To Clementine
Chapter I
THE TALL MAN Switched on the light. "I won't be a minute," he said.
The shorter man looked aromid the room, which was a laboratory. He ambled over to gaze, without understand-mg, at some apparatus.
"It's here somewhere," said Paul Townsend, lifting and shifting papers on the desk, opening the left top drawer. "Letter I meant to mail. Simply forgot. Now where . . . ?" He was an extremely good-looking man, six feet high, in prime state at thirty-seven. His handsome face wore a little fussy frown.
"Take your time," said Mr. Gibson, who was older, in no hurry whatever, and who liked to browse. "What's all this?"
"Ah . . ." Paul Townsend found the letter. "Got it That? That's poison."
"What have you done? Made a collection?" Mr. Gibson peered at a double rank of little square-bottomed bottles aligned to the fraction of an inch, neatly labeled, behind the glass doors of a cupboard.
"Lot of the stuff we use seems to be poisonous," Paul Townsend told him. "So best it's locked up." He came, dangling his letter between two fingers, and peered, too. "Sure is quite a collection," he said innocently.
"Looks like some gourmet's spice cupboard," said Mr. Gibson admiringly. "What are these good for?"
"Different things."
"I never heard of ninety per cent of them."
"Well ..." said Paul Townsend in a forgiving way.
"Death and destruction," murmured Mr. Gibson, "in small packages." He put his forefinger on the glass door. (He fleetingly remembered having once been a little boy pushing his finger, just so, against the glass of a candy counter.) "Which would you advise?"
"What?" said Townsend, batting his long eyelashes.
Mr. Gibson smiled; delicate lines spread from his eye-comers like tiny peacocks' tails. "I'm taking a poetical view," he said whimsically, "of two dozen bottles of death. I don't think the way you do. Can't help it. Teach poetry, you know." He mocked himself good-humoredly and declaimed, "To cease upon the midnight with no pain . . ."
"Oh," said Townsend a little stupidly. "Well, if you mean what will knock you out quick and easy, take that one."
"That one?" Mr. Gibson made no sense of the polysyllabic word on the label to which his host now pointed. He couldn't think how it could possibly be pronounced by a human tongue. The number on the label was 333, which was simple and stuck in the brain. "What will it do?"
"Just kill you," said Paul Townsend. "No taste. No smell."
"No color," murmured the other.
"No pain."
"How do you know that?" Mr. Gibson had fine gray eyes and they were lit with intelligent curiosity.
Townsend blinked again. "Know what?"
"That there is no pain? Or no taste, for that matter? Fella's knocked out, as you say. You can't ask him, can you?"
"Well, I . . . understand there's just no time for pain," said Townsend a little uncomfortably. "Ready?"
"Quite a place," said Mr. Gibson, giving a last look around,
Townsend had his finger on the light switch. "Wait a minute . . ." He frowned. He was like a housewife with unexpected company. He saw deficiencies in his housekeeping. "I see something should have been put away Maybe it wouldn't kill you, but . . . Now who left that out, I wonder? Would you mind turning away for a second?"
"Turning? Oh. Not at all." Mr. Gibson obligingly
turned his back and stared at a cupboard full of breakers and tubes on the opposite wall. It's glass door made quite an efficient mirror, if you selected with your mind only the reflections, out of all you were seeing with your eyes. So Mr. Gibson idly watched Paul Townsend take a small tin of something from a table top, produce a key from a hiding place, put the tin inside the poison cupboard, re-lock the door, rehide the key. "O.K.," said Townsend. "Sorry, but I like to be absolutely careful."
Mr. Gibson said, "Of course," softly. It didn't occur to him to confess to his acquaintance that he now had a very good idea where the key was kept. This Townsend was a friendly chap who had happened to be eating a meal in the same off-campus restaurant and who had offered Mr. Gibson a ride home on this chilly January evening. No need to explain to the man. Mr. Gibson hated to embarrass him. And surely it did not matter.
He began to muse, instead, on poison. Why were there substances created of which men must not eat? Fire, water, air ... all good for man . . . could yet, in quantity, in excess, or out of place, destroy him. Was it possible that poisons, too, had all their measures? Were they, in proper quantity, or place, or time, good, too? In minute quantity perhaps? Was it a question of discovering how much, or where, or when?
"What's that number Three Thirty-three good for?" he asked as they left the building.
"Nobody knows yet," Townsend said amiably. "But it wouldn't be a bad way to die."
Mr. Gibson had no wish for death. He forgot about it and looked up at the moon. "It is a beauteous evening, calm and free . . ." he murmured.
"Nice night," agreed Townsend. "Little chilly, though. I'll drop you off now. Thanks for waiting. Then I'll get along home."
"Don't forget to mail your letter," said Mr. Gibson in friendly prose. "There's a box on my comer."
It was Mr. Gibson's birthday. Characteristically, he hadn't mentioned it. He was fifty-five years old.
He made his thanks and his good night and walked up one flight to his big and only room. He lit the lamp, took off his shoes, placed tobacco handy, selected his book. He was a bachelor.
It was quiet there. It was cozy in a masculine way. It was a little backwater and in it Kenneth Gibson was content. To himself, it seemed that his life had been spent in a series of little backwaters. He had never breasted the full turbulence of the center currents, but like a gentle, unresisting leaf had slipped along the edges of the stream, been caught and held in this or that small stopping place, slipped out, only to be carried into another and yet another, until he. had sailed finally into this particular quiet reach where there was no storm but only the gentlest of ripples from time to time.
He had his niche of usefulness. He liked his work and liked his life. He had a feeling that it was soon over. If another ten or twenty years went by softly in the same pattern it would not seem long. He wasn't an aggressive or an ambition-pressured man.
Four weeks after his fifty-fifth birthday, Mr. Gibson went to a funeral. There he met a young woman named Rosemary James.
It was old Professor James who had given up the ghost. The college rallied to its own. He had been retired for some eight years, had fallen, indeed, into irascible irrationality. But he had once been the college's own and so he must have a well-patronized funeral. The word was given.
Other faculty members met his only daughter, Rosemary, for the first time that day. But Kenneth Gibson met her most significantly because of a quality he had that he, himself, thought of as a weakness. He had the gift, or the burden, of empathy.
To himself, it was a weak sensitivity. Oh, he had learned, in fifty-five years, to manage it pretty well. It had hurt him very much during the First World War.
Having been bom in the first month of a new century he was, of course, eighteen years old in 1918. He had grown up in a very small town in Indiana, a backwater, with a father who owned a hardware store and was a cheerful tactless man, and a mother named Maureen (Grady) who was a little woman with a fanciful mind. He had gone from the village high school directly to the war, because it had seemed the fervently "right" thing to do at the time.
Young, compact of body and muscle, spruce and neat —for Kenneth Gibson from the beginning was one of those
people who always look washed and orderly by some natural gift—even then, he had evidently had an affinity for paper and ink. He went through the war, in the fierce breeches and puttees of the day, as a clerk. Cheerful, willing, and meticulous, he had made a good one. But, although he marked paper with ink in some not unperilous places, he never actually got into a battle. So, when it was all over, nobody knew nor was anyone told that this lad was numb with horror. Nobody ever knew how his essentially fastidious soul had been lacerated by the secrets of slaughter he had come to know and had had to bear. Nobody, in those days, would have conceded the wounds in his mind to be either plausible or important. There were too many horrors experienced. He had only been able to imagine them.