AROUND and above us the night was growing old, The stars were points of smaller light, the shadow masses of the trees had denser, less distinguishable shape against the sky, and the water of the Sound glinted seldom and faintly . . . “The darkest hour” . . . That hackneyed tag of speech went through my mind as I turned to Dr Lister.
“It will be dawn soon” I said. “But this is the part of the story that matters most.”
“Of course,” he said. “Are you too tired to go on?”
“I’m too tired to stop.”
“You mustn’t be afraid to call a halt if you wish.”
He did not seem weary at all. Erect as ever, quiet, with his eyes fixed upon me steadily, it gave me strength to look at him.
“We could never go back to this,” I said. “It is better to finish now.”
“Yes.” His voice was calm, but I noticed that one of his fingers was tapping against the edge of the table.
The last few miles of our ride, the road went uphill steadily. We must have climbed nearly a thousand feet. Then we swung round a shoulder of the mountains and saw Cloud Mesa.
It was something of a geological puzzle to me. In shape it resembled the ordinary mesa of the Southwest, with the usual steeply sloping sides, covered with rocky detritus and ending toward the top in sharp cliffs of naked rock. The level expanse of its summit was as sharply marked as the edge of a table, and on the valley side it rose sheer from the floor of the desert. But its western edge seemed only partly separate from the wall of mountains behind, and the northern, narrower end slid down to the floor of a mountain ravine into which our car began to dip. Sharp and clear I could see the cube of the house about halfway up the mesa’s northern slope and shining white in the sun.
The place had been built by an artist named Eberhardt whom Dad had once befriended. He had come out to the West to paint and to recover from the effects of a dose of gas in Belleau Wood. Before he died he did some strange, harsh-colored pictures of the desert country which I never liked because there was a brutality in them that you couldn’t ignore. He left most of them and the house as well to Dr Lister—out of gratitude, I suppose. It had remained empty until Jerry and Selena came there, and my heart sank a little as I looked across the ravine. If there was ever a lonelier place, or one more dwarfed by its setting, I never saw it.
Jerry pulled the car up in front of a weather-beaten sort of shack that was apparently used for a garage, and we got out stiffly. He hauled forth my bags and we went toward the house. Seen at close hand, it was not quite so forbidding; the walls were a whitewashed cream in color, and there were the conventional blue shutters. It was larger than it had looked from where I had first seen it. Apparently there was a spring just behind the house; at any rate, there was a patch of green which must have meant water in this thirsty country.
Selena was standing in the doorway to greet us; she was wearing a yellow linen dress and sandals. Her beauty was unchanged, so far as I could see; the sun did not appear to have tanned her bare legs and arms, and her face and hair were as I had remembered them, sculptural and perfect. Later, when she moved, I saw that she was walking once again with the same long, swift stride that she had when we first knew her and before she began to imitate Grace.
“Hello, Bark,” she said, and held out her hand.
I took it and told her I was glad to see her, which was a lie. I think she knew it.
“Well, Bark,” said Jerry. “Welcome to our humble home.” His voice didn’t sound quite natural to me.
I told them both I was glad to be there, and we went into the house. Inside it was dark and cool; the floor was tiled, and the heavy adobe walls seemed to hold the freshness of the night all through the heat of the day. The room we entered was clearly the living room, with a big fireplace to the left, at the eastern end. It did not have much furniture aside from several Navajo rugs on the floor, a long settle in front of the fireplace, a large table of unpainted wood, and three straight chairs.
Jerry opened a door on the far side of the room. “This is your place,” he said, and carried my bags in. The room was scarcely more than a cubicle, with a bed, a washstand, and a single window opening to the east. “I think you’ll find everything you want.”
“Sure,” I said, “this is palatial.” But actually I found myself thinking of it with an obscure sense of relief as a sort of refuge.
After I’d washed and got into some old clothes, Jerry showed me the rest of the house. Next to my room was a sort of small study, well lined with books, which he told me was where he worked. Behind the study was a large bedroom where Jerry and Selena slept, with a door opening out of its west wall. The kitchen was in a lean-to shed at the southwest corner of the house.
I wondered what there was about the place that bothered me. It was pleasant enough inside, and done with a simplicity and directness that were agreeable. Even the half dozen or so of Eberhardt’s pictures on the walls could not explain why I felt uneasy. But as soon as I stepped out of doors again I saw the reason. The great bulk of the mesa loomed towering and imminent above the house; incalculable tons of rock and earth seemed almost suspended above its roof; the very scale of that slope above you made you feel like an ant. I don’t know how better to give the effect than to say that I felt always as if a giant were about to step on the house and all of us in it.
Jerry showed me over the place with much pride, and I began to feel that I had been a fool about my first reaction to it. But behind his enthusiasm and the steady flow of talk which he kept up I felt his relief at my coming. How long had the silences been when just the two of them were there alone? And later, in the afternoon, when the blue shadow of the mesa poured down and over the house and left us in a sort of twilight my uneasiness returned to me. We watched that shadow swoop down the slope above us, and after it had swept over the house I turned to go indoors.
“Wait a minute, Bark,” said Jerry. “I want to show you something else.”
He led me a few yards up the slope and pointed to what looked like the remains of a uneven rock stairway that began behind the spring and clambered up the wall of the mesa above us.
“Cliff dwellers. God knows how long ago, but you can still climb their stairs. Want to go up?”
I saw that he did, so I agreed. It was not a really hard or dangerous ascent; the stairs were steep but in pretty good shape. Although we stopped to breathe and look back and down several times, it was only a quarter of an hour or less until we were at the top.
Below us spread the gigantic sweep of the desert, tarnished gold where the sun still lay, and purple blue where the shadows from the western mountains were racing across it as the sun sank behind us. Watching that great tidal wave of darkness pouring across the valley, I suddenly realized how truly the earth was a ball, hung in gulfs of space and spinning around its axis with majestic precision and power. I almost thought I could feel the eastward surge of the mesa under my feet.
After a moment we turned and walked across the level top. It was very bare, with a few bushes, and here and there a low mound that Jerry said he suspected were the remains of ancient houses. Ahead of us was a slight rise in the ground; as we drew near it I saw that on it stood an oblong of rock.
We halted and looked at that single piece of weathered stone, massive, rough-hewed by the chisels of men who were dust a thousand years ago. Unmistakably it was an altar.
“‘To the unknown God,’” I said.
Jerry stared down at it a long time. “Yes,” he said finally. “‘To the unknown God,’ only I suppose they had a name for him. The people who lived up here.”
Certainly this was one of the “high places” that men of the very ancient world had felt to be holy, whether in Palestine or in the American desert. Even when houses had stood on the mesa top, this must have been a still place, aloof and plainly not a part of the business of human living at all. So they had hewed a stone and put it where it could lie for century upon century, here on this height, under the sky and swept clean forever by the great winds. An altar, yes, and in a place where they had felt that the immensity of the universe touched the immediacies of the earth on which they lived. This stone was their ebenezer; it marked their recognition of the something more than they could put a name to, a memorial to the tremendous force or will that had created the earth and the stars.
I turned away from it reluctantly, and yet eager to leave the height and the wind that blew by us. Such vastnesses lay around us that I was suddenly hungry for a roof and a fire and four close walls. Jerry seemed more than willing to go at once; we scrambled down the shadowy stairs with cautious haste, and as we went we saw that Selena must have lighted a fire, for flickers of orange radiance spilled out of the windows below us.
Jerry and I got the supper ready. Selena sat in the living room and read; I remembered that Jerry had said she did not cook, but I felt a little annoyed at her just the same. When we finally got it assembled, it was a workingman’s supper; the climb and the air had given me a tremendous appetite. The two of us ate heartily, but I noticed that Selena moved the food around on her plate but swallowed hardly more than one or two bites. It was a quiet meal, perhaps because we—Jerry and I—were wolfing our food, yet as I ate I thought how seldom they spoke to each other. But the food was good, and I didn’t much mind the silence.
After it was finished, we pushed back our chairs and I lit a pipe. A feeling almost of peace came over me; for the first time I felt at home, not strange in any way. I smiled at Selena and said, “This is very pleasant, Selena. I’m glad I came.”
She smiled back at me almost automatically. “It is a beautiful place, isn’t it?”
Jerry seemed determined to keep the conversation going; he began to explain that the life grew on you, and that you never got tired of watching the desert and the mountains, and that we should have to take some tramps as soon as I got used to the climate.
After a while Selena asked me if I thought I had everything I needed in my room.
I said I thought I had.
She told me, “You’ll be sleepy early tonight, I think. The desert makes you sleepy, and the air at night.”
Jerry added quickly that, while I could turn in any time I wanted to, he hoped I’d sit up and talk for a while. He began to stack the dishes and carry them out to the kitchen, firmly declining my efforts to help him. Selena went back to the settle in front of the fire and picked up her book again. Once, as Jerry was cleaning the crumbs from the table, she turned and looked over her shoulder at him.
“Are you going to work tonight, Jerry?”
“Well,” he said, and there was a faint flavor of apology in his tone, “I’m almost through, you know, and I thought I’d do a bit more. I think I’m getting somewhere.”
“Darling, it’s no use, you know. I wish you would give up the whole idea.”
His face set a trifle stubbornly. “Ah, you must allow for an old man’s crotchets. I get a kick out of it.” And then, turning to me, he said swiftly, “I’m doing a bit of mathematical research for my thesis. It’s really based on that dope of LeNormand’s, but I think I see a way to present it so the boys will swallow it. If I do, it’ll be worth publishing.“
So that was what he was working at. I wondered why Selena did not like it. Plainly it annoyed her very much, but she contented herself with saying, “You are wasting your time.”
Jerry laughed. “Don’t worry your handsome head over my math, my sweet. It’s harmless.”
She made no answer, but I thought in the uncertain light of the fire that an expression had gone over her face of a sort I could not quite define. Still, her face was shaded by the lamp behind her, and I was not sure.
We could hear Jerry, back in the kitchen, whistling to himself and splashing the water in the dishpan, but she read on in her book without lifting her head, and I sat smoking my pipe and watching her. Suddenly I saw a curious thing. She was crying. There weren’t any tears, and she didn’t make a sound, but her face was contorted with grief and the hand lying beside her on the settle was clenched till the knuckles were white.
Any woman, by crying, can make me entirely miserable, but with Selena it was doubly unbearable. I did not associate that sort of weakness with her, for one thing, and, for another, because I did not like her it made it impossible for me to notice that she was crying at all. So I got up and stood by the mantel and smoked my pipe and looked at the fire and pretended that I did not know what she was doing.
Some fragment of sound made me look up. She had risen, and without looking at me or making the slightest sign she went down the room and out the front door. It closed behind her, but in the instant when she opened it I had seen beyond her the black, star-sprinkled sky of the Western night and the distant shouldering silhouette of the mountains to the west. A gust of cold air went through the room and the fire flickered. Jerry stuck his head into the room for a moment when he heard the door close, but returned at once to the kitchen without saying anything. The water went on splashing in the dishpan, but he had stopped whistling.
Nothing in life, I think, ordinarily happens in great, thunderous episodes of obvious and dramatic force. Life is a series of small things, and most of them mean much or little depending on how the observer thinks of them. I, for instance, didn’t pay any real attention to the things that happened in that room that night. And yet, if I had I would have seen a pattern in them, the pattern of the fifth act of a tragedy, when the play is all played out and only the final words, the ultimate destruction of the protagonist, await fulfillment. I see these things now for what they were worth, the last small events before an unthinkable horror of a thing was to happen. But at the time I thought merely that Selena had gone outside to get control of herself, that she would be back soon, and that it was embarrassing to be stuck into the middle of a mess like this. And I couldn’t quite get over a feeling of surprise at Selena’s crying. There didn’t seem to have been enough cause for tears, even for a woman with much less fortitude than Selena had. Thinking back, I couldn’t believe there was any real reason for her crying at all; she had been annoyed with Jerry, not hurt by him.
After a moment I went over to the settle and sat down. Selena’s book was in my way, and as I moved it to one end of the seat, I saw it was an old copy of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales, a book that I felt sure came from the bookcase in Jerry’s room in the Long Island house. I picked it up idly—she had left it face down—and began to read at her own place:
“. . . and as evening grew darker hundreds of variegated lamps were lit. . . . The sailors danced on the deck, and when the young Prince came out there, more than a hundred rockets shot up into the sky.”
“Hey, Bark!” It was Jerry’s voice from the kitchen.
“What?”
“Will you have Scotch or rye?”
“Scotch.”
He appeared with a tray, a bottle, a pitcher of water, and two glasses. “Even if you have practically signed the pledge, as you claim, a nightcap or two won’t hurt us.”
“Hell, no,” I agreed. “I’m all for an occasional renewal of youthful folly anyway.”
“You always were a philosophical so-and-so,” he said. “Personally, I just drink without thinking out a formal reason for it.”
He poured us a couple of stiff ones. They tasted good there in front of the fire, and I took a long pull. “This is the McCoy, Jerry.”
“Yeah. It’s good to see you again.”
“Here’s to it.”
“Down the hatch.”
He poured out another apiece, and we took it slower. Jerry stared into the fire for a while and then turned to me, almost impulsively. “You see how it is.”
“Damn it,” I said, “I don’t see anything.”
He looked at me thoughtfully as if to find out whether I meant it. “She’s gone up there, you know.”
“Up where?”
“Up to the top of the mesa.”
“My God,” I said. “In the dark? She’ll fall and kill herself!”
His answer came after quite a while. “She never has.”
I let that sink in for a minute. “You mean,” I asked him incredulously, “she goes up there often?”
“Almost every night.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yes, I’m serious as hell.”
“But, Jerry,” I argued, “it doesn’t make sense. What does she do it for?”
He swirled the whisky and water in his glass round and round and stared at it. “I wish I knew. I wish to God I knew.”
“Listen,” I said. “There must be some reason. Maybe she likes to be alone and look at the stars and moon from up there.” Even while I was speaking, it sounded foolish.
“Maybe.” He added nothing to that one word for a time, and then took another drink. “I followed her once. It took me a hell of a while, even in the moonlight, to get up there. When I did, I couldn’t see her anywhere. The moon was bright too. But, of course, it’s a big place. After a while I called, but she didn’t answer.” He put his glass down between his feet and fished out a cigarette. “She must have heard me, though, because the next morning she bawled hell out of me for going up. Told me it was too dangerous, and I mustn’t do it again.”
“For Christ’s sake!”
He was groping in his pockets. “Got a match?”
I found a solitary paper packet in my own pocket. There were only a few matches left in it. “Here.”
He lit his cigarette, blew out a long funnel of smoke, and observed, “I’ve got so I don’t mind any more.”
We had a few more drinks and felt fine and talked over the old days, and it was pleasant. Twice, I remember, Jerry put more wood on the fire before we went off to our respective beds. And when I blew out the lamp in my room, I had neither seen nor heard Selena come back to the house. But I thought to myself, she must have come in by the door into their bedroom.
The next day was much cooler. A sharp wind was coming down off the mountains, and I was surprised to see a gray scud of cloud across the sky. Jerry and I set out, after breakfast, for a walk up toward the peak beyond and behind the mesa. Selena must have come home, for she was at breakfast, looking very still and without any morning small talk. She said she didn’t want to walk, and that it was not a nice day, but she hoped we’d have a good time.
There was nothing really worth telling about the walk. We climbed pretty far up one shoulder of the peak and sat down to eat our sandwiches in the lee of a rock pinnacle. After we finished, I filled my pipe and Jerry put a cigarette in his mouth. Then, for a few minutes, we thought we didn’t have any matches. Finally he found the paper I’d given him the night before, and by the mercy of God I got my pipe going with the last one. He lit his cigarette from the pipe, and I scaled the empty match paper out into the wind. We watched it fall, idly and without attention. If I had known what was to happen, I might have paid a good deal more heed to its long, curving drop out of sight. As it was, though, we sat and smoked contentedly for a while, and looked down across the desert.
“Bark,” said Jerry, keeping his eyes on the view, “would you be willing to tell me now what it is you know?”
“I can’t,” I told him honestly. “It wouldn’t do you any good and it wouldn’t prove a thing.”
“Would it prove anything about who killed LeNormand?”
“No,” I said. “I’m positive it wouldn’t.”
“Okay.” He was quiet, as though planning what to say next. “I’ve got something I want to tell you, and get your reaction to. Do you mind my talking about it?”
“Of course not.”
He leaned back against the rock, “I’ve come to the conclusion that if I could find out who killed LeNormand and why, I’d know about this thing that’s between Selena and me. I’ve been thinking over the whole business for a long time now. And I’m reasonably sure I’ve figured out what the only clue is.”
“Pretty long-range work, wasn’t it?” But I was worried; I didn’t want to reopen that whole murder case. I most emphatically did not want to remember that night in Eldridge Observatory.
“No,” he said calmly. “It wasn’t long-range work at all. I had the clue with me. Those equations that were on LeNormand’s table. He was working at them when he died, I’m sure of that.”
“Even if he was,” I told him impatiently, “a few pencil scratches on a piece of paper are seldom fatal.”
“That depends. They are if they’re an order to a firing squad. Listen, Bark, you don’t know what a big thing LeNormand was on to. The biggest thing in the world, by God!” He was silent for a second. “Do you remember any of your college math?”
“Not much.”
“Well, I’ll try to explain it to you in words, then. Only it’s hard to put into words. LeNormand’s work followed the stuff of a guy named Minkowski. Ever hear of him?”
“He sounds sort of Polish.”
“Damned if I know what he was, except that he was a great mathematician. LeNormand always spoke of him as if Minkowski was the only man who would have understood his own ideas. But LeNormand was way beyond Minkowski.”
This didn’t interest me much. “Minkowski! Why do these mathematicians have such cockeyed names?”
“Nuts,” said Jerry. “There have been jokes about your own name, if it comes to that, and mine sounds like part of a mouthwash. Let me try to get this across to you. Minkowski worked on the problem of time, among other things. Lots of people talk about time as if it were a fourth dimension. In a way it is; everything tangible has length and breadth and thickness and also it exists in time. It lasts. It has duration. If it didn’t, you wouldn’t be able to grasp its existence any more than you could figure out something that lacked one of the other three dimensions.”
“All right,” I said. “I agree to all that.”
“But,” he went on, very earnestly, “in another way time isn’t like the other dimensions. You can’t see the time dimension of anything. You can even forget about it the way Euclid did, and do lots of things to geometrical figures, at least on paper, without taking it into account at all. This fellow Minkowski discovered that time is not any ordinary spatial quality of anything, but his idea was that it would become so if it was multiplied by the square root of minus one.”
“My old friend,” I remarked, “the square root of minus one! I haven’t thought of it in years. It’s in the same class with that other thing, the nth power. And wasn’t there a funny-looking symbol that represented infinity?”
“There is.” He looked at me curiously. “The inside of your mind must be a queer place.”
“It’s cozy,” I told him.
“Yes. Well, LeNormand figured out a set of equations that proved the serial nature of time.”
“Hunh?”
“Sure. There isn’t just one time. There are lots of times. Why, everybody believes in that, if you stop to think about it. You’ve heard people say, ‘time passes slowly,’ or ‘the time went by like lightning.’ Well, it’s sort of like the old song about who takes care of the caretaker’s daughter? If you talk about time passing, you’re actually measuring it against something, and that something is a sort of second time.”
I felt distinctly confused, but I knew that once Jerry started to explain something all hell would not deflect him, so I sat and waited for the rest of it to roll over me.
“The nearest way I can give you an idea of LeNormand’s work is to say that he applied this theorem of Minkowski’s to the conception of a serial time, or a bunch of times running on up into infinity. I know you don’t get it, and it’s not a thing you can explain even with diagrams, but I guess you can see that everyone, from Einstein to little old Bill Feldman in the Math Department, was on his neck for it.“
“My God,” I said, “I don’t see how they even understood it.”
“They didn’t. Well, that’s about all I can tell you about LeNormand’s theories, because it’s all I’m sure I understand. There’s one last equation. I’m working on it now. If I can decipher what he was putting down in that ...” Jerry’s voice trailed off for a moment. “Anyhow, you see why I think LeNormand had hold of something big. He used to tell me some things you could do with his stuff, just for fun. I remember he said once that if you could control your mind after you were dead and outside your body, you could make it travel through time. He used to tell me that it would do a lot of Christians good to go back and take a look at the Crucifixion before settling down to an eternity of bliss.”
“Nice,” I said, “a very nice, pleasant thought to take home with you.”
“Hell,” said Jerry. “I don’t suppose he meant that stuff. Or most of it, anyway.”
We sat there for several moments without any more words. Perhaps Jerry was thinking. For my part, I knew that I could never understand what he had been talking about, so there was no use my trying any thought. I just sat.
After a while he went on, and his voice was lower and graver, somehow. “LeNormand was killed by some kind of chemical, or else a ray of some sort. More likely a ray, though God knows where it came from. And it must have been because of his work. There was no other reason to kill him.”
“There was Selena.”
“Yes,” he said. “Selena. Selena who won’t tell me who she was before we met her. Bark, can you, for God’s sake, tell me why she should be so silent about her past unless it would connect her, or someone she is sheltering, with that murder?” His voice was suddenly strained and urgent.
“Listen,” I said quickly, “there’s nothing to that idea. And if it’s any comfort to you, it wasn’t what Parsons and I talked about, either.”
“Thanks for that much.” He stopped a moment and wet his lips. “You don’t know, I suppose, whether he ever investigated to find out who Selena is?”
“Yes,” I told him, “he did.”
“And did he find out?”
“No.”
“You see what I have to think, don’t you, Bark? I know it was a scientist’s murder. I am certain Selena knows who did it. That’s why she’s keeping such a careful watch against giving anything away about her past.”
“And she married LeNormand just to keep an eye on him?”
He nodded grimly. “Yes. Damn it! Do you think I like this? Do you think I enjoy suspecting my wife of being implicated in a murder—a horrible murder, at that, and of a man I liked damned well?”
“I think you’re building a lot on a pretty slender foundation.”
“Yes,” he admitted, “I know that. But there’s another thing. She hates my working on that stuff of LeNormand’s. She doesn’t like it, and she tries to stop me. Remember last night how she told me it was useless? That’s the word she uses when she wants to say a thing is altogether bad. Suppose she has the idea that if I go on with what I’m doing, the same thing will happen to me that happened to LeNormand?”
It came over me at last in what torment he had been living; there was nothing I could say without putting another and equally horrible alternative in his mind, the alternative that Selena was Luella Jamison. And yet, I wish now that I had told him Parsons’ story.
“Bark, don’t you see how much of it fits? Think how intelligent Selena is. Half the time I believe she knows more about LeNormand’s work than I do. Just from little things she lets drop once in a while. Where else could she get that intelligence from but a scientist’s family, that intelligence and her knowledge?”
“You’re born with intelligence. You don’t acquire it.”
“Maybe.”
“Anyway, your whole idea is crazy. It’s as thin as tissue paper, and as improbable as a movie scenario. What scientist do you suspect?”
“I don’t suspect any one of them. There are fifty men whose careers would have been ruined by LeNormand’s work.”
“Are any of them missing a daughter or a wife?”
He looked at me, hard. “I don’t know yet. I’m getting reports on all of them from an agency.”
“Good God!”
“You see, Bark,” he said quietly, “if I can’t eliminate this horrible idea I have in my mind, I’ll have to live with it for the rest of my life.”