Out of the corner of his eye Squires could see Latzarel working away at his hair with a pocket comb. “No, I can’t say that they did. Were they friends of yours?”
“Not very likely,” he said, peering past Squires into the room.
Latzarel appeared from the kitchen, his hair preposterously parted in the center. His coat was gone and his sleeves were rolled up. He waved his bottle cheerfully at the frowning man who stood in the doorway. “I can’t at all decide what to offer you for this first edition of The Polyglots. It’s been read pretty thoroughly.”
The statement meant nothing to Squires. In fact, it meant nothing to Latzarel. Only the man on the doorstep supposed it had any meaning, and after getting a good look at Latzarel, even he wasn’t sure. “Who’s this?” he asked.
“It’s none of your business,” said Squires evenly. “Who are you, and what the devil do you mean, banging on the door at this hour?”
The man looked surprised at being asked such a question. Latzarel smiled at him and took a first, long pull at his bottle, gasping and gagging in spite of himself when the liquid within gurgled across his tongue. He coughed, pretending to have choked. “Who do you think I am, my dear fellow?” he asked, taking a quick look at the label on his bottle and finding that he’d stumbled by accident onto one of Dr. Brown’s Cel Rey elixirs instead of beer.
“He believes you’re an escaped fat man, apparently,” said Squires, giving the man a look.
“Now, now,” said the man, shaking his head and holding up a hand. “I accused no one. There’s been a break-in up on Patchen, and a couple of men, as I say, ran in this direction. But I can see they’re not here.”
“Well too bad,” Latzarel said. “Just when you thought you had them corraled. They must be desperate men.” Then to Squires he said, “Maybe we’d better bolt the door. There may be a siege.”
The man stood on the porch for another few moments as if trying to find the words necessary to break off the conversation. A shout from the road, however, and a quick succession of footsteps on the sidewalk made him turn and dash away, shouting something over his shoulder about “rough customers.” Squires shut the door behind him and drew the Venetian blinds tighter over the arched window.
Edward peered out of the library. “Is it safe?”
‘Tolerably,” said Latzarel, “but we’d better lie low for a while until the excitement dies down.”
Edward walked through the door, followed, to Latzarel’s immense surprise, by William Hastings. “What in the devil have you done to your hair?” asked William.”
Latzarel mussed the part out of it. “Nothing,” he said. “Where did you pop up from?”
“A manhole,” said William, smiling at the tale he was about to tell them. The four sat down into chairs around the electric fire.
“So,” said William two hours later, pouring down the last half inch of a bottle of beer, “I’ve done some studying. Made some connections. The physical universe, I’m convinced, is a far more puzzling place than we’ve given it credit for. Your information about Giles Peach bears me out. Science has taken a good crack at it, and can’t be faulted. But it wears blinders. It’s got to be made to yank them off. It’s time for a literary man to have at it.” William held his beer bottle up like a telescope and peered into it — a habit he unfailingly acquired after his third beer had disappeared. Edward wondered what it was that William saw in there, but had never thought of any way to ask him without sounding as if he thought the practice peculiar.
“And speaking of literary matters,” William continued, “I’ve landed the relativity story.”
“That would be the swelling man in the rocket?” asked Squires, putting a match to his pipe.
“That’s right. They sent me an appreciative letter — carried on a bit, in fact.”
“Who did?” asked Squires.
“Analog,” said William.
Squires dropped his pipe onto his chair at that revelation, a wad of flaming tobacco rolling out and sliding down between his leg and the chair arm. He leaped up, swatting at it, and managed to knock it onto the rug and then onto the tile hearth. He went into the kitchen and returned with a tray of fresh beer. “Let’s drink to the relativity story” he said, passing the beers around. And William, smiling broadly, assented. In the roseate glow of the beer, things seemed to be going well indeed for him. The muddy splashes on his trousers and the torn sleeve of his coat had already become souvenirs. He’d given the bastards the slip for well and good. But they hadn’t heard the last of William Hastings, not by a long sea mile. He grinned at the thought of coming battles.
“Roy,” he said suddenly, looking up at his friend who was tamping new tobacco into a fresh pipe, “I’ve been reading up on relativity again — light cones to be more specific. What do you know about them?”
Squires hesitated for a moment, wondering, perhaps, at the futility of the conversation that was almost certainly forthcoming. “The term light cone,” he said evenly, “has to do with the charting of the three dimensions of space and the single dimension of time on a cubical graph, the vertical axis being a person’s position in time, the horizontal being his movement in space. …”
“But as I understand it,” interrupted William, hunching forward in his chair in mounting excitement, “the cone itself is a product of a sphere of light expanding roundabout it like a vast, evenly inflating balloon. I mean to say that all of us are at the center of an infinitely expanding series of photon circles, rushing at light speed through the stars — ripples on the otherwise placid lake of the universe. Auras, if you will. Halos, if you look at it from another angle — an angle most of us have ignored. Up until now, that is. It’s profitable to turn to mythology once again.” He peered at Squires, squinting through one eye. Squires nodded broadly.
“Man, then, if I understand light cones aright, is the omphalos of an expanding photon halo — an almost infinite succession of such halos which, when charted, form a cyclone of emanations, whirling into the stars.”
“I can’t argue with that,” said Squires, giving Latzarel a look. Latzarel said quickly that he couldn’t argue with it either.
“Our lives, gentlemen, are summed up in spatial and temporal terms by the light cones on the highway — symbols of man’s trials, of his voyage through space and time.”
“By the which?” asked Latzarel. “You’ve thrown me there with that last bit about the highway.”
“Those red cones. The clown caps with lamps inside that they use to cordon off lanes on a highway. Inverted light cones is what they are, figuratively speaking. Concrete representations of our earthbound existence, of our literally being bound to the earth in the infinite eyes of those fleeing halos of light.” William paused and thought about it for a moment. He picked up a pen and a scrap of paper and jotted quick notes, lost for the moment in his musings. He paused, grinned, scribbled a bit more, and sat back, wholly pleased with himself. “Can you find fault with it?” he asked, looking up.
“Not with anything I can put my finger on,” said Squires, shaking his head. “It has all the earmarks of your work.”
“Thank you,” said William, understanding that last to be a compliment. He worked his hands together like a spider on a mirror, squinting shrewdly, then left off his puzzling and took a congratulatory swig of beer. “Let a literary man loose on science,” he said triumphantly, “and you’ll go somewhere.”
“There’s truth to that,” Squires assented. “I sense the ripplings of a short story here.”