Oh, well, thought Georgine philosophically, probably like everything else it could be blamed on the war. In a season when Japanese forces roosted on the Aleutian Islands, and when the ocean outside the Golden Gate was muffled in a fog-bank supposed by many Bay residents to be solidly packed with enemy aircraft carriers, a slight sense of impermanence might well be felt. She squinted her blue eyes against the glare, and looked at the western horizon. There was the notorious fog-bank. You had a fine view of it from this perch.
The view also comprised the soaring towers of San Francisco, two bridges and a number of islands, and almost all the cities on the east side of the Bay. Across the canyon to Georgine’s left squatted the red dome of the Cyclotron building, and far below it lay the campus, blocked out in fawn and green, tile-red and white, like a section of modernistic linoleum. Georgine surveyed the miles that were spread soft-colored and glittering within her vision, and thoughtfully nodded. She had lived in Berkeley long enough to realize the paramount importance of this view in the minds of hill-dwellers. It explained the existence of the isolated group of houses that was called Grettry Road.
A faint wind was stirring, gratefully cool on her face and neck. She took off her old Panama hat and ruffled the short brown curls of a war bob, and sighed in relaxation. Her round curly head looked like a girl’s, and so did the slim figure in the blue cotton suit and saddle oxfords, but her face was more mature. It was a bit too thin and anxious-looking for her twenty-seven years.
One glance at Georgine Wyeth left you with no more than a vaguely pleasant impression. A second proved unexpectedly rewarding; those who troubled to take it saw her eyes and thought “lonely”; her mouth, and thought “sweet”; and then this increasingly sentimental gaze, having reached her chin, was brought up with a round turn. The set and tilt of the jaw spoke of stubbornness and humor, and more than hinted at a peppery though short-lived temper.
Little by little, as at the moment she sat resting with her attractive legs stretched out before her, her face lost its anxious determination and took on a look of soulful thought. She was wondering if she’d ever get used to cotton stockings. This important question occupied the forefront of her mind; another part was lazily deliberating whether to go home now or to ring just a few more doorbells. The short blind street to her left seemed a poor prospect for sales. It was too quiet, half asleep under the summer sunlight; more than likely nobody was at home.
From the Campanile, far below, drifted the notes of a chime: three o’clock. By sun time, of course, it was only two; mid-afternoon, that little zero hour when the shadows forget to change, when a woman alone in the house becomes suddenly aware of a dripping tap, the tick of a branch against the window. The air was full of the sleepy shrilling and humming of insects. Somewhere across the canyon eucalyptus leaves were burning, and their aromatic smoke, sweeter than incense to Californian nostrils, came floating across the hill. Georgine sat on, dreamily inert. Gradually all conscious thought left her mind, until it felt clean and empty as a house ready for new tenants.
She heard it then for the first time: that thin little thread of music, lonely as a shepherd’s pipe on the quiet air. It wasn’t mechanical music, for the reedy notes wavered a little on the run in the fourth bar, and stopped and were repeated. So, there was somebody at home in Grettry Road. She found herself wondering what odd sort of person would play Schubert’s The Trout on a mouth-organ.
It caught the imagination, somehow; mental adventures like this were distinctly to her taste, which was lucky, since as a mother and wage-earner she could hardly afford to seek any other kind. Maybe, she thought, it would be worthwhile to try that street after all.
Georgine Wyeth stood up, looked at the sign that said NOT A THROUGH STREET, and shrugged. Then, quite willingly, as if enchanted by the tune of the Pied Piper, she stepped into Grettry Road.
There was no telling how far away the music had been when she heard it. She rang first at the two well-built, unpretentious houses that faced each other across the mouth of the street. The doorbells burred unheeded in their quiet depths. Nobody seemed to be at home.
From her resting-place the larger part of the road had been out of sight, curving away behind a high outcrop of rock that took up most of the eastern side. She left the porch of the first house on the west and went downhill, scuffing through the dry sickle-shaped leaves that carpeted a vacant lot shaded by a fine stand of eucalyptus. At the outer curve of this lot she paused, looking down the steep slope of Grettry Road, which could be seen in its entirety from this point alone. At the far end, where the road flattened and widened, a low white-painted fence kept cars from plunging into the canyon. There was only one house on the east side, three-quarters of the way down; but on the west there were four.
Three of them were small, differing so aggressively in detail and ornament as to make it obvious that the same hand had built them all. Their front walks, on three descending levels, led straight onto the street—there were neither curbs nor sidewalks—and their narrow side yards were separated only by thin straggles of hedge. They had a comic look, like white puppies peering over the edges of adjacent stair-steps. Presumably their lower floors were built down into the first slope of the ravine.
The door of the highest one stood ajar, and Georgine could hear someone moving about inside, just out of sight. She rang the bell; its tubular chime sounded so close to her ear that it made her jump.
Whoever was walking around that inner room completely ignored the sound. The footsteps were quick but sounded heavy enough to be a man’s. She found herself peering through the screen in an effort to see him. She rang again, and waited; waited a full two minutes.
She stood frowning at the screen for a moment, and then retreated rather slowly to the street and stood gazing up and down its empty length. The technique of ignoring agents had certainly been brought to a fine point in these hills; the residents might as well come out and kick you downstairs!
She was irritated, and found herself rather fostering her annoyance. For a moment there she’d had a decidedly queer feeling, As if, thought Georgine, I’d died and didn’t know it, and everyone looked right through me.
Well, there were other houses. She walked fifty feet downhill and tried the next one. Surely someone ought to answer here, for as she came up a door closed audibly in the depths of the house; but nobody came, and she could not even hear the doorbell.
How quiet this street was! There was no sound now except that of her rubber-shod feet, and its padded echo from the rock wall. Generally in mid-afternoon you’d expect to hear children playing, but there could scarcely be any living in this remote, steep dead-end. The silence gave it a sleeping-beauty quality, for the breeze had dropped and the striped shadows of eucalyptus lay motionless on the buckling asphalt of the pavement. She still hadn’t found a sign of her mouth-organ player. The music had stopped just before she entered the road, and now it seemed as if she’d never heard it.
She turned her head suddenly, catching in the tail of her eye a movement in one of the upper houses, as if a curtain had been twitched aside and as hastily dropped into place. So that was it; she must have agent written all over her, somehow, and the people along this street were playing possum. She’d done that herself in the past. The realization gave her an obscure sense of relief.
At the lowest of the triplet-houses the bell gave off that indefinable echo that tells you the place is empty. Georgine’s lower lip folded softly over the upper, and she glanced about her once more. If she had any sense, she’d go home now, but honor must be satisfied. She compromised by not crossing the street; there was only one more house on this side, the big one at the end, and she would probably draw a blank there, too. If not—she prepared to hand out a sales talk that would fairly batter the listener into acceptance.
The big house had no doorbell. She grasped the knocker with unnecessary violence, intending to shatter the echoes; and before she could let it fall, felt it twitched from her fingers.
The door swung open. A majestic Negro woman, in a black dress and white apron, stood benignly gazing down at her. “Come right in,” said the apparition softly. “We been waitin’ fo’ you.”
The well-known sensation of walking down a step that isn’t there was as nothing to the effect of this welcome. For a moment Georgine could do nothing but gasp. A reasonless feeling of terror touched her, and was swiftly gone. Then she opened her mouth to say, “You can’t mean me!” and caught herself just in time. Why not? she thought; there were characters who simply yearned to subscribe to magazines, and it would be crazy to give up the chance of meeting some. In dazed silence she stepped into the dimness of a square entrance hall.
The dark lady retreated before her with a stately tread, reminiscent of the chorus in Aïda. “P’fessah! P’fessah!” she boomed in her velvet voice, into the rear of the house. “She got here.” A far-away shout answered, unintelligibly, as Georgine followed her guide into a small, hot, drab living-room that looked as if nobody ever lived in it.
The African Queen gestured nobly toward a chair. “There’s been so many disappointed him,” she remarked, “I was right glad to see you comin’ along the street, ringin’ do’bells. You lose the address?”
There must be a catch in this, Georgine thought. “I—yes,” she said vaguely. “People were at home, I heard them, but no one answered the bell.”
“Maybe you tried Frey’s.” The deep voice was respectfully soothing. “He’s stone deef. And the Gillespies, next to him, they unhitched the do’bell because Mr. Gillespie works nights.”
So that was it; simple, normal, only Georgine hadn’t happened to think of it. Yet she gave a nervous start as another voice spoke from the doorway, “That’s all, Mrs. Blake,” it said, and the housekeeper strode magnificently out.
The Professor was tall, bald and sixtyish. His sharp black eyes, narrowed in the hot glare from the window, looked Georgine over; once up, once down, He nodded, came briskly into the room and sat down on a straight chair. “Your name?” he snapped out.
Georgine’s fingers moved toward the clasp of the little briefcase. She usually began by giving her name, though few forestalled her by asking. “Mrs. James Wyeth,” she said. Jim Wyeth had been dead for seven years, but to give her Christian name made her sound like a divorcee.
“Mine is Pah-eff, P-a-e-v,” said the Professor, adding angrily, “—the last young woman managed to misspell it in four several ways. Accuracy is my one desire.
“Now; I’ll tell you at once that I pay by piecework. There are less than three hundred pages, and I will pay one hundred dollars for the job; one ribbon copy, two carbons. You must work here. Not one page, not one line is to go out of this house. Is that understood?”
Out of this speech, delivered in a furious staccato, Georgine really heard only three words: one hundred dollars. Around her floated a vague impression that there had been a mistake after all, that Professor Paev wanted some typing done, that there were certain conditions; but that sum of money loomed in her mind like a glittering promise. She could type; she could earn it.
One hundred dollars. It might be hay to some people, but it wasn’t to her. It was more than her entire monthly income from Jim Wyeth’s insurance, ten times as much as she earned in her best weeks at the subscription business. It would pay off almost all the debt owed to Barby’s doctor since last October, and Barby could have a new winter coat after all, and she, Georgine, could draw a few free breaths. With scarcely a pause, she said, “I understand.”
It wouldn’t take more than ten days, surely. And she had ahead of her two weeks free of responsibility, for that morning she had seen her little girl start off with the family of a kind neighbor for her first vacation away from home. Georgine firmly believed that no child, however delicate, should become wholly dependent on its mother. It had startled her no little to find that the seven-year-old Barby shared this view, but that was beside the point. Everything was falling into place.
Her shock of disappointment was therefore all the greater when she heard the Professor demanding, “Describe your knowledge of chemistry.”
Bang went the doctor’s bill. “I had it for a year, in—in high school,” Georgine murmured.
“How much of it do you remember?”
She sought wildly for some recollection. “There was an experiment where you put sodium in a tank of water, and it ran around. Mine blew up,” said Georgine unhappily. “I’m afraid that’s all I—”
“Any physics? Bacteriology?”
Bang went the winter coat. “None,” she admitted.
“You’re hired,” said Professor Paev, briskly rising.
Georgine blinked at him. There was something odd about these requirements; but again, for a moment, the hundred dollars seemed to flutter within her reach.
And then the Professor flung over his shoulder, “I will call the Acme Agency and tell them that if you prove reasonably accurate, I shall be satisfied.” He was halfway to the hall before her voice stopped him.
“Professor Paev, I’m not from the Acme Agency.”
The man stopped short. Then, with a curious deliberation, he closed the door and came across the room to her chair. “Who sent you here?” he said harshly.
“Nobody. It just happens that I can type. I’m slow, but I’m accurate. And if it isn’t taking the bread out of somebody’s—”
“Who hired you to spy on me?”
“Nobody, I tell you!”
“It’s diabolical,” said the Professor, breathing rapidly, “but I might have suspected it. Somehow, they must have figured that my experiments were nearly complete. They’d know how much I needed a typist. They should have prepared you better.” The high bald head swooped down at her. “You might as well tell me who it was, I’ll pay for the information!”
“I think you’re crazy,” said Georgine, and thrust herself to her feet. “Do I look like a spy? I came here to sell you some magazines, and before I got the words out of my mouth you offered me a job that it just happens I can do! Who wouldn’t take it? I need the money, you need a typist. And what on earth would I be spying about?”
“Ah,” said Professor Paev with a mirthless smile, “you would like to know, would you?”
They stood glaring at each other. Neither moved, but Georgine had a fantastic mental picture of two cats jockeying for position before a fight. If she held this pose much longer she’d burst into laughter.
“This is absurd,” she said crisply. “I didn’t intend to cheat you. It’s a shame, too, when so many typists have disappointed you—but I see why, now.”
The Professor’s eyes narrowed. He said nothing.
“Before I go, could I interest you in any subscriptions, renewals, gift offers? I was afraid not. Well, good-by.”
She heard an odd rusty sound. It seemed that Professor Paev was chuckling. “Wait,” he said. “We might come to an understanding. Perhaps—an exchange of references?”
“Did you say exchange?” Georgine paused on the verge of a step. “That’s more like it.”
“Ah, yes. Someone whom we can both trust. I live alone here, you see, though Mrs. Blake is always present during the day. But perhaps I should tell you one thing: the consensus of the neighborhood is that I am perfecting a Death Ray in my laboratory.”
Georgine gave him a penetrating look.
“I admit,” he said blandly, “that I may have given them that impression myself. Indeed, in one sense it is not far from the truth. But you needn’t feel any alarm, Mrs. Wyeth.”
Dear me, she thought; that gasp of mine must have been obvious.
At five o’clock that afternoon Georgine was still at 82 Grettry Road, the home of Professor Alexis Paev; and she was still slightly dizzy and incredulous.
What an afternoon; up, down, up again in spirits; luck handed her, luck snatched away. The voice on the telephone, that of the President of the Parent-Teachers Association of Emerson School, who had fortunately remembered Mrs. Wyeth; the voice saying
, “He’s quite mad on the subject of science, but harmless every other way. We’ve known him for years, long before he resigned from the Faculty.” From such a respectable source, this should be completely reassuring; but the words mad professor carried inescapable overtones: that laboratory in the basement, walled in glass brick, probably full of evil vapors and steaming flasks, and long tubes glimmering with unearthly lights… A death ray, indeed. The old gentleman’s jokes were ponderous, he looked odd when he smiled, as if it didn’t suit his face… And he’d wanted someone who knew nothing about science, so she was actually sitting here in a hot little south room on the top floor, with one window that looked off into space across the deep canyon, picking away letter by letter, figure by figure, at a seemingly endless stack of work.
Culture medium Penicillium (spp.), she wrote, adsorbed by norite. Elute with chloroform, distil, take up in ethyl alcohol and reppt.
Oh, DEAR, Georgine thought; I can’t do this… Yes, I can. I’ve got to.
Ten or twelve days of it…the bill, Barby’s coat…something to take up the slack of her loneliness while Barby was away. The stubborn insistence that it still came under the head of mental adventure…and the pay to be counted not in nickels and dimes, but in dollars; a hundred dollars to come… At five minutes after five it came, in a lump. The Professor tapped on the door, whisked in and inspected the three pages she had laboriously finished, nodded and got out a check book.
“Not all at once?” Georgine said, frowning at the check.
“All at once. Postdated, you will observe,” said Mr. Paev.
She raised grave blue eyes to his. “You’re convinced that I’m honest, or will be three days from now?” The long bald head nodded. “And you want to make sure I’ll keep coming back until the job’s finished?”
“I believe I’ve read you correctly, Mrs. Wyeth,” said the Professor, his gaze doing its best to penetrate her skull.
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