The things on the blackboard weren't like that at all. The board was covered with variations of a simple expression that consisted of five letters and two symbols: a right-handed pothook and a left-handed pothook.
"What do they mean?" I asked, pointing.
"Somethings I made up," he said nervously. "The word for that one is
'enfields.' The other one is 'is enfielded by.'"
"What's that mean?"
His luminous eyes were haunted. He didn't answer.
"It looks like simple stuff. I read somewhere that all the basic stuff is simple once it's been discovered."
"Yes," he said almost inaudibly. "It is simple, Beel. Too damn simple, I think. Better I carry it in my head, I think." He strode to the blackboard and erased it. Instinctively I half-rose to stop him. He gave me a grin that was somehow bitter and unlike him. "Don't worry," he said. "I don't forget it." He tapped his forehead. "I can't forget it." I hope I never see again on any face the look that was on his.
"Julio," I said, appalled. "Why don't you get out of here for a while? Why don't you run over to New York and see your folks and have some fun?
They can't keep you here against your will."
"They told me I shouldn't—" he said uncertainly. And then he got tough.
"You're damn right, Beel. Let's go in together. I get dressed up. Er—You tell Leitzer, hah?" He couldn't quite face up to the hard-boiled security man.
I told Leitzer, who hit the ceiling. But all it boiled down to was that he sincerely wished Gomez and I wouldn't leave. We weren't in the Army, we weren't in jail. I got hot at last and yelled back that we were damn well going out and he couldn't stop us. He called New York on his direct wire and apparently New York confirmed it, regretfully.
We got on the 4:05 Jersey Central, with Higgins and Dalhousie tailing us at a respectful distance. Gomez didn't notice them and I didn't tell him.
He was having too much fun. He had a shine put on his shoes at Penn Station and worried about the taxi fare as we rode up to Spanish Harlem.
His parents lived in a neat little three-room apartment. A lot of the furniture looked brand-new, and I was pretty sure who had paid for it.
The mother and father spoke only Spanish, and mumbled shyly when
"mi amigo Beel" was introduced. I had a very halting conversation with the father while the mother and Gomez rattled away happily and she poked his ribs to point up the age-old complaint of any mother anywhere that he wasn't eating enough.
The father, of course, thought the boy was a janitor or something in the Pentagon and, as near as I could make out, he was worried about his Julio being grabbed off by a man-hungry government girl. I kept reassuring him that his Julio was a good boy, a very good boy, and he seemed to get some comfort out of it.
There was a little spat when his mother started to set the table. Gomez said reluctantly that we couldn't stay, that we were eating somewhere else. His mother finally dragged from him the admission that we were going to the Porto Bello so he could see Rosa, and everything was smiles again. The father told me that Rosa was a good girl, a very good girl.
Walking down the three flights of stairs with yelling little kids playing tag around us, Gomez asked proudly: "You not think they in America only a little time, hey?"
I yanked him around by the elbow as we went down the brown-stone stoop into the street. Otherwise he would have seen our shadows for sure. I didn't want to spoil his fun.
The Porto Bello was full, and the pretty little girl was on duty as cashier at the table. Gomez got a last-minute attack of cold feet at the sight of her. "No table," he said. "We better go someplace else."
I practically dragged him in. "We'll get a table in a minute," I said.
"Julio," said the girl, when she saw him.
He looked sheepish. "Hello, Rosa. I'm back for a while."
"I'm glad to see you again," she said tremulously.
"I'm glad to see you again too—" I nudged him. "Rosa, this is my good friend Beel. We work together in Washington."
"Pleased to meet you, Rosa. Can you have dinner with us? I'll bet you and Julio have a lot to talk over."
"Well, I'll see …look, there's a table for you. I'll see if I can get away."
We sat down and she flagged down the proprietress and got away in a hurry.
All three of us had arróz con polio—rice with chicken and lots of other things. Their shyness wore off and I was dealt out of the conversation, but I didn't mind. They were a nice young couple. I liked the way they smiled at each other, and the things they remembered happily—
movies, walks, talks. It made me feel like a benevolent uncle with one foot in the grave. It made me forget for a while the look on Gomez's face when he turned from the blackboard he had covered with too-simple math.
Over dessert I broke in. By then they were unselfconsciously holding hands. "Look," I said, "why don't you two go on and do the town? Julio, I'll be at the Madison Park Hotel." I scribbled the address and gave it to him. "And I'll get a room for you. Have fun and reel in any time." I rapped his knee. He looked down and I slipped him four twenties. I didn't know whether he had money on him or not, but anything extra the boy could use he had coming to him.
"Swell," he said. "Thanks." And looked shame-faced while I looked paternal.
I had been watching a young man who was moodily eating alone in a corner, reading a paper. He was about Julio's height and build and he wore a sports jacket pretty much like Julio's. And the street was pretty dark outside.
The young man got up moodily and headed for the cashier's table.
"Gotta go," I said. "Have fun."
I went out of the restaurant right behind the young man and walked as close behind him as I dared, hoping we were being followed.
After a block and a half of this, he turned on me and snarled: "Wadda you, mister? A wolf? Beat it!"
"Okay," I said mildly, and turned and walked the other way. Hig-gins and Dalhousie were standing there, flat-footed and open-mouthed.
They sprinted back to the Porto Bello, and I followed them. But Julio and Rosa had already left.
"Tough, fellows," I said to them as they stood in the doorway. They looked as if they wanted to murder me. "He won't get into any trouble,"
I said. "He's just going out with his girl." Dalhousie made a strangled noise and told Higgins: "Cruise around the neighborhood. See if you can pick them up. I'll follow Vilchek." He wouldn't talk to me. I shrugged and got a cab and went to the Madison Park Hotel, a pleasantly unfashionable old place with big rooms where I stay when business brings me to New York. They had a couple of adjoining singles; I took one in my own name and the other for Gomez.
I wandered around the neighborhood for a while and had a couple of beers in one of the ultra-Irish bars on Third Avenue. After a pleasant argument with a gent who thought the Russians didn't have any atomic bombs and faked their demonstrations and that we ought to blow up their industrial cities tomorrow at dawn, I went back to the hotel.
I didn't get to sleep easily. The citizen who didn't believe Russia could maul the United States pretty badly or at all had started me thinking again—all kinds of ugly thoughts. Dr. Mines, who had turned into a shrunken old man at the mention of applying Gomez's work. The look on the boy's face. My layman's knowledge that present-day "atomic energy" taps only the smallest fragment of the energy locked up in the atom. My layman's knowledge that once genius has broken a trail in science, mediocrity can follow the trail.
But I slept at last, for three hours.
At four-fifteen A.M. according to my watch the telephone rang long and hard. There was some switchboard and long-distance-operator mumbo-jumbo and then Julio's gleeful voice: "Beel! Congratulate us.
We got marriage!"
"Married," I said fuzzily. "You got married, not marriage. How's that again?"