“Is he in town?”
Warfield nodded.
“Well?”
Warfield looked at her. She was a statue now, a dark-crowned bloodless figure. “I’ll go with you.”
“I’ll see him alone.”
“I’ll go with you all the same, then, and wait.”
“Very well. Only hurry.”
Warfield slipped out of his laboratory smock and into a coat without another word. Outside the office he stopped and said, “Peg…please—” but she walked steadily down to the elevators, and he shrugged and followed her.
They caught a cab almost immediately, and Warfield gave the driver a Riverside address. Peg sat staring blindly ahead of her. Mel slumped in a corner and looked at his wrists, dully.
Peg broke the silence only once—to ask in a deceptively conversational voice if anything had been learned that she didn’t know about the treatment of acromegaly. Warfield shook his head vaguely. She made a sound, then, like a sob, but when Warfield looked at her she still sat, dry-eyed, staring at the driver’s coat collar.
They pulled up in front of one of those stately old cell-blocks of apartment houses that perch on the slanted, winding approaches to the Drive. They got out, and a doorman, a bit over life-size, swung open both leaves of a huge plate glass and bronze door to let them into the building.
“Mr. Wenzell,” said Warfield to a wax-faced desk clerk.
“What?” said Peg.
“He… it amuses him to use your name,” said Warfield, as if he were speaking out of a mouthful of sal ammoniac.
“Mr. Wenzell is out,” said the clerk. “Can I take a message?”
“You can take a message right to Mr. Wenzell, who is not out,” said Warfield. “Tell him his two doctors are here and must see him.”
“Tell him,” said Peg clearly, “that Margaretta Wenzell is here.”
“Yes, Mrs. Wenzell,” said the clerk with alacrity.
“Why must you make this painful as well as unpleasant?” gritted Warfield. Peg smiled with her teeth and said nothing.
The clerk returned from the phone looking as if he had learned how to pronounce a word he had only seen chalked on fences before. “Fourteen. Suite C. The elevators—”
“Yes,” growled Warfield. He took Peg’s elbow and walked her over to the elevators as if she were a window-dummy.
“You’re hurting me.”
“I’m sorry. I’m—a little upset. Do you have to go through with this weird business?”
She didn’t answer. Instead she said, “Stay down here, Mel.”
“I will not!”
She looked at him, and said a thousand words—hot-acid ones—in the sweep of her eyes across his face.
“Well,” he said, “all right. All right. Tell you what. I’ll give you fifteen minutes and then I’m coming up.” He paused. “Why are you looking at me like that? What are you thinking about?”
“That corny line about the fifteen minutes. I was thinking about how much better Robin would deliver it.”
“I think I hate you,” said Warfield hoarsely, quietly.
Peg stepped into the elevator. “That was much better done,” she, said, and pushed the button which closed the doors.
On the fourteenth floor she walked to the door marked “C” and touched the bell. The door swung open instantly.
“Come in!” grated a voice. There was no one standing in the doorway at all. She hesitated. Then she saw that someone was peering through the crack at the hinge side of the door.
“Come in, Peg!” said the voice. It was used gently now, though it was still gravelly. She stepped through and into the room. The door closed behind her. Robin was there, with a gun. He put it away and held out both hands to her. “Peg! It’s so good to see, you!”
“Hello, Robin,” she whispered. Just what gesture she was about to make she would never know for she became suddenly conscious of someone else in the room. She wheeled. There was a girl on the chesterfield, who rose as Peg faced her. The girl didn’t look, somehow, like a person. She looked like too many bright colors.
“Janice,” said Robin. It wasn’t an introduction. Robin just said the one word and moved his head slightly. The girl came slowly across the room toward him, passed him, went to the hall closet and took out a coat and a hat and a handbag with a long strap. She draped the coat over her arm and opened the door; and then she paused and shot Peg a look of such utter hatred that Peg gasped. The door closed and she was alone with Robin English.
“Is that the best you can do,” she said, without trying to keep the loathing out of her voice.
“The very best,” said Robin equably. “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 smorgasbord 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.”