Thunder and Roses (55 page)

“Is
that
the best you can do,” she said, without trying to keep the loathing out of her voice.

“The very best,” said Robin equitably. “Janice is utterly stupid. She has no conversation, particularly when I want none. What she has to recommend her, you can see. She is a great convenience.”

A silly, colorful little thought crept into Peg’s mind. She looked around the room.

“You’re looking for a smörgasbord tray,” chuckled Robin, sinking into an easy-chair and regarding her with amusement. “Why won’t you look at me?”

Finally, she did.

He was taller, a very little. He was much handsomer. She saw that, and it was as if something festering within her had been lanced. There was pain—but oh the blessed relief of pressure! His face was—
Oh yes
, said Dr. Wenzell to herself,
pre-pituitary. Acromegaly
. She said. “Let me see your hands.”

He raised his eyebrows, and put his hands in his pockets. He shook his head.

Peg turned on her heel and went to the hall closet. She dipped into the pockets of an overcoat, and then into a topcoat, until she found a pair of gloves. She came back into the room, examining them carefully. Robin got to his feet.

“As I thought,” she said. She held up the left glove. The seam between the index and second fingers was split. And they were new gloves. She threw them aside.

“So you know about that. You would, of course.”

“Robin, I don’t think this would have happened if you had continued your treatments.” He slowly took out his hands and stared at them. They were lumpy, and the fingers were too long, and a little crooked. “A phenomenal hypertrophy of the bony processes, according to the books,” he said. “A development that generally takes years.”

“There’s nothing normal about this case. There never was,” said Peg, her voice thick with pity. “Why did you let it go like this?”

“I got interested in what I was doing.” Suddenly he got to his feet and began to stride restlessly about the room. She tried not to look at him, at his altered face, with the heavy, coarse jaw. She strained to catch the remnants of his mellow voice through the harshness she heard now.

He said, “It was all right during those months when I wrote
Too Humorous To Mention
and
Festoon
and invented the back out drills and all that. But everything got too easy. I could do anything I wanted to do. All of the things I had ever dreamed about doing I could do—and so easily! It was awful. I tried harder things, and they came easy too. I couldn’t seem to apply myself on anything that couldn’t be seen or touched, though perhaps, if I had been able to go into higher mathematics or something purely abstract like that, I wouldn’t be—well, what I am now.

“I began to be afraid. The one thing I couldn’t whip was Mel Warfield. I was afraid of him. He hated me. I don’t think he knew it, but he hated me. I wanted you. There was a time when I could have—but I was afraid of him. He had too much power over me. Too much thumb-pressure on that hypodermic of his, or the addition of some little drop of something in a test tube, and he could do anything he wanted with me. I’d never been afraid for myself before. Maybe it was part of that maturity you were talking about.”

“I imagine it was.”

Robin sat down heavily, clasped his hands, stared at them, put them in his pockets again. “I was glad to take the risk, mind you. It wasn’t that. Anything in my condition that was suddenly too much for his skill to cope with—any accident like that couldn’t frighten me. It was knowing that he hated me, and somewhere underneath he wanted me out of the way—preferably dead. Anyway—I got out. I kept him informed as to where I was, because I was ready for him. I was ready to kill him first if he came after me. But no hypodermics. No solutions. So—I went on with my work, and then it all got old, right away. I could do anything I wanted to do. Peg—can you imagine how horrible that can be? Never to know you might fail? To have such a clear conception of what the public wants in a play or a poem or a machine, that you can make it and know from the start that it will be a success? I knew a man once, who had photography for a hobby. He got to be so good that he stopped
printing his negatives. He’d
know
they were perfect. He pulled ’em out of the hypo and dried ’em and filed ’em. Often he sold them without looking at them. It killed his hobby. He took up electronics, which was more his speed. But I’m that way about everything.”

“You got bored.”

“Bored. Oh, Peg, if you only knew the things I tried! Finally I dropped out of sight. I got a kick out of the papers then. For a while. Know what I was doing when the whole world thought I was doing something fantastic? I was reading. I was holed up in the back room of my Westchester place with all the books I had ever wanted to read. That’s all. They let me get out of myself—for a while. For a while.” He stopped and wiped sweat off his lip. “But it happened again. It got so that a page or two would tell me an author’s style, a paragraph or two told me his plot. Technical books the same; once I got the basics the whole thing was there. Or maybe I thought it was. Maybe I just lost interest. It was as if I were being pursued by a monster called Understanding. I understood everything I looked at or thought about. There was nothing I could see or say or do or read or think about where I couldn’t predict the end result. I didn’t want to give anything any more, either, the way I did with the Whirltoy. Do you know what I wanted? I wanted to fail. I didn’t think I could. I don’t think so now. If I purposely botched a thing up, that would be a success of a sort. So for a long time I did nothing.”

He fell silent. Peg waited patiently. She had had dozens of questions to ask, and half of them were already answered.

“Then I began to think about Voisier. You know Voisier?”

She nodded. “Robin—wait a minute. You hate Voisier. I think you’re trying to ruin him. But you hated Mel Warfield. Why didn’t you try to—”

“Warfield? By then, he wasn’t big enough. Voisier was the only man I ever met whom I thought could beat me.” He sighed. “Now I think he won’t do it.” And suddenly, Robin smiled. The smile sat badly on that heavy face. “Peg, there’s an alternative to unquenchable, inevitable success. That is to play a game in such a way that you never can know how it ends. That’s what I’m doing.”

“Voisier’s trying to find you.”

“Is he now? How do you know?” For the first time Robin’s face and voice showed real animation. All the twisted ravings of the past few minutes had come out of him like toothpaste out of a tube.

Peg told him about Voisier’s calling the hospital, and what had happened at Lelalo’s, where he had stolen the case history.

“Good,” said Robin. “Oh, fine. This means that things are shaping up better than I thought. Faster. Uh—excuse me a moment.”

He went to the desk in the corner, sat down, and began to write rapidly.

“This maturity thing,” he said, phrasing between the lines he was writing, “I think you and Warfield overlooked something. I’m the patient. Do doctors listen to patients?”

“They do.”

“You realize, don’t you, that humans die before they’re fully mature?”

“You mean in the sense that their bones do not completely ossify?”

“That’s it. And there’s a psychological factor, too.” He paused, thought a while, wrote for a moment, and then went on. “Puppies and kittens and lion cubs—they’re terribly foolish, in a pretty kind of way. They have their mock battles and they chase their balls of paper and get wound up in milady’s yarn, don’t they?”

“They do, but—”

“Humans, with few exceptions,
always
are puppyish, to a degree. There is even a parallel in the proportions of head to body, even allowing for the larger brain pan of
homo sapiens
. An adult human being has proportions comparable to a half-grown colt or dog in that respect. Now—did you ever hear of a full-grown gorilla acting kittenish? Or a bison bull, or a lion? Life for them is a serious business—one of sex, hunger, self-preservation and a peculiar ‘don’t tread on me’ kind of possessiveness.

“Peg—let’s face it. That’s what’s happened to me. I can’t go back. I don’t see how I can go on this way. I’m mature now. But I’m mature like an animal. However, I can’t stop being human. A human being has to have one thing—he has to be happy, or he has to think he knows what happiness is. Happiness for me is unthinkable. There is nothing for me to work toward. All of my achievements are here”—he
tapped his head—“as good as done when I think of them, because I know I can do them. No goal, no aspiration—the only thing left is that little game of mine, the one where, according to the rules, I can’t ever really know the result.”

“Voisier?”

“Voisier.” He picked up the phone, dialed rapidly. He listened. “Come on back,” he said. He hung up. “That was Janice. She’ll be here in fifteen minutes. You’d better go, Peg.”

The door buzzer began to shrill. Robin leaped across the room; the gun was in his hand again. He opened the door and stood behind it, peering out at the hinge side as he had before. Mel walked in.

“Peg—are you all right?”

“A little bewildered.”

“Of course she’s all right,” said Robin in a tone that insulted both of them. Mel stared at him. Robin went over to the desk, picked up the sheets he had written and, folding them, handed them to Peg. “Promise me you won’t read these until you get back to Mel’s office.”

“I promise.”

Mel spoke up, suddenly—and with great effort. “English—You know what that condition is?” He indicated Robin’s face.

“He does, Mel,” said Peg. “Don’t—”

Warfield pushed her hand off his arm impatiently. “Robin, I’m willing to do what I can to arrest it, and there’s a chance … not much, you understand—”

Robin interrupted him with a sudden, thunderous guffaw—quite the most horrible sound Peg had ever heard. “Why sure, Mel, sure. I’ll be a bit busy this afternoon, but say tomorrow, if we can get together?”

“Robin!” said Peg joyfully. “You
will?
”

“Why not?” He chuckled. “Don’t make an appointment today.

Call me tomorrow.” He took the note back from Peg, and scribbled on it. “Here’s the number. Now go on. Beat it, you two. Maybe I ought to say something like ‘Bless you, my children’ but I—Oh, beat it.”

Peg found herself in the hall and then at the door. “But Robin—” she said weakly; but by then the door was closed and Mel was guiding her into the elevator.

At Mel’s office a few minutes later, she unfolded Robin’s note with trembling fingers. It read:

And down in the corner, where he had ostensibly written his phone number, were these words: “Sorry I can’t keep that appointment. The condition is already arrested.”

Peg phoned the police. The police found Robin English dead. Robin English left everything he had to Peg and Warfield equally. And in due course Voisier was electrocuted for the murder. The recording found in his apartment, coupled with the testimony of one Janice Brooks, was quite sufficient. Voisier’s defense, that Robin was torturing him, held no water; for where is a law that specifies mental torture as grounds for justifiable homicide?