Griswold Masterson was not entirely successful in escaping human involvement. By sheer perversity of personality, and an overpowering loneliness, Beryl Ward of Columbia Falls managed to gain access to his house, if not his heart. Having been abandoned by her husband after one year of marriage, and having spent the subsequent decade growing grim and frustrated — having lost both her parents, too — Miss Ward, at well past forty, decided that a life alone was no life at all. At the very least she needed someone to look after. And since there were no other prospects within reach, she set her cap on Griswold Masterson — sight unseen, though with plenty of tales about him in her head: His isolation constituted a local legend. If nothing else, she could be sure he wouldn’t pack up and run off on her.
A former neighbor of Miss Ward’s, whom the editors tracked down in Boston, apparently felt far enough removed from the scene to speak to us over the phone (though not far enough to authorize us to use her name) on the unusual courtship of Griswold and Beryclass="underline"
“I mean that Beryl Ward was always sniffing round Mr. Masterson’s house. And even though he fired off a shotgun on the roof one night to scare her off, that hussy just kept going back. All the way down on Main Street we could hear her calling to him — she was going to wait forever, she’d shout loud as a loon, so he might as well open up. But he didn’t; so what does she do? — that hussy starts sleeping out on an old sofa on the porch. I mean, the town got really upset with her, but what could we do? Then one morning the door of the house opened, just like that, and Beryl Ward moseyed inside. Nothing but a rusty-headed hussy! After that there sure was plenty of talk about what they were doing up there on Cobalt Hill, if you know what I mean. Personally I doubt it very much — he was all mind and no body. Besides, what would any man see in Beryl Ward?”
EQMM’s theory is that Mr. Masterson gave in to Miss Ward for two reasons: (1) It gave him more time and energy for his work, rather than expending physical and mental resources worrying about what she was doing out on the porch; (2) There were probably many items he needed on a continual basis for his experiments, goods she could procure from the local general store while he worked: candles, jars, nails, copper tubing, alcohol, matches, wire, batteries, welding rods, and who knows what else? How Beryl Ward reacted upon setting eyes on him for the first time is not known, and what she found inside the huge, unpainted, crumbling place is open to speculation. But the large shopping list she turned over to the store clerk that first month — including ammonia, detergent, scouring pads, and a mop — confirmed what most believed to be the case: Griswold Masterson, already being referred to as one of the great unheralded minds of this century, apparently lived like a farm animal. Probably the biggest housekeeping problem Beryl Ward had were the science fiction magazines, the technical books, and the philosophical tracts he’d collected over the decades. According to our Boston source:
“He had so many books you could see them from the footpath — stacked up every which way; I mean, they just blocked out the living room windows; I mean, you could smell the moldiness all the way down to Jill’s beauty shop!... Thousands of rats and mice must’ve been nesting in that house. Ugh!”
It did not occur to Miss Ward’s former neighbor that the Hermit Genius may have been consciously attempting to attract those rodents, for they might have served an important function in his work. In any case, she indicated further that sometimes there were empty packing cartons scattered on the porch. The local postmaster/general store proprietor confirmed that a few times each year Griswold Masterson received shipments from laboratory supply companies around the country. But when our reporter asked the gray-faced postmaster what he could tell us about the weight and size of those boxes, and about what might have been inside them, his voice hardened:
“Didn’t pay attention, and I wouldn’t want to know. And stop coming around here botherin’ me! I got work to do.”
The fire which destroyed the two-story, stick-built house on Cobalt Hill may indeed have gotten started through spontaneous combustion, as Marshville residents contended — those dried-out magazines springing into flames. Or maybe a bolt of lightning set it off. Or a kerosene lamp left lit by mistake may have been knocked over by the wind. An act of nature may well have been the cause. But with the attitude the town maintained toward Masterson and his work, one had to wonder. Certainly our reporter did. However, she was unable to come up with any evidence of arson, conspiratorial or otherwise. Of course, Rev. Ossip saw it as neither an act of Nature nor Man:
“God was righting a grievous wrong.”
Sifting through the ashy remains in the Masterson basement, EQMM’s reporter made an important find: a few fragments of yellow, lined manuscript pages, written in what is undoubtedly the hand of Griswold Masterson. Tragically, most of Masterson’s papers must have been destroyed by flames, and even sections of the fragments salvaged — preserved by mere chance under a slab of fallen boilerplate — were damaged by heat and water. In attempting to piece together a skeleton of Masterson’s thoughts, the editors have bracketed words that were obliterated or not entirely readable, corrected misspellings and obvious grammatical oversights, and are publishing the fragments in the order that seems to offer the greatest continuity. But the total sense of these elements will probably never be known:
... in the Practical Future — a psychological response to immediate human needs, the second is the Theoretical Future — a cry for more time to experience Man’s potential. In pursuing the Practical Future we are expressing a [desire to preview particular] events so that we might alter their outcome in some way that is meaningful to our existence. In pondering the Theoretical [Future], we are attempting to break out of the [limitations of our flesh] — to participate in a time beyond our physical life span...
After countless attempts to discard faulty reasoning, it became clear that bridging the Practical and Theoretical would have to be accomplished not entirely physically, not entirely spiritually, but through a journey involving mind and body...
... still another discipline, that of philosophy. Specifically the question of an immortal presence in the universe. If the world as we know it was indeed shaped through a process of evolution, certainly that development had to be set into motion: It needed a Prime Mover. But how events are shaped in the future will depend on Man...
There is no more. While we suspect hundreds of these handwritten sheets were destroyed (bear in mind the technical aspects of his experiments have barely been alluded to in these fragments), who can say for sure?
In searching the ruins of the house our reporter came across the remains of jars and test tubes — apparently smashed by the volunteer firemen. She also recovered a charred corner of a schematic drawing that seems to correspond to the stainless-steel cylinder the sheriff and his deputy reputedly found in Masterson’s basement the morning before the fire. That was the day Beryl Ward reported the Hermit Genius missing. The reporter didn’t get to see the cylinder itself, and there was much too little of the schematic to infer anything meaningful. (This was confirmed by the International Institute of Scientific Phenomena in New York, to whom we later turned it over.) So the editors of this magazine contacted the Washington County sheriff’s office by telephone, requesting permission to inspect the cylinder in person. Deputy Durham Stone told us: