Hawks smiled without amusement. “Lieutenant, if I weren’t able to make the phone call to Washington that I can make, this job would have been all finished right now.”
“Oh. I guess we’d better take good care of him, then.” The lieutenant shook his head. “I hope he lasts. He’s a little on the hard-to-get-along-with side, for us. But you can’t have everything. I guess if you’ve finally got a man who works out smoothly on the science part of this, that’s the main thing, even if it’s not all peaches and cream down here on the practical end. “
“Yes,” Hawks said. The man at the tape recorder shut the machine off, walked to the map table, tightened a piece of chalk in the socket of his pointer and, reaching out, made a delicate scarlet fleck-mark on the white plastic. He looked at it critically and then nodded with satisfaction.
Hawks nodded, too. He said, “Thank you, Lieutenant,” to the officer, and went up to his office.
That day, the elapsed time Barker was able to survive within the formation was raised to four minutes, thirty-eight seconds.
On the day that the elapsed time was brought to six minutes, twelve seconds, Connington came to see Hawks in his office.
Hawks looked up curiously from behind his desk. Connington walked slowly across the office. “Wanted to talk to you,” he mumbled as he sat down. “It seemed as if I ought to.” His eyes searched restlessly back and forth.
“Why?” Hawks asked.
“Well — I don’t know, exactly. Except that it wouldn’t feel right, just sort of letting it drop. There’s — I don’t know, exactly, what you’d call it, but there’s a pattern to life… Ought to be a pattern, anyhow: a beginning, a middle, and an end. Chapters, or something. I mean, there’s got to be a pattern, or how could you control things?”
“I can see that it might be necessary to believe that,” Hawks said patiently.
“You still don’t give an inch, do you?” Connington said.
Hawks said nothing, and Connington waited a moment, then let the matter drop. “Anyhow,” he said, “I wanted you to know I was leaving.”
Hawks sat back in his chair and looked at him expressionlessly. “Where are you going?”
Connington gestured vaguely. “East. I’ll find a job there, I guess.”
“Is Claire going with you?”
Connington nodded, his eyes on the floor. “Yes, she is.” He looked up and smiled desperately. “It’s a funny way to have it end up, isn’t it?”
“Exactly the way you planned it,” Hawks pointed out. “All but the part about eventually becoming company president.”
Connington’s expression set into a defiant grin. “Oh, I didn’t really figure it was as sure a thing as that. I just wanted to see what happened when I put some salt on your tail.” He stood up quickly. “Well, I guess that’s that. I just wanted to let you know how it all came out in the end.”
“Well, no,” Hawks said. “Barker and I are still not finished.”
“I am,” Connington said defiantly. “I’ve got my part of it. Whatever happens from now on doesn’t have anything to do with me.”
“Then you’re the winner of the contest.”
“Sure,” Connington said.
“And that’s what it always is. A contest. And then a winner emerges, and that’s the end of that part of everyone’s life. All right. Goodbye, Connington.”
“Goodbye, Hawks.” He turned away, and hesitated. He looked back over his shoulder. “I guess that was all I wanted to say.”
Hawks said nothing.
“I could have done it with a note or a phone call.” At the door, he said, “I didn’t have to do it at all.” He shook his head, puzzled, and looked to Hawks as if for an answer to a question he was asking himself.
Hawks said gently, “You just wanted to make sure I knew who the winner was, Connington. That’s all.”
“I guess,” Connington said unsurely, and walked slowly out.
The next day, when the elapsed time was up to six minutes, thirty-nine seconds, Hawks came into the laboratory and said to Barker, “I understand you’re moving into the city, here.”
“Who told you?”
“Winchell.” Hawks looked carefully at Barker. “The new personnel director.”
Barker grunted. “Connington’s gone East, someplace.” He looked up with a puzzled expression on his face. “He and Claire went out to get her stuff yesterday, while I was here. They smashed all those windows looking from the living room out on the lawn. I’ll have to have them all replaced before I can put the place up for sale. I never thought he was like that.”
“I wish you’d keep the house. I envy it.”
“That’s none of your business, Hawks.”
But, nevertheless, the elapsed time had been brought up to six minutes, thirty-nine seconds.
On the day that the elapsed time was brought up to seven minutes, twelve seconds, Hawks was in his office, tracing his fingertip down the crumpled chart, when his desk telephone rang.
He glanced aside at it with a ificker of his eyes, hunched his shoulders, and continued with what he was doing. His fingertip moved along the uncertain blue line, twisting between the shaded black areas, each marked with its instruction and relative time bearing, each bordered by its drift of red X’s, as if the chart represented a diagram of a prehistoric beach, where one stumbling organism had marked its labored trail up upon the littered sand between the long rows of drying kelp and other flotsam which now lay stranded under the lowering sky. He stared down raptly at the chart, his lips moving, then closed his eyes, frowned, repeated bearings and instructions, opened his eyes and leaned forward again.
The telephone rang once more, softly but without stopping. He tightened his hand into a momentary fist, then pushed The chart aside and took the handset off its cradle. “Yes, Vivian,” he said.
He listened, and finally said, “All right. Call the gatehouse, please, and clear Dr. Latourette for a visitor’s pass. I’ll wait for him here.” He put the telephone down and looked around at the bare walls of his office.
Sam Latourette knocked softly on the door and came in, his mouth quirked into a shy half-smile, his footsteps slow and diffident as he crossed the room.
He was wearing a rumpled suit and an open-throated white shirt without a tie. There were fresh razor nicks on the underside of his jaw and on his neck, as if he had shaved only a few minutes ago. His hair was carefully combed; still damp from. the water he had used on it, it lay in thick furrows with his scalp visible between them, as though someone had found an old papier-mache bust of him and from an impulse of old fondness, had refurbished it as well as was possible under the circumstances.
“Hello, Ed,” he said gently, extending his hand as Hawks got up quickly. “It’s been a while.”
“Yes. Yes it has. Sit down, Sam — Here; here’s the chair.”
“I hoped you could spare the time to see me,” Latourette said, sinking down. He looked up apologetically. “Things must be moving along pretty fast now.”
“Yes,” Hawks said, lowering himself into his own chair. “Yes, pretty much so.”
Latourette looked down at the chart, which Hawks had folded and put down on the far end of the desk. “It looks like I was wrong about Barker.”
“I don’t know.” Hawks moved a hand toward the chart, then withdrew it and put his hands back in his lap. “He’s making progress for us. I suppose that’s what counts.” He watched Latourette uncertainly, his eyes restless.
“You know,” Latourette said with that same embarrassed twist of his features, “I didn’t want that job with Hughes Aircraft. I thought I did. You know. A man — a man wants to keep working. Anyway, that’s what he’s supposed to want.”