“Mmmm. Hard to tell.”
“Was I right in calling you Miss Tomlinson?”
“It came through yesterday. Restoration of maiden name and all.”
“Like the looks of our boy Christopher?”
“Poor little lost sheep.”
“Poor little lost gold mine. Inside a year he’ll be trying to find a lawyer smart enough to find a hole in that contract. But there won’t be any. He signed in the city before we came out. Next year they’ll be paying him at least sixty thousand. Thirty thousand for us, darling.”
“Fifty percent!” Her eyes widened. “You weasel, you!”
“I better go out and pay my respects to the esteemed Doctor Tomlinson. How did that fuddy get a kid like you?”
“Throwback. My great, great, great, great grandfather was a pirate.”
“I’ll tell him about the Christopher boy. I want this one fixed up fast so he can start bringing in the dough. Expenses are high.”
She held him close. “And they’re going to be higher, man.”
“Acapulco?”
“And the emerald too. I’m holding you to that.” She was warm against him. “I missed you, you thief,” she whispered. “Oh, how I’ve missed you!”
“This much?”
“Even more than that, Sam. More than that. You’ve got cold eyes, Sam. Pale eyes. What goes on behind them?”
“Ideas.”
“With me in them?”
“With you in them. I think it’s you. A big girl. Black hair, soot on her eyelashes. Eyes the color of campfire smoke.”
“Where there’s smoke—”
Wally Christopher sat on the edge of the bed. The tall dark girl had explained the schedule. Pretty girl. Wise looking. Made him uncomfortable somehow, as if she was laughing at him inside herself. Lots of girls like that in the world. Get in the big time and all you got to do is whistle. The big time!
She said to come down and eat at six. He looked at his watch. She hadn’t said anything about wandering around for a while. It was close to five. He went downstairs and out without seeing anyone. A swarm of men were working on the new buildings. He watched them for a while, wondering what time they’d quit, and then he saw them rigging floodlights so the masons could work at night.
From a distance he saw Mr. Banth coming out of the white stone building beyond the barn. Mr. Banth had his arm around the shoulders of an older man, a small man with gray hair that was nearly white. Mr. Banth was talking excitedly. Quite a guy, that Sam Banth. Convincing.
Banth waved to him casually so Wally guessed that it was all right to wander around the place. Diagonally off to the left beyond the white stone building he saw a tennis court. A girl and a fellow were talking over the net. The fellow turned and walked away toward the rear of the white stone building. Wally ambled toward the tennis court. She came walking rapidly toward him, slim brown legs twinkling. She wore white shorts and a halter. She was a striking tan, particularly in contrast to her carrot-red hair.
She stopped and stared at Wally. He saw that her small, pert-featured face was older than he had realized. The weather wrinkles were deep at the corners of her eyes, and the lines were stark from snub nostrils to the corners of her mouth.
“You play tennis?” she asked in a remarkably high-pitched voice. She spoke very rapidly.
“Play at it,” he said grinning. The grin faded. “Say!” he said. “I’ve seen you someplace. Wait a minute. Allison? No. Anson. That’s it. Barbara Anson.”
“Give the boy a cookie,” she said.
“I thought you quit tennis a long time ago.”
Her voice became slower and dropped in pitch. “I didn’t quit on purpose, son. My legs gave out.” They walked side by side. She kept getting a few steps ahead and then slowing down.
He gave her a bashful smile. “Gave out? They look good from here.”
“Listen to him! What’s your name? How old are you? What’s your sport?”
“Wally Christopher. Nineteen. Baseball.”
“Nineteen, eh? Then I am just barely old enough to be your mother.”
“Don’t kid me, Miss Anson.”
She gave him an odd smile. “What’s your trouble in baseball?”
“Can’t hit. Do you think they’ll be able to straighten me out?”
“You don’t know how it’s done?”
“Nobody’s told me a thing yet.”
“I’ll let them tell you, Wally. Don’t worry about it. Don’t worry about a thing. Every little kid in the country will know your name inside of two years.”
At nine o’clock in the morning Miss Tomlinson sent Wally to the white stone building. The old man he had seen Banth talking to was there. And some young men in white coats with high collars.
He was told to strip and then they had him climb onto a table and lie down. There was a long and uncomfortable period of tubes and needles and a thing wrapped around his arm. Then they had him breathing into a tube while a pen drew lines on a piece of graph paper wrapped around a cylinder, behind glass. They took all sorts of samples. They used words to each other that were strange. Wally had heard a few of them but he couldn’t remember what they meant. They put gunk on his temples, stuck metal things into the gunk and another pen drew a different sort of line. After he came back from lunch they waited thirty minutes and then pumped the lunch out of his stomach. It made him sick for a little while and then he was famished again. Another gadget, once it was fastened onto him, made a pen line that had a peak for every time his heart beat.
“Come back here at three in the afternoon the day after tomorrow,” Dr. Tomlinson said. “Your time is your own until then.”
During the two days he played tennis with Barbara. She was amazing; she seemed to know where the ball was going to go the instant he hit it. Banth had gone away again. The buildings were roofed, both of the new ones, and interior work had begun. The dark girl, Miss Tomlinson, wandered around looking glum. There was a lake ten miles away. He drove Barbara’s car and they went swimming. Later he kissed her and she pretended to think it was funny and called him a silly kid, but he guessed from the way her eyes looked that she enjoyed it all right. She didn’t kick the second time or from then on.
He went back at the time Tomlinson had said and they gave him two capsules with a glass of water. The room swung slowly back and forth and darkened and was gone.
When he woke up it was night. He was back in his room. He was very sleepy. He tried to think and remember, but his head hurt. He went back to sleep.
In the morning he got dressed and went downstairs. It was the same as any other morning except that he managed to break the laces in both shoes and that annoyed him. Miss Tomlinson was the only one in the dining room.
“Come and sit with me, Wally,” she said. Her voice was deep and slow.
“Have you got a cold?” he asked.
“That’s what Barbara Anson asked the first morning. No, I’m just as I’ve always been, Wally.”
“You’re different. You act sleepy and slow.”
“Look at the clock, Wally. Look at the pendulum.”
“It’s running down, isn’t it? About to stop?”
“No. It’s just the same. You’re different, Wally. The world is the same. You’re speeded up. Do you know how you’ve changed?”
“What is this?”
“Your voice is so high that you sound almost like a girl, Wally. Every move you make is too fast. You look and act like a man with a bad case of jitters.”
“What’s happened to me? What is this?”
“Everything in the world will look as though it has slowed down, Wally. So will that baseball floating down toward the batter’s box.”
Slowly he began to understand. “They — Dr. Tomlinson, he speeded me up?”