“Quite human,” Nash grinned, “oh, quite human.”
“That’s just it,” she still protested. “Human.”
“Stop it!” he said sharply. “I didn’t mean it that way.”
“I’m sorry.” She lowered her eyes over the cup. After a moment, she said, “If you don’t mind . . . I’d like to ask you something. And I promise not to make a scene.”
“Fire away. I’ll answer if I can.”
“The shipwreck—” she began “—that shipwreck ten thousand years ago. You said that the body of his wife was washed ashore.” She hesitated briefly as a quick, fleeting emotional shadow passed across his face. “Were there any other living survivors besides Gilgamesh?”
“Were, yes. The island was large and much of it was like an unexplorable jungle you must understand. Movement was next to impossible where there were barriers but no means of transportation. Naturally, while he searched for water he also sought his companions who might have lived. He found a few of them, eventually. The rest had either perished with the ship or were marooned in some inaccessible place. Slowly, with time, those few survivors appeared.”
“Are they—are they still . . .?”
“Alive today? No. With one exception they met early death. Some died of injuries, some were old and could not exist on the water found here, some met with accidents. One deliberately committed suicide in a Roman arena.”
Shirley questioned, “With one exception . . .”
Nash glanced at her curiously. “Do you have access to your government’s wartime secrets? You can check this if you like. In France, in 1940, two scientists fled their country to avoid the approaching enemy; they took with them to England two hundred and ten quarts of heavy water—or to be more accurate, they left France with two hundred and ten quarts, barely a jump ahead of the invading Germans who wanted that treasure. The fugitives fled across the channel with their deuterium oxide, which amounted to virtually the entire world’s supply at that time and was therefore doubly precious. The two scientists arrived safely in England with one hundred and sixty-five quarts. But mark you this: they could not account for the shortage, could offer no reasonable explanation as to what had happened to the missing forty-five quarts. It was generally assumed they had been lost overboard.”
“But they hadn’t?” she queried.
He didn’t answer her directly. “The loss of those forty-five quarts was the first clue to the existence of another survivor—a survivor who still lived at this late day.” Again he turned to her, watching her eyes and her sensitive face, wondering if she was mentally following him. “A search was instituted for that other survivor, sparked by the very natural desire to be reunited. And finally a trace was found.”
“Nothing more than a trace?”
“A trace. At Peenemunde.”
Shirley frowned. “I should know that name.”
“The German rocket site, where the V-2’s were built”
“Oh—of course.” Her frown had not quite vanished. “And a trace of him was found there?”
“A trace of her was found there,” he corrected.
“Her? A woman!”
“A woman. It seems that she had been at Peenemunde for some years; since 1934 in fact, when the German government began seriously considering rocket experimentation. But now only a trace of her remained—she was gone, and forty-five quarts of heavy water had disappeared from the middle of the English channel with her. It wasn’t too difficult to guess why she had been at Peenemunde, why she finally left there, and where she was going next. Not when you knew the nature of the woman. After all this time she was still not reconciled to the world in which she now lived, still not willing to stay, very unwilling to accept an early death. She wanted a ship to return home.” He paused.
Shirley absently shook her head, not speaking.
“When the Germans began rocket experimentation at Peenemunde she quite naturally gravitated there, pulled by a hope and a prayer stronger than herself. She was, frankly, impatiently awaiting the day when they would fumble and grope beyond mere war rockets, beyond rockets themselves, for she knew something better was needed to conquer space. Given time and the proper channeling of energies, the Germans would build a ship for her. But the Germans had neither time, nor the inclination; they concentrated their product on the destruction of London and similar purposes of war.
“She then must have realised that Peenemunde was not the answer, that Germany would not last long enough to build the ship she desired. So she fled—and seized life-giving water as she did so. After Germany—what? What other nation was experimenting with rockets, what other nation was also experimenting with atomic energy—which also happened to be the true answer to space flight? She came to the United States. Once in the United States she very carefully surveyed the situation and assayed her chances. And then made a choice. She married a young man who gave brilliant promise in the field of physics, aiding and abetting him by her own knowledge whenever possible, pushing here, thrusting him forward there, causing his name and work to appear in places and publications where it would be noted.
“The patient years of planning and scheming finally paid off and eventually her husband found himself working for the Manhattan District, found himself at Oak Ridge, and probably much to his surprise, found himself assisting in the designing and building of an atomic reaction motor which was capable of hurling a ship through space. At last her long-awaited victory was within her grasp and it seemed only a short wait before she could sail again. Her husband, now useless and something of a dangerous weight about her neck, was murdered.”
“Carolyn Hodgkins!” the girl exclaimed.
“Carolyn,” he nodded. “She is determined to get off the earth and she will not be stopped as long as she lives.” Nash fell silent, listening again to the house and the night.
“Carolyn Hodgkins is a—a survivor?”
“Is, yes.”
“The only other one? No more than—two?”
“No more than two.”
“Is . . .” she hesitated with some embarrassment. “Is she the only one determined to live—and to leave?”
“She is. The other one long ago resigned himself to remaining here, to a premature death. Without dramatics, without mock heroism, he simply accepted the situation and is now quite content to stay, to await what comes.” Nash moved slightly on the hearthrug, turning and lifting a hand to touch her arm. “You must remember that the only thing I ever loved is buried here, somewhere. I want to stay.” There was a minute sound somewhere in the night, and Nash lifted his eyes to stare through the window at the sky.
“I think I can understand that,” Shirley said haltingly and still with evident embarrassment. “And I’d like to ask . . . Please, this is rather personal, but . . .”
“Ask it.” He was listening hard to the darkness.
“Did he—did you ever marry again?”
“Marry? No, not in that sense. I have mated—many times, but I never married again.”
“Were there, I mean are there any descendants?”
“Yes, a few.” He shook his head. “A very, very few. My genetic curse still follows me, always will. But there are a few.”
Shirley looked up, saw his gaze on the window and followed it, uncomprehending. “The descendants would not know, of course. They couldn’t know.”
“They have no way of knowing. I suppose most of them are pleasantly surprised to find themselves living to an unusual age. Unusual in respect to those around them.”
“Do you know any of them?” she persisted. “That is, do you meet them? I’m sorry I can’t express that more clearly—I’m all jumbled up inside and my thinking isn’t any too lucid. But in your—travels have you ever found any of your own descendants?”
“Have, yes.” He was grinning broadly at some inner secret as he climbed to his feet and then reached out to help her up. She was standing quite close to him and he rested his hands on her shoulders. “It’s always a startlin
g thing; they appear most unexpectedly and ins. the strangest places. Of course there is seldom an outward physical trait to mark them, so I’ve learned to look for the subtler things—the attitude, the personality, the mental awareness and the matter of their longevity. That’s the greatest clue, that and a talent for mental telepathy—for extra-sensory perception.” He shook her playfully. “Yes, it happens every now and then. Makes me feel something like a fatuous grandfather.”
Shirley hesitated, then said, “I still have a job, you know. A man will want to know about you.”
“You tell the man what you please, or omit what you please. I know the man’s curiosity—and so I haven’t told you everything that I could.” He hadn’t told her, for instance, that a microphone had been planted in Dikty’s office long before Dikty thought of putting an instrument in hi?. “I leave it up to your conscience, Shirley. Say as much or as little as you please. Only a word of warning for your own safety—consider first how much will be believed.”
“That’s my greatest problem,” she admitted.
Shirley moved toward her purse on the table. “It’s really late, I’ve got to go. And do you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to sleep on everything that you’ve told me—everything about sailors and shipwrecks and survivors—and tomorrow I’ll decide whether or not to believe it myself.”
“A wise decision, and let me know your answer. And in the meantime thank you for the dinner. Practicing was fun.”
She lifted her lips invitingly. “I liked it, too.”
Nash kissed her briefly. “Tomorrow we can do it again.”
“Tomorrow?” she questioned.
“Some tomorrow. You have several thousand coming.”
Again she hesitated and lifted a forefinger to his lips. Changing her mind before the thought could be spoken, she repeated, “I’ve really got to go.”
Nash pulled the car keys from his pocket and shook them in her face. “You’ll either wait for me or you’ll walk. And that’s quite a distance to town.” They were moving toward the door and he reached around her to snap on the outside light. He opened the door and stood aside for her.
“I’ll wait for you-—or I’d never get home. And I’ll bet you that I’m late for work in the—Gilbert!” Shirley screamed his name and shrank back, blocking the doorway.
XII.
The long, raw sleepless night was reflected on her face. Hoffman sat miserably behind Dikty’s desk in the inner office, struggling to keep her eyes open and holding up her head in both hands. Her head ached with a throbbing intensity and no amount of aspirin and strong coffee had been able to wash it away. Her legs were tired, tired from walking back and forth across the yard, from running in and out of Nash’s house, and her body was as tired as her legs after a highly keyed night of excitement and nightmare.
“Tell me again,” Cummings demanded savagely, “again and again!” He grasped the desk with both hands and seemed ready to overturn it. “Where did he go?”
“I don’t know! I’ve told you, I don’t know.” She held her head tightly, afraid it would burst from pain and the booming anger of his voice. “He just disappeared.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know.”
“When?”
“I don’t know. Before the police got there.”
“Why did you call the police? Why didn’t you call me?”
“Because he told me to. I didn’t think of you—not then. Not until later.”
“And later he was gone?”
“Yes.”
“But you don’t know when? You didn’t see him go?”
“No—no, to both.”
“You were together all evening? In the house?”
“Yes.”
“Alone?”
“Yes.”
“You didn’t know Dikty was there, was tailing?”
“No. I hadn’t seen Mr. Dikty all day.”
“Where did you pick up Nash?”
“At the library. He invited me to dinner—or maybe I invited him. I can’t remember now I”
“What happened after you left the library?”
“We walked along the street to his car and he drove me out to his house.”
“Nothing else? You didn’t stop anywhere, do anything?”
“No—well, he did pause a moment. To look in a florist’s window.”
“To get some flowers?”
“No, it was closed.”
“He just stood there looking at the window? Did he seem pensive—thinking about something?”
“Yes . . . he did that. I had to speak to him two or three times to catch his attention. I suppose he was daydreaming or something. He gave me some flippant answer about not being able to buy a plant.” She put the tips of her fingers to the closed eyelids, pressing inward in a vain effort to relieve the ache there.
“And then he drove you out to the house? No stops?”
“No, no stops. I cooked dinner.”
“What about after dinner? What happened then?”
“He showed me his library. He has a big room entirely lined with books, all manner of books.”
“I saw that a few hours ago,” Cummings snapped. “Then what?”
“We played records and I looked at the—the books.”
The supervisor leaned low over the desk, thrusting his face within inches of hers. “You’re lying! You didn’t look at his books.”
“Oh, all right then! I looked at some pictures.”
“Pictures . . .?”
“He has dozens of them. Old prints of Egyptian scenes, Babylonian scenes—everything.”
Cummings drew back to study her. “Pictures,” he repeated softly. “What was he doing all this time?”
“Reading. In the chair behind me.”
“All the time? He never left the chair?”
“No. Yes, he did. Sometimes I would look up and he wouldn’t be there.”
“Gone from the room do you mean?”
“Yes,” she answered miserably.
“How long was he gone?”
“I don’t know. I’m afraid I didn’t pay much attention. The hours slipped by—sometimes he would be there, and sometimes not. I can’t tell you how long he was gone.”
Cummings grunted sourly. “Gone. Nobody knows how long, nobody knows where.”
“I couldn’t help it, I tell you! I was lost in what I was doing. An army could have marched through the room.”
“Pictures,” he said once more, skeptically. “All right, after the pictures what?”
“We went out into the kitchen, made coffee. He built a fire in the fireplace. And then we sat there and talked.”
“What about?”
“History—I mean prehistory. All about Gilgamesh, and Noah, and the ice age, and the Azilians—”
“What’s that?”
“Prehistoric men who lived in Europe. Thousands of years ago.”
“Just talking? All that time?”
“Just talking, until I realised how late it was. He was going to drive me back to town.”
“And then?”
“And then he opened the door and I saw . . . I saw . . .” Glaring memories of the beginnings of the nightmare rushed to the front of her mind, created a prickling sensation along the skin of her arms. She tried and failed to repress a chilling shudder. “Mr. Dikty—dead.”
“What did Nash do?”
“He ran down the steps, turned him over.”
“Did you see the lipstick?”
“No, not then. Some policeman pointed it out later. I looked then.”
“You don’t know if the lipstick was there when Nash turned the body over?”
“No. All I could see was . . . was . . .”
“Did you ever see Dikty with another woman? Someone who was not his wife?”
“No, I never did. He wasn’t that kind of a man.”
“Some woman smeared lipstick on his mouth,” Cummings said bitingly. “And somebody strangled him.”
> Hoffman didn’t bother to answer. Her head had sunk nearly to the desktop.
“All right,” Cummings said desperately, “let’s go back to where we started. What happened after he turned the body over?”
“I only stood there, looking at it. And he said something I couldn’t understand. Something strange.”
“In a foreign language, do you mean? What did it sound like—French? German? Spanish?”
“No, none of those. It didn’t sound like anything I’d heard before. He said two or three words—angry words.” She briefly raised her head to stare at the supervisor. “I could tell he was angry, terribly angry.”
“So am I,” Cummings snapped at her. “You have no idea—yet—just how angry I am! I’m going to have somebody’s life for this. What next? What did he do?”
“He said to me, did you know Dikty was here? And I told him I didn’t.”
“Did he believe you?”
“Yes.”
“You were never aware that Dikty had been tailing either of you?”
“No, I never knew it.”
“And then what?”
“He put his fingers—his hand, I guess, inside Mr. Dikty’s coat a moment, and said he was dead. And then he bent down closer to look at his face. Mr. Dikty’s face was . . .”
“Black,” Cummings supplied. “Hadn’t you ever seen a man strangled to death before?”
“Never!” She paused. “I think I was sick.”
“What did Nash do then?”
“He told me to go back in the house and call the police.”
“And you did. Without first calling me.”
“Yes. I didn’t think of you, then.” She rubbed her hands across her face. “After I called the police I sat down. I think I went into the bathroom; I must have been upset. Everything was so—so mad and whirling.”
“What did Nash do?”
“I don’t know. I don’t remember seeing him again.”
“You stayed in the house until the police arrived? In the chair?” Hoffman nodded. “There, or in the bathroom.”
“And the police gave you the works.” He glanced at her briefly, studied the top of her head. “You really can’t blame them; you were found alone with the body and you weren’t wearing much lipstick. They like to leap to hasty conclusions.”
The Time Masters Page 13