Maybe. Maybe not. Too pat somehow. And the details were blurred. Where was the Paramount Cafeteria? And what dark doorway was it? Maybe it was her own. Under the peeling gold letters of her father’s name. I sighed, sat up, stared at all the notes and data spread around me on the office floor. It was getting late and I was floundering about in midfield, getting nowhere. Pat and the girls had no doubt wondered why I wasn’t home for supper. Should have called. Pat was probably still waiting up for me. But I couldn’t go home. Not yet. I had to complete this investigation, make sense of it somehow. Douglas’s stay of execution, coupled with the sudden rise of tensions throughout the world, had cast a whole new complexion on the case. Uncle Sam had projected me into the heart of this thing and I had to respond. Anyway, Pat would suppose I was in some emergency meeting, that was all right. Or preparing a speech. She was used to my late nights. At the time of the Hiss case, I spent as much as eighteen to twenty hours a day at my office, we hardly saw each other. At such times, I deliberately refuse to take time off for relaxation or “a break,” because my experience has been that in preparing to meet a crisis, the more I work the sharper and quicker my mental reactions become. “Taking a break” is actually an escape from the tough grinding discipline that is absolutely necessary for superior performance, and Pat has had to learn to live with this. Many times I’ve found that my best ideas come when I think I can’t work another minute, when I literally have to drive myself to stick at the job. Sleepless nights, to the extent the body can take them, can stimulate creative mental activity, it’s happened to me lots of times. Oh, you have to take the machine out of gear once in a while, but it’s never wise to turn the engine off and let the motor get completely cold, not when you’re on to something. I could write a goddamn manual about it.
This was why my golf game disappointed Uncle Sam so. I couldn’t help it. It wasn’t just the game, it was the going and coming, the time lost in the clubhouse, all those empty-headed boozers clomping around in golf shoes, a whole day could get shot down. Whenever I was in the middle of a period of intense study or work, leaving the problem for a day on the golf course simply meant I had to spend most of the next day getting myself charged up again — to the point of efficiency I had reached before leaving the task in the first place. That was why I was collecting all this flab around the middle, too. I knew that was something I had to watch — Americans rarely elected fat men President. Old Taft got away with it, but that was because he went to the other extreme. But just fat and sloppy, never. As long as I was down on the floor, I decided to do a few sit-ups. After a couple, though, I felt a little giddy — hungry probably — and so stayed stretched out, my head pillowed in bomb diagrams. I had already studied these sketches, looking for hidden objects, thinking they might be some kind of puzzle pictures, but I hadn’t turned up anything. They tended to suggest sex organs, but this was natural with bomb diagrams.