"Hey!" I said.
"I'm okay now," he grinned. "Don't write this down in your history, Beel.
Everybody will think I act like a woman."
I followed him into his work room, where he flopped into an easy chair, his eyes on a blackboard covered with figures. He wasn't grinning any more.
"Dr. Mines says you're up to something big," I said.
"Si. Big."
"Unified field theory, he says."
"That is it," Gomez said.
"Is it good or bad?" I asked, licking my lips. "The application, I mean."
His boyish mouth set suddenly in a grim line. "That, it is not my business," he said. "I am American citizen of the United States." He stared at the blackboard and its maze of notes.
I looked at it too—really looked at it for once—and was surprised by what I saw. Mathematics, of course, I don't know. But I had soaked up a very little about mathematics. One of the things I had soaked up was that the expressions of higher mathematics tend to be complicated and elaborate, involving English, Greek, and Hebrew letters, plain and fancy brackets, and a great variety of special signs besides the plus and minus of the elementary school.
The things on the blackboard weren't like that at all. The board was covered with variations of a simple expression that consisted of five letters and two symbols: a right-handed pothook and a left-handed pothook.
"What do they mean?" I asked, pointing.
"Somethings I made up," he said nervously. "The word for that one is
'enfields.' The other one is 'is enfielded by.'"
"What's that mean?"
His luminous eyes were haunted. He didn't answer.
"It looks like simple stuff. I read somewhere that all the basic stuff is simple once it's been discovered."
"Yes," he said almost inaudibly. "It is simple, Beel. Too damn simple, I think. Better I carry it in my head, I think." He strode to the blackboard and erased it. Instinctively I half-rose to stop him. He gave me a grin that was somehow bitter and unlike him. "Don't worry," he said. "I don't forget it." He tapped his forehead. "I can't forget it." I hope I never see again on any face the look that was on his.
"Julio," I said, appalled. "Why don't you get out of here for a while? Why don't you run over to New York and see your folks and have some fun?
They can't keep you here against your will."
"They told me I shouldn't—" he said uncertainly. And then he got tough.
"You're damn right, Beel. Let's go in together. I get dressed up. Er—You tell Leitzer, hah?" He couldn't quite face up to the hard-boiled security man.
I told Leitzer, who hit the ceiling. But all it boiled down to was that he sincerely wished Gomez and I wouldn't leave. We weren't in the Army, we weren't in jail. I got hot at last and yelled back that we were damn well going out and he couldn't stop us. He called New York on his direct wire and apparently New York confirmed it, regretfully.
We got on the 4:05 Jersey Central, with Higgins and Dalhousie tailing us at a respectful distance. Gomez didn't notice them and I didn't tell him.
He was having too much fun. He had a shine put on his shoes at Penn Station and worried about the taxi fare as we rode up to Spanish Harlem.
His parents lived in a neat little three-room apartment. A lot of the furniture looked brand-new, and I was pretty sure who had paid for it.
The mother and father spoke only Spanish, and mumbled shyly when
"mi amigo Beel" was introduced. I had a very halting conversation with the father while the mother and Gomez rattled away happily and she poked his ribs to point up the age-old complaint of any mother anywhere that he wasn't eating enough.
The father, of course, thought the boy was a janitor or something in the Pentagon and, as near as I could make out, he was worried about his Julio being grabbed off by a man-hungry government girl. I kept reassuring him that his Julio was a good boy, a very good boy, and he seemed to get some comfort out of it.
There was a little spat when his mother started to set the table. Gomez said reluctantly that we couldn't stay, that we were eating somewhere else. His mother finally dragged from him the admission that we were going to the Porto Bello so he could see Rosa, and everything was smiles again. The father told me that Rosa was a good girl, a very good girl.
Walking down the three flights of stairs with yelling little kids playing tag around us, Gomez asked proudly: "You not think they in America only a little time, hey?"
I yanked him around by the elbow as we went down the brown-stone stoop into the street. Otherwise he would have seen our shadows for sure. I didn't want to spoil his fun.
The Porto Bello was full, and the pretty little girl was on duty as cashier at the table. Gomez got a last-minute attack of cold feet at the sight of her. "No table," he said. "We better go someplace else."
I practically dragged him in. "We'll get a table in a minute," I said.
"Julio," said the girl, when she saw him.
He looked sheepish. "Hello, Rosa. I'm back for a while."
"I'm glad to see you again," she said tremulously.
"I'm glad to see you again too—" I nudged him. "Rosa, this is my good friend Beel. We work together in Washington."
"Pleased to meet you, Rosa. Can you have dinner with us? I'll bet you and Julio have a lot to talk over."
"Well, I'll see …look, there's a table for you. I'll see if I can get away."
We sat down and she flagged down the proprietress and got away in a hurry.
All three of us had arróz con polio—rice with chicken and lots of other things. Their shyness wore off and I was dealt out of the conversation, but I didn't mind. They were a nice young couple. I liked the way they smiled at each other, and the things they remembered happily—
movies, walks, talks. It made me feel like a benevolent uncle with one foot in the grave. It made me forget for a while the look on Gomez's face when he turned from the blackboard he had covered with too-simple math.
Over dessert I broke in. By then they were unselfconsciously holding hands. "Look," I said, "why don't you two go on and do the town? Julio, I'll be at the Madison Park Hotel." I scribbled the address and gave it to him. "And I'll get a room for you. Have fun and reel in any time." I rapped his knee. He looked down and I slipped him four twenties. I didn't know whether he had money on him or not, but anything extra the boy could use he had coming to him.
"Swell," he said. "Thanks." And looked shame-faced while I looked paternal.
I had been watching a young man who was moodily eating alone in a corner, reading a paper. He was about Julio's height and build and he wore a sports jacket pretty much like Julio's. And the street was pretty dark outside.
The young man got up moodily and headed for the cashier's table.
"Gotta go," I said. "Have fun."
I went out of the restaurant right behind the young man and walked as close behind him as I dared, hoping we were being followed.
After a block and a half of this, he turned on me and snarled: "Wadda you, mister? A wolf? Beat it!"
"Okay," I said mildly, and turned and walked the other way. Hig-gins and Dalhousie were standing there, flat-footed and open-mouthed.
They sprinted back to the Porto Bello, and I followed them. But Julio and Rosa had already left.
"Tough, fellows," I said to them as they stood in the doorway. They looked as if they wanted to murder me. "He won't get into any trouble,"
I said. "He's just going out with his girl." Dalhousie made a strangled noise and told Higgins: "Cruise around the neighborhood. See if you can pick them up. I'll follow Vilchek." He wouldn't talk to me. I shrugged and got a cab and went to the Madison Park Hotel, a pleasantly unfashionable old place with big rooms where I stay when business brings me to New York. They had a couple of adjoining singles; I took one in my own name and the other for Gomez.
I wandered around the neighborhood for a while and had a couple of beers in one of the ultra-Irish bars on Third Avenue. After a plea
sant argument with a gent who thought the Russians didn't have any atomic bombs and faked their demonstrations and that we ought to blow up their industrial cities tomorrow at dawn, I went back to the hotel.
I didn't get to sleep easily. The citizen who didn't believe Russia could maul the United States pretty badly or at all had started me thinking again—all kinds of ugly thoughts. Dr. Mines, who had turned into a shrunken old man at the mention of applying Gomez's work. The look on the boy's face. My layman's knowledge that present-day "atomic energy" taps only the smallest fragment of the energy locked up in the atom. My layman's knowledge that once genius has broken a trail in science, mediocrity can follow the trail.
But I slept at last, for three hours.
At four-fifteen A.M. according to my watch the telephone rang long and hard. There was some switchboard and long-distance-operator mumbo-jumbo and then Julio's gleeful voice: "Beel! Congratulate us.
We got marriage!"
"Married," I said fuzzily. "You got married, not marriage. How's that again?"
"We got married. Me and Rosa. We get on the train, the taxi driver takes us to justice of peace, we got married, we go to hotel here."
"Congratulations," I said, waking up. "Lots of congratulations. But you're under age, there's a waiting period—"
"Not in this state," he chuckled. "Here is no waiting periods and here I have twenty-one years if I say so."
"Well," I said. "Lots of congratulations, Julio. And tell Rosa she's got herself a good boy."
"Thanks, Beel," he said shyly. "I call you so you don't worry when I don't come in tonight. I think I come in with Rosa tomorrow so we tell her mama and my mama and papa. I call you at the hotel, I still have the piece of paper."
"Okay, Julio. All the best. Don't worry about a thing." I hung up, chuckling, and went right back to sleep.
Well, sir, it happened again.
I was shaken out of my sleep by the strong, skinny hand of Admiral MacDonald. It was seven-thirty and a bright New York morning.
Dalhousie had pulled a blank canvassing the neighborhood for Gomez, got panicky, and bucked it up to higher headquarters.
"Where is he?" the admiral rasped.
"On his way here with his bride of one night," I said. "He slipped over a couple of state lines and got married."
"By God," the admiral said, "we've got to do something about this. I'm going to have him drafted and assigned to special duty. This is the last time—"
"Look," I said. "You've got to stop treating him like a chesspiece. You've got duty-honor-country on the brain and thank God for that. Somebody has to; it's your profession. But can't you get it through your head that Gomez is a kid and that you're wrecking his life by forcing him to grind out science like a machine? And I'm just a stupe of a layman, but have you professionals worried once about digging too deep and blowing up the whole shebang?"
He gave me a piercing look and said nothing.
I dressed and had breakfast sent up. The admiral, Dalhousie, and I waited grimly until noon, and then Gomez phoned up.
"Come on up, Julio," I said tiredly.
He breezed in with his blushing bride on his arm. The admiral rose automatically as she entered, and immediately began tongue-lashing the boy. He spoke more in sorrow than in anger. He made it clear that Gomez wasn't treating his country right. That he had a great talent and it belonged to the United States. That his behavior had been irresponsible. That Gomez would have to come to heel and realize that his wishes weren't the most important thing in his life. That he could and would be drafted if there were any more such escapades.
"As a starter, Mr. Gomez," the admiral snapped, "I want you to set down, immediately, the enfieldment matrices you have developed. I consider it almost criminal of you to arrogantly and carelessly trust to your memory alone matters of such vital importance. Here!" He thrust pencil and paper at the boy, who stood, drooping and disconsolate.
Little Rosa was near crying. She didn't have the ghost of a notion as to what it was about.
Gomez took the pencil and paper and sat down at the writing table silently. I took Rosa by the arm. She was trembling. "It's all right," I said.
"They can't do a thing to him." The admiral glared briefly at me and then returned his gaze to Gomez.
The boy made a couple of tentative marks. Then his eyes went wide and he clutched his hair. "Dios mlo!" he said. "Estd per dido! Olvidado!"
Which means: "My God, it's lost! Forgotten!"
The admiral turned white beneath his tan. "Now, boy," he said slowly and soothingly. "I didn't mean to scare you. You just relax and collect yourself. Of course you haven't forgotten, not with that memory of yours. Start with something easy. Write down a general biquadratic equation, say."
Gomez just looked at him. After a long pause he said in a strangled voice: "No puedo. I can't. It too I forget. I don't think of the math or physics at all since—" He looked at Rosa and turned a little red. She smiled shyly and looked at her shoes.
"That is it," Gomez said hoarsely. "Not since then. Always before in the back of my head is the math, but not since then."
"My God," the admiral said softly. "Can such a thing happen?" He reached for the phone.
He found out that such things can happen.
Julio went back to Spanish Harlem and bought a piece of the Porto Bello with his savings. I went back to the paper and bought a car with my savings. MacDonald never cleared the story, so the Sunday editor had the satisfaction of bulldozing an admiral, but didn't get his exclusive.
Julio and Rosa sent me a card eventually announcing the birth of their first-born: a six-pound boy, Francisco, named after Julio's father. I saved the card and when a New York assignment came my way—it was the National Association of Dry Goods Wholesalers; dry goods are important in our town—I dropped up to see them.
Julio was a little more mature and a little more prosperous. Rosa—
alas!—was already putting on weight, but she was still a pretty thing and devoted to her man. The baby was a honey-skinned little wiggler. It was nice to see all of them together, happy with their lot.
Julio insisted that he'd cook arróz con polio for me, as on the night I practically threw him into Rosa's arms, but he'd have to shop for the stuff. I went along.
In the corner grocery he ordered the rice, the chicken, the gar-banzos, the peppers, and, swept along by the enthusiasm that hits husbands in groceries, about fifty other things that he thought would be nice to have in the pantry.
The creaking old grocer scribbled down the prices on a shopping bag and began painfully to add them up while Julio was telling me how well the Porto Bello was doing and how they were thinking of renting the adjoining store.
"Seventeen dollars, forty-two cents," the grocer said at last.
Julio flicked one glance at the shopping bag and the upside-down figures. "Should be seventeen thirty-nine," he said reprovingly. "Add up again."
The grocer painfully added up again and said, "Is seventeen thirty-nine.
Sorry." He began to pack the groceries into the bag.
"Hey," I said.
We didn't discuss it then or ever. Julio just said: "Don't tell, Beel." And winked.
Masquerade
[Stirring Science Stories, March, 1942 as by Kenneth Falconer]
A man can wake one morning to read in his tabloid that his father has been shot fleeing the scene of a bank robbery. In these times there is no guarantee against the unexpected striking one down harder than a thunderbolt and almost as quick. From the vast-spreading matrix of the ordinary there may fly into your face the grotesque, the shocking, even the horrible.
Why did Leonard die?
Who were the Whelmers, silent partners in the most horrid nightmare that ever rose to walk the streets of New York?
Mac Leonard, who is now compressed into the small confines of a crematory urn, had always seemed to me to be one of the chosen of the Lord. In Columbia University, where we both studied, he was a shining campus l
ight. I said both studied, but that is a misconception. Keeping the profligate's hours that he did, tumbling into bed dead drunk four nights out of the seven, Leonard could not possibly have studied in the ordinary sense.
Revolving the matter carefully, I realize that Leonard could not possibly have done anything in the ordinary sense. He was a blinding flash of a man; the hardest liver, the most brilliant scholar and the coolest head on the blocks-long campus was his. If he had gone to a smaller school he would have stood out like a beacon. He would probably, furthermore, have been thrown out like a bum for his vices and dissipations. As far as I was concerned, of course, they were his business. He drank and went with the Joe College set, but had no illusions about their capacities.
This was, you will remember, in the Flaming Youth era, when skirts were short and gin was aged in the porcelain for about five minutes.
Mac drank with them, but he talked with men and the rest of the grinds on the school daily and the Journal of the Columbia Philosophical Society.
It comes back to me like a nightmare that was almost funny—the deadly seriousness of the kids. Mac himself had been almost completely taken in by Mr. James Branch Cabell, who had been fortunate enough to have one of his recent puerilities barred from the mails.
Perhaps the business of the mysterious Whelmers was all my fault, for one day I made it my business to catch Mac on the fly between classes.
"Leonard," I yelled, overtaking him.
Looking at me with the glazed eyes of a hangover, he said: "Hi. Going in for track, old son of the lamp?" He focussed on the book I was holding out to him. "What's that mouse-colored tome?"
"Take it. I want you to read it. My very own personally-annotated copy of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. It's about time you learned something in college."
"Very truly yours," he said, pocketing it and weaving off down the red brick walk. That, of course, wasn't the last of it. He came around that night—standing up his gin and jazz crowd—to chew the rug about Kant. He had actually read the book in six hours, and assimilated most of the meat.
"It is," he said, "quite a change-over from math and science to beat one's brow against a thing like this. Have I been neglecting the eternal verities in my pursuit of hard facts? Speak, O serpent of the thousand diamond scales."
His Share of Glory The Complete Short Science Fiction Page 25