He said, “We get off at the next station.”
“I know.”
“I just wanted to tell you.”
“Where to get off?”
In utter surprise, he said “Me?” and it was the most eloquent monosyllable she had ever heard. For the first time it occurred to her to wonder consciously what he thought of her. It hadn’t seemed to matter, before. What was she, in his eyes? She suddenly realized that she, as a doctor meeting a man socially, had really no right to corner him, question him, analyze and diagnose the way she had over the past few weeks. She couldn’t abide the existence of a correctible condition in her specialty, and it was probably the essence of selfishness for her to do it. He probably regarded her as meddling and dominating. She astonished herself by asking him, point-blank.
“What do I think of you?” He considered, carefully. He appeared not to think it remarkable that she could have asked such a question. “You’re a taffy-puller.”
“I’m a what?”
“A taffy-puller. They hypnotize me. Didn’t you ever see one?”
“I don’t think so,” she breathed. “But—”
“You see them down on the boardwalk. Beautifully machined little rigs, all chrome-plated eccentrics and cams. There are two cranks set near each other so that the ‘handle’ of each passes the axle of the other. They stick a big mass of taffy on one ‘handle’ and start the machine. Before that sticky, homogeneous mass has a chance to droop and drip off, the other crank has swung up and taken most of it. As the crank handles move away from each other the taffy is pulled out, and then as they move together again it loops and sags; and at the last possible moment the loop is shoved together. The taffy welds itself and is pulled apart again.” Robin’s eyes were shining and his voice was rapt. “Underneath the taffy is a stainless steel tray. There isn’t a speck of taffy on it. Not a drop, not a smidgin. You stand there, and you look at it, and you wait for that lump of guff to slap itself all over those roller bearings and burnished con rods, but it never does. You wait for it to get tired of that fantastic juggling, and it never does. Sometimes gooey little bubbles get in the taffy and get carried around and pulled out and squashed fiat, and when they break they do it slowly, leaving little soft craters that take a long time to fill up; and they’re being mauled around the way the bubbles were.” He sighed. “There’s almost too much contrast—that competent, beautiful machinist’s dream handling what? Taffy—no definition, no boundaries, no predictable tensile strength. I feel somehow as if there ought to be an intermediate stage somewhere. I’d feel better if the machine handled one of Dali’s limp watches, and the watch handled the mud. But that doesn’t matter. How I feel, I mean. The taffy gets pulled. You’re a taffy-puller. You’ve never done a wasteful or incompetent thing in your life, no matter what you were working with.”
She sat quietly, letting the vivid picture he had painted fade away. Then, sharply, “Haven’t I!” she cried. “I’ve let us ride past our station!”
Dr. Mellett Warfield let them in himself. Towering over his colleague, he bent his head, and the light caught his high white forehead, which, with his peaked hairline, made a perfect Tuscan arch. “Peg!”
“Hello, Mel. This is Robin English.”
Warfield shook hands warmly. “I am glad to see you. Peg has told me a lot about you.”
“I imagine she has,” grinned Robin. “All about my histones and my albumins and the medullic and cortical tissues of my lobulae. I love that word. Lobulae. I lobule very much, Peg.”
“Robin, for Pete’s sake!”
Warfield laughed. “No—not only that. You see, I’d heard of you before. You designed that, didn’t you?” He pointed. On a side table was a simple device with two multicolored disks mounted at the ends of a rotating arm, and powered by a little electric motor.
“The Whirltoy? Robin, I didn’t know that!”
“I don’t know a child psychologist or a pediatrician who hasn’t got one,” said Warfield. “I wouldn’t part with that one for fifty times what it cost me—which is less than it’s worth. I have yet to see the child, no matter how maladjusted, glandular, spoiled, or what have you, who isn’t fascinated by those changing colors. Even the color-blind children can’t keep their eyes off it because of the changing patterns it makes.”
Peg looked at Robin as if he had just come in through the wall. “Robin… the patent on that—”
“Doesn’t exist,” said Warfield. “He gave it to the Parent’s Association.”
“Well, sure. I made mine for fun. I had it a long time before a friend of mine said I ought to sell the idea to a toy manufacturer. But I heard that the Parent’s Association sent toys to hospitals, and I sort of figured maybe kids that needed amusement should have it, rather than only those whose parents could afford it.”
“Robin, you’re crazy. You could have—”
“No, Peg,” said Warfield gently. “Don’t try to make him regret it. Robin… you won’t mind if I call you Robin… what led you to design the rotors so that they phase over and under the twentieth-of-a-second sight persistence level, so that the eye is drawn to it and then the mind has to concentrate on it?”
“I remember Zeitner’s paper about that at the Society for Mental Sciences,” said Peg in an awed tone. “A brilliant application of optics to psychology.”
“It wasn’t brilliant,” said Robin impatiently. “I didn’t even know that that was what it was doing. I just messed with it until I liked it.”
A look passed between Warfield and Peg. It said, “What would he accomplish if he ever really tried?”
Warfield shook his head and perched on the edge of a table. “Now listen to me, Robin,” he said, gently and seriously. “I don’t think Peg’ll mind my telling you this; but it’s important.”
Peg colored slightly. “I think I know what you’re going to say. But go ahead.”
“When she first told me about you, and what she wanted to try, I was dead set against it. You see, we know infinitely more about the ductless glands nowadays than we did—well, even this time last year. But at the same time, their interaction is so complex, and their functions so subtle, that there are dozens of unexplored mysteries. We’re getting to them, one by one, as fast as they show themselves and as fast as we can compile data. The more I learn about the ductless glands, the less I like to take chances with them. When Peg just told me about you as a talented young man whose life history was a perfect example of hyper-thymus—immaturity, I think was the word she used—”
“Da! Also goo!” laughed Robin. “She might have been kind enough to call it, say, a static precociousness.”
“Please don’t tease me about it, Robin.”
“Oh. Sorry. Go on, Mel.” Peg smiled at the way Warfield’s eyebrows went up. She had done the same thing, for the same reason, the first time Robin called her “Peg.”
“Anyhow, I certainly had no great desire to follow her suggestion—shoot you full of hormones and sterones to help you reorganize your metabolism and your psychology. After all, interesting as these cases are, a doctor has to ration his efforts. There are plenty of odd glandular situations walking around in the guise of human beings. In addition, I had no personal interest in you. I have too much work to do to indulge a Messiah complex.
“But Peg got persistent. Peg can be very persistent. She kept bringing me late developments. I didn’t know whether you were a hobby or an inverted phobia of hers. With some effort I managed to remain uninterested until she brought me those blood analyzes.”