“Acromegaly,” she echoed sweetly. “His pre-pituitary has gone wild, he’s suffering from hypertrophy of the chin and probably of the hands, and you say he’s not glandular.” Suddenly she was across the room, had spun him about and was clutching his lapels. “What are you going to do? Are you going to let him go on doing whatever crazy thing a glandular imbalance is forcing him to, so that he’ll be killed by Voisier? Or are you going to stand by while he gets around Voisier some way and then turns into a monster and dies?”
“I have to think,” said Warfield. “Oh, Peg. Peg—”
“You can’t think,” she said wildly. “Why do you suppose Voisier stole that book? With what he knows, and with what that book contains, he’ll track Robin down in a matter of hours! Do you really know where he is?”
“Yes,” Warfield whispered. “A piece of his strange kind of braggadocio. He was defiant, and yet he seemed afraid of me. He promised to keep in touch with me whatever he did, so that if I ever wanted to… kill him I could come and face him with whatever it was. He swore to keep away from you. He has moved four times since he stopped taking the treatments, and each time he has called or written to give me the address. I don’t know why.” Warfield raised his eyes to hers. “I don’t know anything about any of this,” he said brokenly. “It’s all mad. We’re being played like chessmen, Peg, by a lunatic against a devil.”
“Is he in town?”
Warfield nodded.
“Well?”
Warfield looked at her. She was a statue now, a dark-crowned bloodless figure. “I’ll go with you.”
“I’ll see him alone.”
“I’ll go with you all the same, then, and wait.”
“Very well. Only hurry.”
~ * ~
Warfield slipped out of his laboratory smock and into a coat without another word. Outside the office he stopped and said, “Peg…please—” but she walked steadily down to the elevators, and he shrugged and followed her.
They caught a cab almost immediately, and Warfield gave the driver a Riverside address. Peg sat staring blindly ahead of her. Mel slumped in a corner and looked at his wrists, dully.
Peg broke the silence only once—to ask in a deceptively conversational voice if anything had been learned that she didn’t know about the treatment of acromegaly. Warfield shook his head vaguely. She made a sound, then, like a sob, but when Warfield looked at her she still sat, dry-eyed, staring at the driver’s coat collar.
They pulled up in front of one of those stately old cell-blocks of apartment houses that perch on the slanted, winding approaches to the Drive. They got out, and a doorman, a bit over life-size, swung open both leaves of a huge plate glass and bronze door to let them into the building.
“Mr. Wenzell,” said Warfield to a wax-faced desk clerk.
“What?” said Peg.
“He… it amuses him to use your name,” said Warfield, as if he were speaking out of a mouthful of sal ammoniac.
“Mr. Wenzell is out,” said the clerk. “Can I take a message?”
“You can take a message right to Mr. Wenzell, who is not out,” said Warfield. “Tell him his two doctors are here and must see him.”
“Tell him,” said Peg clearly, “that Margaretta Wenzell is here.”
“Yes, Mrs. Wenzell,” said the clerk with alacrity.
“Why must you make this painful as well as unpleasant?” gritted Warfield. Peg smiled with her teeth and said nothing.
The clerk returned from the phone looking as if he had learned how to pronounce a word he had only seen chalked on fences before. “Fourteen. Suite C. The elevators—”
“Yes,” growled Warfield. He took Peg’s elbow and walked her over to the elevators as if she were a window-dummy.
“You’re hurting me.”
“I’m sorry. I’m—a little upset. Do you have to go through with this weird business?”
She didn’t answer. Instead she said, “Stay down here, Mel.”
“I will not!”
She looked at him, and said a thousand words—hot-acid ones—in the sweep of her eyes across his face.
“Well,” he said, “all right. All right. Tell you what. I’ll give you fifteen minutes and then I’m coming up.” He paused. “Why are you looking at me like that? What are you thinking about?”
“That corny line about the fifteen minutes. I was thinking about how much better Robin would deliver it.”
“I think I hate you,” said Warfield hoarsely, quietly.
Peg stepped into the elevator. “That was much better done,” she, said, and pushed the button which closed the doors.
On the fourteenth floor she walked to the door marked “C” and touched the bell. The door swung open instantly.
“Come in!” grated a voice. There was no one standing in the doorway at all. She hesitated. Then she saw that someone was peering through the crack at the hinge side of the door.
“Come in, Peg!” said the voice. It was used gently now, though it was still gravelly. She stepped through and into the room. The door closed behind her. Robin was there, with a gun. He put it away and held out both hands to her. “Peg! It’s so good to see, you!”
“Hello, Robin,” she whispered. Just what gesture she was about to make she would never know for she became suddenly conscious of someone else in the room. She wheeled. There was a girl on the chesterfield, who rose as Peg faced her. The girl didn’t look, somehow, like a person. She looked like too many bright colors.
“Janice,” said Robin. It wasn’t an introduction. Robin just said the one word and moved his head slightly. The girl came slowly across the room toward him, passed him, went to the hall closet and took out a coat and a hat and a handbag with a long strap. She draped the coat over her arm and opened the door; and then she paused and shot Peg a look of such utter hatred that Peg gasped. The door closed and she was alone with Robin English.
“Is that the best you can do,” she said, without trying to keep the loathing out of her voice.
“The very best,” said Robin equably. “Janice is utterly stupid. She has no conversation, particularly when I want none. What she has to recommend her, you can see. She is a great convenience.”
A silly, colorful little thought crept into Peg’s mind. She looked around the room.
“You’re looking for a smorgasbord tray,” chuckled Robin, sinking into an easy-chair and regarding her with amusement. “Why won’t you look at me?”
Finally, she did.
He was taller, a very little. He was much handsomer. She saw that, and it was as if something festering within her had been lanced.
There was pain—but oh! the blessed relief of pressure! His face was—Oh yes, said Dr. Wenzell to herself, pre-pituitary. Acromegaly. She said, “Let me see your hands.”
He raised his eyebrows, and put his hands in his pockets. He shook his head.
~ * ~
Peg turned on her heel and went to the hall closet. She dipped into the pockets of an overcoat, and then into a topcoat, until she found a pair of gloves. She came back into the room, examining them carefully. Robin got to his feet.
“As I thought,” she said. She held up the left glove. The seam between the index and second fingers was split. And they were new gloves. She threw them aside.
“So you know about that. You would, of course.”
“Robin, I don’t think this would have happened if you had continued your treatments.”
He slowly took out his hands and stared at them. They were lumpy, and the fingers were too long, and a little crooked. “A phenomenal hypertrophy of the bony processes, according to the books,” he said. “A development that generally takes years.”
“There’s nothing normal about this case. There never was,” said Peg, her voice thick with pity. “Why did you let it go like this?”
“I got interested in what I was doing.” Suddenly he got to his feet and began to stride restlessly about the room. She tried not to look at him, at his altered face, with the heavy, coarse jaw. S
he strained to catch the remnants of his mellow voice through the harshness she heard now.
He said, “It was all right during those months when I wrote ‘Too Humorous To Mention’ and ‘Festoon’ and invented the back out drills and all that. But everything got too easy. I could do anything I wanted to do. All of the things I had ever dreamed about doing I could do—and so easily! It was awful. I tried harder things, and they came easy too. I couldn’t seem to apply myself on anything that couldn’t be seen or touched, though perhaps if I had been able to go into higher mathematics or something purely abstract like that, I wouldn’t be—well, what I am now.
“I began to be afraid. The one thing I couldn’t whip was Mel Warfield. I was afraid of him. He hated me. I don’t think he knew it, but he hated me. I wanted you. There was a time when I could have—but I was afraid of him. He had too much power over me. Too much thumb-pressure on that hypodermic of his, or the addition of some little drop of something in a test tube, and he could do anything he wanted with me. I’d never been afraid for myself before. Maybe it was part of that maturity you were talking about.”
“I imagine it was.”
Robin sat down heavily, clasped his hands, stared at them, put them in his pockets again. “I was glad to take the risk, mind you. It wasn’t that. Anything in my condition that was suddenly too much for his skill to cope with—any accident like that couldn’t frighten me. It was knowing that he hated me, and somewhere underneath he wanted me out of the way—preferably dead. Anyway—I got out. I kept him informed as to where I was, because I was ready for him. I was ready to kill him first if he came after me. But no hypodermics. No solutions. So—I went on with my work, and then it all got old, right away. I could do anything I wanted to do. Peg—can you imagine how horrible that can be? Never to know you might fail? To have such a clear conception of what the public wants in a play or a poem or a machine that yon can make it and know from the start that it will be a success? I knew a man once, who had photography for a hobby. He got to be so good that he stopped printing his negatives. He’d know they were perfect. He pulled ‘em out of the hypo and dried ‘em and filed ‘em. Often he sold them without looking at them. It killed his hobby. He took up electronics, which was more his speed. But I’m that way about everything.”
“You got bored.”
“Bored. Oh, Peg, if you only knew the things I tried! Finally I dropped out of sight. I got a kick out of the papers then. For a while. Know what I was doing when the whole world thought I was doing something fantastic? I was reading. I was holed up in the back room of my Westchester place with all the books I had ever wanted to read. That’s all. They let me get out of myself—for a while. For a while.” He stopped and wiped sweat off his lip. “But it happened again. It got so that a page or two would tell me an author’s style, a paragraph or two told me his plot. Technical books the same; once I got the basics the whole thing was there. Or maybe I thought it was. Maybe I just lost interest. It was as if I were being pursued by a monster called Understanding. I understood everything I looked at or thought about. There was nothing I could see or say or do or read or think about where I couldn’t predict the end result. I didn’t want to give anything any more, either, the way I did with the Whirltoy. Do you know what I wanted? I wanted to fail. I didn’t think I could. I don’t think so now. If I purposely botched a thing up, that would be a success of a sort. So for a long time I did nothing.”
He fell silent. Peg waited patiently. She had had dozens of questions to ask, and half of them were already answered.
“Then I began to think about Voisier. You know Voisier?”
She nodded. “Robin—wait a minute. You hate Voisier. I think you’re trying to ruin him. But you hated Mel Warfield. Why didn’t you try to—”
“Warfield? By then, he wasn’t big enough. Voisier was the only man I ever met whom I thought could beat me.” He sighed. “Now I think he won’t do it.” And suddenly, Robin smiled. The smile sat badly on that heavy face. “Peg, there’s an alternative to unquenchable, inevitable success. That is to play a game in such a way that you never can know how it ends. That’s what I’m doing.”
“Voisier’s trying to find you.”
“Is he now? How do you know?” For the first time Robin’s face and voice showed real animation. All the twisted ravings of the past few minutes had come out of him like toothpaste out of a tube.”
~ * ~
Peg told him about Voisier’s calling the hospital, and what had happened at Lelalo’s, where he had stolen the case history.
“Good,” said Robin. “Oh, fine. This means that things are shaping up better than I thought. Faster. Uh—excuse me a moment.”
He went to the desk in the corner, sat down, and began to write rapidly.
“This maturity thing,” he said, phrasing between the lines he was writing, “I think you and Warfield overlooked something. I’m the patient. Do doctors listen to patients?”
“They do.”
“You realize, don’t you, that humans die before they’re fully mature?”
“You mean in the sense that their bones do not completely ossify?”
“That’s it. And there’s a psychological factor, too.” He paused, thought a while, wrote for a moment, and then went on. “Puppies and kittens and lion cubs—they’re terribly foolish, in a pretty kind of way. They have their mock battles and they chase their balls of paper and get wound up in milady’s yarn, don’t they?”
“They do, but—”
“Humans, with few exceptions, always are puppyish, to a degree. There is even a parallel in the proportions of head to body, even allowing for the larger brain pan of homo sapiens. An adult human being has proportions comparable to a half-grown colt or dog in that respect. Now—did you ever hear of a full-grown gorilla acting kittenish? Or a bison bull, or a lion? Life for them is a serious business—one of sex, hunger, self-preservation and a peculiar, ‘don’t tread on me’ kind of possessiveness.
“Peg—let’s face it. That’s what’s happened to me. I can’t go back. I don’t see how I can go on this way. I’m mature now. But I’m mature like an animal. However, I can’t stop being human. A human being has to have one thing—he has to be happy, or he has to think he knows what happiness is. Happiness for me is unthinkable. There is nothing for me to work toward. All of my achievements are here”—he tapped his head—”as good as done when I think of them, because I know I can do them. No goal, no aspiration—the only thing left is that little game of mine, the one where, according to the rules, I can’t ever really know the result.”
“Voisier?”
“Voisier.” He picked up the phone, dialed rapidly. He listened. “Come on back,” he said. He hung up. “That was Janice. She’ll be here in fifteen minutes. You’d better go, Peg.”
The door buzzer began to shrill. Robin leaped across the room; the gun was in his hand again. He opened the door and stood behind it, peering out at the hinge side as he had before. Mel walked in.
“Peg—are you all right?”
“A little bewildered.”
“Of course she’s all right,” said Robin in a tone that insulted both of them. Mel stared at him. Robin went over to the desk, picked up the sheets he had written and, folding them, handed them to Peg. “Promise me you won’t read these until you get back to Mel’s office.”
“I promise.”
Mel spoke up, suddenly—and with great effort. “English—You know what that condition is?” He indicated Robin’s face.
“He does, Mel,” said Peg. “Don’t—”
Warfield pushed her hand off his arm impatiently. “Robin, I’m willing to do what I can to arrest it, and there’s a chance… not much, you understand—”
Robin interrupted him with a sudden, thunderous guffaw—quite the most horrible sound Peg had ever heard. “Why sure, Mel, sure. I’ll be a bit busy this afternoon, but say tomorrow, if we can get together?”
“Robin!” said Peg joyfully. “You will?”
“Why not?” He chuckled. “Don’t make an appointment today. Call me tomorrow.” He took the note back from Peg, and scribbled on it. “Here’s the number. Now go on. Beat it, you two. Maybe I ought to say something like ‘Bless you, my children’ but I—Oh, beat it.”
Peg found herself in the hall and then at the door. “But Robin—” she said weakly; but by then the door was closed and Mel was guiding her into the elevator.
~ * ~
At Mel’s office a few minutes later, she unfolded Robin’s note with trembling fingers. It read:
Peg dear,
Here is where a mature human being gets kittenish, if he has to kill himself in the attempt.
What I have been doing to Voisier is to drive him crazy. He’s a bad apple, Peg. Very few people realize just how bad. I knew today would be the payoff when you told me how he had stolen the book and all that. He played you for bait. I told you he was almost as clever as I am. He knew that if he could worry you enough, you’d find me some way. My guess is that he simply had you followed until you found me. Then he’d wait until you had gone—he’s waiting as I write this. When he’s sure there are no witnesses, he’ll come and finish his business with me.
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