“No,” she said.
“Poor Prue. I read about it in the papers.”
“What? The papers?”
“About Karl’s death, Miss Misty. Not about you!… He was quite an important man, you know.”
“Was he?”
Killilea had long since ceased to be amazed at Prue’s utter inability to be impressed by the things that impress everyone else. “He was a sort of columnist. More like an essayist. Most people read him for his political commentaries. Some people thought he was a poet. He shouldn’t have died. We need people like him.”
“He liked The Little Prince and mango chutney and he would rather look at penguins than baby rabbits,” said Prue, stating her qualifications. “I killed him, don’t you understand?”
“Prue, that’s ridiculous. They had an autopsy and everything. It was heart failure.”
She put her left hand flat on the table and with the right pressed and slid cruelly. “Prue,” he said. She stopped.
“I did, Killy. I know I did.”
“How do you know you did?”
That terror flitted across her face again.
“You can tell me, Prue.”
“Because.” She looked up into his face, leaning forward in that swift, endearing, myopic way. She so seldom really wanted to look at anything, he thought. The things she knows … the way she thinks … she doesn’t need to see. “Killy, I couldn’t bear it if you died. And you’d die.”
He snorted. Gently, then, he asked her, “That isn’t why you went away, is it?”
“No,” she said without hesitation. “But it’s why I stayed away.”
He paused to digest that. “Why did you go away?”
“You weren’t you any more.”
“Who was I?”
“Someone who didn’t look at the snow before it had footprints, someone who read very important papers all the way through the crepe Suzettes, someone who didn’t feed the goldfish,” she said thoughtfully, and added, “Someone who didn’t need me.”
“Prue,” he began, and cast about for words. He wished devoutly that he could talk to her in terms of ketoprogesterone and the eleventh oxygen in a four-ring synthesis. “Prue, I stumbled on something terribly important. Something that … you know those old horror stories, all built on the thesis that there are certain mysteries that man should not know? I always sneered at them. I don’t any more. I was interested, and then fascinated, and then I was frightened, Prue.”
“I know, Killy,” she said. There was deep understanding in her voice. She seemed to be trying as hard as he was to find words. “It was important.” The way she used the term included “serious” and “works of the world” and even “pompous.”
“Don’t you see, Killy,” she said earnestly, “that you can have something important, or you can have me? But you can’t have both.”
There was a gallant protest to be made at this point, and he knew better than to make it. If he told her how very important she was, she would look at him in astonishment—not because she could not realize her importance to him, but because he would have so badly misused the term. He understood her completely. There was room in his life for Prue and his work when he built on his steroid nuclei as Bach built on a theme, surely and with joy. But when the work became “important,” it excluded Prue and crepe Suzettes and a lovingly bitten toe: music straight from a sunset rather than a sunset taken through music; the special sting across the sight from tears of happiness; and all the other brittle riches that give way when that which is “important” grows greater to a man than that which is vital. And she was perfectly right in saying that he had not needed her then.
“I’ve dropped it now,” he said humbly. All of it. No more fractionations. No more retained benzoquinones. No more laboratories, no more chemistry. Sometimes,” he continued in her strange idiom, “there’s a door to a flight of steps down to a long passageway, and it’s magic every way you look. And on you go, down and around and along, until you find where it all leads, and that’s a place as bad as a place can get. It’s so bad you never want to go there again. It’s so bad you never want the corridor again, or the steps. It’s so bad you’ll never go through the door. You close it and you lock it and you never even go near the door again.”
“You wouldn’t leave chemistry for me,” she said factually.
“No, I wouldn’t. I didn’t. Prue, I’m trying to tell you that I closed the door eighteen months ago. Not for you. For me.”
“Oh, Killy!” She was deeply concerned. “Not you! But whatever have you been doing instead?”
“Looking for you.”
“Oh dear,” she whispered.
“It’s all right. All those fellowships, the prizes—I don’t need chemistry any more. I don’t even have to work. Prue, come with me. Come home.”
She closed her eyes and her cheekbones seemed to rise toward them, so tightly were they sealed. She shook her head very slowly, twice, and at last a tear pressed through the lids. “I can’t, Killy. Don’t ask me, don’t ever,” she choked.
The inconceivable thought struck him, and the fact that it was inconceivable was the most eloquent thing which could be said about Prue and Killilea. “Don’t you want to?” he asked painfully.
“Want to? You don’t know, you can’t. Oh, I want so much to.” She made a swift, vague gesture which silenced him. “I can’t, Killy. You’d die.”
He thought about Karl and the dreadful thing that had happened to her. To call that experience traumatic would be fabulous understatement. But what peculiar twist made her insist that he might be harmed?
“Why are you so sure?” When he saw her face, he said, “You’ve got to tell me, Prue. I’ll ask and ask until you do.”
She leaned close to see his eyes. She looked into one, and the other. She touched his hair, a touch like the stirring of a warm wind. “Karl wasn’t the first one. I … I killed Landey, Roger Landey.”
Killilea’s eyes widened. Landey, professor extraordinary, whose philosophy courses were booked solid two years in advance, whose deep wisdom and light touch had made legends before he was thirty … whose death four months earlier had shocked even the Evening Graphic into putting out a black-bordered edition.
“You can’t really believe that you—”
“And someone else too. His name … they told me his name at a party.” She wrinkled her brow and shook the wrinkles away impatiently. “I had a name for him that was much better. He was a round little man. He made you want to pick him up and give him a hug. I called him Koala. I used to see him in the park. I gave him some leaves once, that’s how I met him.”
“Leaves?”
“Koalas look like teddy-bears and all they ever eat is eucalyptus leaves,” she explained. “I saw him every day in the park and I began to wonder if he ever had any eucalyptus leaves, he reminded me so much of a Koala, I s’pose I thought he was one. I got some and went to him and gave them to him. He understood right away and laughed like … he laughed like you, Killy.”
Killilea half-smiled through his distress, visualizing the scene; Prue so grave and silent, wordlessly handing the leaves to the man who looked like a koala … “Prue,” he breathed. “Oh Prue …”
“I killed him too. The same way as the others, just the same. Here,” she said suddenly. “Look, he gave me this.” And from her pocketbook she drew a small cube and dropped it into his hand. It looked like blue glass, until he realized that it was not a cube but a chunk of monoclinic crystal.
“What is it?”
“It’s lovely,” was her typical answer. “Cup it in your hands, make it dark, and peek.”
He put his hands together with the crystal inside, and brought it up to his eye. The crystal phosphoresced … no, he realized excitedly, it was fluorescing with a beautiful deep-blue glow, which had about it the odd “black-halo” characteristic of ultraviolet. But luminescents don’t fluoresce without an energy source of some kind. Unless—“What is it?”
“You mean
, what’s it made of? I don’t know. Isn’t it just lovely?”
“Who … who was this Koala?” he asked faintly.
“Someone very fine,” she said. Then she added, in a whisper, “That I killed.”
“Don’t say that ever again, Prue,” he said harshly.
“All right. But it’s true no matter what I say.”
“What can I do?” he asked in despair. “How can I make you understand that these are crazy coincidences, that you had nothing to do with them?”
“Make me understand that I couldn’t kill you, too, the same way. Can you do that?”
“Just take my word for it.”
“No.”
“Trust me. You used to trust me, Prue.”
“You used to tell me things that were so. You used to say things that came true. But if you’d begun to say this table is not a table, that lark isn’t singing, it’s a noise a cow makes … then I never could have trusted you at all.”
“But—”
“Prove it to me, Killy. Find a way, I mean a real way, not words, not just clever ideas all strung out like a diamond necklace, all dazzly and going right around in a circle. Prove it a real way, like one of the things you did in chemistry. Build it, and show it to me. You can’t show me I didn’t kill those others, because I did. But show me I can’t kill you, and I’ll come … come home.”
He looked at her for a long moment. Then he said, “I’ll prove it to you.”
“You won’t ask me to come with you until you prove it?”
“I won’t ask you,” he said heavily.
“Oh, good, good,” she said thankfully. “Because I can see you, if you’ll promise that. I can see you and talk with you. Killy, I’ve missed you so very much.”
They were together for a while longer. They let the waiter serve them. They exchanged addresses and left, and outside they parted.
Killilea thought, I had my work to keep me busy, and then I had Prue to look for. And I used to figure if I couldn’t find her, I’d spend the rest of my life looking. If I could find her, I’d spend the rest of my life with her. I never thought what I might do if I found her and she wouldn’t come home.
And here that’s happened. But instead of a great big empty nothin’-to-do, I’ve got something to build.
Once I start. But where do I start?
Once home, he thought about that a great deal, while he smoked and paced. Part of the time he thought, this is no job for me. It’s a psychopathologist’s kick. And part of the time he thought, what can I do? I know I can do it, if I can only find the right thing to do. But I can’t. And all this time he felt very bad. Then at last he thought about the one part of the problem you could pick up in your hand, look at, wonder about, find out.… The crystal.
He sprang to the phone, scrabbled through his number book, and dialed rapidly. The phone rang and rang at the other end, and Killilea was about to give up when a fast-asleep voice said “Hello,” without a question mark.
“Hi. Egg?”
The voice came awake with a roar. “That’s not Killilea?”
“Yup.”
“Well godslemighty, where you been? What have you been doing for the last year? Hell, it’s more than a year.”
“Research,” said Killilea, as the receiver made a yawning noise at him. “Gosh, Egmont, I just realized what time it is. I wake you?”
“Oh, that’s all right. Like the man says, I had to get up to answer the phone anyway! What are you, up late or up early?”
“Egg, I’m racking my brains. Something I read someplace, a crystal with a self-contained energy source that fluoresces.”
“There’s no such,” said Egmont.
“Blue. Right up near the u-v,” persisted Killilea.
“Know anything about the lattice?”
“No. It’s monoclinic, though.”
“Hm. Nup—hey—wait! There is such a thing, but nobody ever gets to see one.”
“No?”
“Not for a while yet. High-level blue, you say? I think what you’re talking about is stilbene, crystallized after an infusion of tritium.”
“Tritium!”
“Like I said, son. You won’t find ’em on the toy counters this Christmas. Or next either, now that Pretorio checked out.”
“Oh. Was that one of his tricks?” Killilea asked.
“His big trick,” said Egmont. “Set up a whole line of constant light sources that way. Bid fair to do for crystallography what Jo-blocks did for the machine shop. Still a lot to do on it, though, and Pretorio was the boy could do it. Why, Killy? What’s up?”
“Just got to worrying where I read about it. Egg, did you know Pretorio personally?”
“Had lunch with him one time. He was thirty-eight chairs due north of me. A convention banquet. Speaking of banquets and Pretorio, Killy, remember my offer to take you to the Ethical Science Board dinner one of these years?”
“Gosh yes! That’d be—”
“It wouldn’t be,” said the telephone. “I’m not going.”
“I thought you were—”
“AII het up about it? I was. I still am, about the main idea. But the outfit is but dead.”
“I didn’t know.”
“What you expect?” barked Egmont. “Here’s the finest idea of the century, see—to establish a genuine ethic for science, right across the board; to study the possible end effects on humanity of any progress in any science. They had Pretorio to run it, Landey the philosopher to steer it, and Karl Monck to correlate it with politics. And they’re all dead. So where do you go when your car’s suddenly missing a motor, the steering gear and a driver? I tell you, Killy, if some mastermind had set out to wreck the first real chance this crazy world ever had to get onto itself, he couldn’t have done it more efficiently.”
“But couldn’t someone else—”
The wires sizzled. “Someone else,” Egmont inflected it like profanity. “Those three were unique, but not as unique as the fact that they were contemporaries. Where else are we going to find scientists who can buck the trend of anti-science?”
“Huh?”
“Yes, anti-science! Even the politicians are saying we have to turn to higher spiritual accomplishments because of what science has created. But their way of doing it will be to stop science from creating anything. It’s a little like blaming the gunsmith every time somebody gets shot, but that’s what’s happening. Hell, four-fifths of the stories in science fiction magazines are anti-scientific.” Egmont paused to breathe—at last—and said in more subdued tones, “Looka me. Off on a hobby horse, straight out of a sound sleep. Sorry, Killy. I’m lecturing.”
“Gosh no,” said Killilea. “Man’s got something important to get excited about, he gets excited. Egg—”
“Mmm?”
“What did Pretorio look like?”
“Pretorio? Mild little guy. Pudgy.” There was a pause while Egmont scanned a mental photograph. “He looked like one of those gentle little tree-climbing bears in Australia, know what I mean?”
“Koala,” said Killilea.
“Something the matter, Killy?”
God yes. “No, Egg … look, go back to bed. Swell talking to you again. I’ll give you a buzz for lunch or a beer or something, sometime.”
“Great,” said Egmont. “Do that. Soon, huh? Right.”
Slowly Killilea hung up and went to sit on the edge of his bed. He thought, I quit chemistry because I was about to isolate the most ghastly substance this earth has ever known, and I didn’t want it isolated.
But I think someone has finished my work.…
Killilea, as anyone who met him could attest, was not an ordinary man. The ways in which he was extraordinary did not include fictional commonplaces like the easy familiarity with phones, cabs and the police methods of a private eye and the adventure-hero’s fisty resourcefulness. He was a scientist—or rather, an ex-scientist—rather more sure of things he did not believe in than those in which he did. His personal habits tended towar
d those of a hermit, though intellectually he recognized no horizons. He was at a serious disadvantage with other people because of a deep conviction that people were good. And though he had found that most were good, the few who were not invariably caught him off-guard. His work in biochemistry had been esoteric in the extreme, and he had worked in it alone. But even if it had been more general an endeavor, he would not comfortably have worked with anyone else.
So now he found himself very much alone; no allies, no confidants. Yet he had always worked this way in the lab; you find a brick that fits a brick, and see what you can build with them. Or you know what to build, and you find the bricks that will do the job.
He called Prue late the next morning, and she was not at home. So he went back to the restaurant where he had found her, not expecting to see her, but simply because he felt he could think better there.
The table they had had was vacant. He sat down and ordered some lunch and a bottle of ale, and stared at the chair she had used. Somewhere, he thought, there is a lowest common denominator in all this. Somewhere the deaths of three great liberal scientists in Prue’s arms, and the work I have been doing are tied together. Because what I almost had was a thing that would make men die that way. And since it was men it would work on, and not women, then Prue isn’t the lowest common denominator.
Under the arch which separated the dining room from the bar a man stopped and gasped audibly. Killy looked up into the man’s shocked face, then turned around to find out what had so jolted him. A wall, some tables—nothing else. Killy turned back again and now had time to recognize the man—the philosophic barfly, Hartog. “Hi.”
Hartog came forward timidly. “Oh. Mr.—uh …”
“Killilea. You all right?”
Hartog hesitated, his hand on a chair. “I—I get a twinge now and again,” he said. “I don’t want to horn in.”
“Sit down,” said Killilea. The man looked badly shaken.
“Well,” he said, and sat down. Killilea beckoned the waiter. “Had lunch?”
Hartog shook his head. Killilea ordered a double sirloin. “Medium rare all right?” and when Hartog agreed gratefully, sent the waiter off.
A Saucer of Loneliness Page 18