, not because you believe it. No one lives to be several thousand years old.”
“Remind me to tell you about the May flies—later on this evening when I have you in my web.”
“Mayflies? What in the world do they have to do with Gilgamesh?”
“They live a full lifetime in less than a day,” he said.
“Oh? Your implication then, is that a year in the life of Gilgamesh is not the same as a year in my life?”
“Yes and no; again, the terms are relative.”
“But would Gilgamesh still say he was dying young?”
“If he were alive today, yes.”
“Why?”
“Because he would be—far short of his old age.”
“But why,” she persisted. “Why would he be dying? What was it that he was seeking to prolong his life?”
Nash grinned down at her in high humour. “Those buried tablets didn’t say. The old poet gave no hint.”
Irritation welled up within her again but she fought to conceal it. She changed the subject. “Where shall we eat? I’m hungry. We are going to eat, aren’t we?”
“Spoken like a forward wench. Dine them and wine them well, then invite then in to see the etchings.” He laughed aloud and a passing few turned to stare at him. Taking her arm, he guided her across the sidewalk. “Can you cook?”
“Certainly. I expect to be married someday.”
“Let’s practice this evening.”
“Cooking, or being married?”
“Hoffman!” He removed his hand from her arm.
“I suppose,” she said expectantly, “that you have the usual well-equipped kitchen?”
“Have, yes. My car’s not far from here.” He moved a single step and then stopped again, quite suddenly. His attitude was one of intent listening. The pedestrian current flowed around them.
Hoffman glanced up at him, turned to follow his blank gaze and instantly mistook his intentions. He was staring absently at a florist’s display window, now lighted up for the coming darkness. She thought he was examining the window.
“Flowers?” she asked with surprise. “Are you becoming serious?”
“What?” he replied, inattentive. He was still listening to some-thing unseen, unknown. In the previous instant he had realized that the eyes were gone, the telescopic sights removed from the back of his head. He knew it as surely as though he had seen a man stop, remove the flapping red cloak with a flourish, and walk off home. Thinking back quickly, he realized now that the boring eyes had left him when he entered the library, but had not been there again when he emerged with the girl.
An
d that implied—what?
That the eyes knew the girl was waiting in the library waiting for him, and she would take up the surveillance for the remainder of the evening? Or had those eyes not been interested in him at all but were really following Dikty? Had they rested so long on the cut of his hair merely because he happened to be in direct line of sight between Dikty and the unknown shadow? But why should those eyes be interested in Dikty? Dikty was no threat to their hallowed security. Or perhaps—when he ceased trailing Dikty, it was no longer necessary for the eyes to follow him. Was the girl expected to watch for the night, or would there be another when she left him? Had they begun a twenty-four hour watch over him? If they had, it was past time to start moving; they were surely preparing to close in.
“Gilbert Nash!” the girl exclaimed.
He emerged from his inner shell. “What?”
“I said, the florist is closed.”
That escaped him for a second or so until his glance came to rest on the illuminated window, and he guessed her thoughts. “Oh, too bad,” he answered. “And I wanted to buy you a cactus. Come on, let’s find my car. I’m curious as to how well you can cook.”
Nash moved his chair back from the table and patted his stomach, his lips making a contented sound. He winked across the table at the girl and closed his eyes.
“Behold,” Shirley Hoffman declared, “the well-stuffed male! One would think you’d never eaten catfish and hush puppies before.” She placed an elbow on the table and propped her chin in the palm of her hand. “And now, if you’re running true to form, you want to take a nap.”
“Negra consentida: you speak like experience.”
“I’ve had experience with my boss and with male relatives. And that means what?”
“My pet brunette. After tonight, you are. Any woman who can prepare a meal like that is my pet.”
“Any woman,” she repeated. “I’m only the latest.”
“The latest and the first, in this house at least. It would surprise you to know how long it has been since I’ve enjoyed a woman’s company.” He chuckled. “My good neighbours will have a field day tomorrow; they usually must go to the trailer camp for their scandal.”
The Time Masters Page 10