It was a jumbled museum. There were stuffed birds in glass bell jars, a brass astrolabe, a globe that would have made Nero W olfe turn green with envy. There was also a gas chromatograph with its guts torn out and tools lying around it, an Edison phonograph for playing cylinders, three IBM Selectrics stacked in a corner gathering dust, a giant Xerox machine that stretched through a doorway into another room, and a crystal ball that wouldn't have made it through an NBA hoop. Sitting here and there on tables were bits and pieces of laboratory glassware.
The only bare wall was over the fireplace -- bare in the sense of having no bookcases.
There were a few trophies on the mantel, and pictures and diplomas hung on every available square inch.
I'd been looking at one for quite a while before I realized it was a Nobel Prize. I'd thought the actual prizes were medals, but maybe he had that tucked away somewhere. This was an ornate parchment, for Physics, and it was dated in the "60s. I thought I should have known his name, but they give those things away to four or five people every year and usually you've never heard of them and have no idea what they were given for. Still, I was impressed.
There was a picture of Mayer with President Eisenhower. Signed: "Regards, Ike." There was a group picture: Mayer, Linus Pauling, Oppenheimer, and Edward Teller. There was a shot of a much younger Mayer shaking hands with Mr Relativity himself: Albert Einstein. It was unsigned. I was right, Mayer didn't look anything like him.
"I confess it," he said, behind me. "I'm a pack rat. I can never seem to throw anything away. I used to, and then a few years later I'd try to find it and it wouldn't be there."
He hurried into the room, wiping his hands on a towel. He seemed nervous. I wondered why, until he picked up a plate with a half-eaten sandwich on it and a wine glass with a red stain at the bottom. He kept bustling around the room, not making a dent in the clutter but seeming to feel he had to clean up.
"I have a girl who comes in once a week," he apologized. "She manages my excesses.
Makes sure typhoid doesn't get a foothold." He picked up a soiled shirt and a single red sock.
"Doctor Mayer, I don't-"
"You might wonder how she knows what is excess and what is not," he said, on his way out the door. I heard him dumping the debris somewhere, raising his voice so I could hear him. "Its not an easy task, but I have trained her fairly well. She will not disturb the important experiments in progress. She sticks to the spoiled food and spilled coffee." He was back now, helplessly scanning the room.
"Doctor Mayer, it doesn't matter to me. I know what a working laboratory can look like."
"You might not believe it," he said, "but I know where everything is."
"I thought you would."
He looked at me closely for the first time since his return, and he seemed to relax a little.
God knows, the last thing I had expected was to have to reassure him.
"Call me Arnold, please," he said. "I don't go for the Doctor bullshit." ,, He eventually got me settled in a comfortable red leather chair facing his desk, with a glass of The Glenlivet sitting on a table beside me. I raised the glass and sipped; I thought I ought to keep my wits about me.
"You go first class," I said, indicating the bottle of whiskey.
"Some lucrative patents," he said, with a shrug. "Investments. They provide enough money for an old fool to indulge his wild theories."
"Are you a theoretical or applied physicist?"
He laughed, looked at me askance, and settled down in his chair. I had the feeling he was humoring me; he knew I had come to tell him a story, but I couldn't just come right out with it.
"A little of both, these days. I was always a tinkerer, but I made my reputation in pure physics, in mathematics. A "physicist," these days, is usually more engineer than scientist, to my way of thinking. While I've never been afraid to get my hands dirty, I tired of weapons development. I .have no interest in building a more powerful laser or a smaller fusion bomb.
If you weren't already in such trouble, I'd feel honor-bound to warn you away from me. I'm a terrible security risk. Being seen with me is enough to get you kicked out of almost any government job."
"That's no problem anymore."
"Indeed. At any rate ... they wanted me to work on a larger particle accelerator. I decided not to. I kept thinking of Newton, of Rontgen ... men like that. Men who did the basic thinking that led to gigawatt particle accelerators."
"You don't think those accelerators are worthwhile research tools?"
"On the contrary. I keep abreast of all the results. It may very well be that the breakthrough I'm looking for will come from Batavia, or Stanford. But I don't really think so.
I think it will come from the most unexpected place, as so many breakthroughs do.
Something as simple as Wilhelm Rontgen accidentally exposing a photographic plate and discovering X rays."
"So what is it you're looking for? What is your basic research?"
"The nature of time," he said, and leaned forward. "And now that you've examined my bona fides, I think it's your turn."
I took another sip of the whiskey, and started to tell him.
It took most of the morning. I went into great detail, much more than I had been willing or able to before the Board.
He asked very little, but took a lot of notes. A few minutes into the story he asked if I minded being recorded. I said I didn't care. He didn't turn anything on, so I assumed he'd been doing it right along.
At lunchtime he led me into the kitchen. I talked while he prepared a salad and some cold-cut sandwiches. We ate them, and I continued to talk.
And finally I was through. I looked at the glass of whiskey and saw it was still half-full.
I've got to say, that made me proud.
To be honest, I had expected an uncritical reception. The little I knew about Mayer was from a few comments Roger Keane and Kevin Briley had made after the night of that press conference, to the effect that he was the "local crackpot," who showed up at air crashes and other disasters all over California and much of the west. I had expected a sympathetic ear, one as eager to fall for my "evidence" as a grad student in astrology looking at one of Uri Geller's spoons.
So what did Mayer do? He grilled me unmercifully for two hours. If the bastard had been running for California Attorney General, he'd have had my vote.
He went at me up, down, and sideways. He had me sketch the stunner Louise had taken from me. He tore at anything that looked inconsistent -- and let's face it, that included the whole unlikely story. He wanted to see physical evidence. I'd brought it with me, and laid it out before him: Louise's clothes, the glass she had handled, a photo of the fingerprints obtained from it, ten grainy blowups of her face from various angles, photostats of the autopsy reports, a watch I'd stolen that was still off by forty-five minutes because I'd kept winding it, a Vicks inhaler, and an empty package of Clorets.
He sniffed the inhaler, and wrinkled his nose. The smell was faint by now, but it was still foul. He fingered the material of her skirt, poked at her abandoned underwear with a penal eraser.
"We can run some tests on this cloth," he said. "Though I doubt it would tell us anything.
Tell me, Bill, would you object to telling this story again, under hypnosis?"
I Laughed.
"I'd try anything, Arnold, but I don't think that"ll do you any good. I've tried it before, and I can't be hypnotized."