“Light what, Doc?”
“We start with two obvious problems,” Doc continued. “First, they can’t stand heat, and second, they are to a certain extent photophobic. I don’t know how I’m going to get enough cold light on them. Would it be possible, do you suppose, to condition them, to light them constantly, so that the photophobia subsides?”
“Oh sure,” said Mack uneasily.
“Don’t be too sure,” said Doc. “The very process of conditioning might, if it did not kill them, change their normal reactions. It’s always difficult to evaluate responses that approximate emotions. If I place them in an abnormal situation, can I trust the response to be normal?”
“No,” said Mack.
“You cannot dissect for emotion,” Doc went on. “If a human body were found by another species and dissected, there would be no possible way of knowing about its emotions or its thoughts. Now, it occurs to me that the rage, or rather the symptom that seems like rage, must be fairly abnormal in itself. I have seen it happen in aquariums. Does it occur on the sea bottom? Is the observed phenomenon not perhaps limited to the aquarium? No, I can’t permit myself to believe that, or my whole thesis falls.”
“Doc!” Mack cried. “Look, Doc, it’s me—Mack!”
“Hello, Mack,” said Doc. “How much did you say?”
“You’ve already given it to me,” said Mack, and he felt like a fool the moment he’d said it.
“I need better equipment,” said Doc. “Goddam it, I can’t see without better equipment.”
“Doc, how’s about you and me stepping over and getting a half-pint of Old Tennis Shoes?”
“Fine,” said Doc.
“I’ll buy,” said Mack. “I’ve got a couple of loose bucks.”
Doc said sharply, “I’ll have to get some money. Where can I get some money, Mack?”
“I told you, I’ll buy, Doc.”
“I’ll need a wide-angle binocularscope and light. I’ll have to find out about light—maybe a pinpoint spot from across the room. No, they’d move out of that. Maybe there are new kinds of lights. I’ll have to look into it.”
“Come on, Doc.”
Doc bought a pint of Old Tennis Shoes and later sent Mack out with money to buy another pint. The two of them sat in the laboratory side by side, staring into the aquarium, resting their elbows on the shelf, and they got to the point where they were mixing a little water with the whisky.
“I got an uncle with an eye like them,” said Mack. “Rich old bastard too. I wonder why, when you get rich, you get a cold eye.”
“Self-protection,” said Doc solemnly. “Conditioned by relatives, I guess.”
“Like I was saying, Doc. Everybody in the Row is worried about you. You don’t have no fun. You wander around like you was lost.”
“I guess it’s reorientation,” said Doc.
“Well, some people think you need a dame to kind of nudge you out of it. I know a guy that every time he gets feeling low he goes back to his wife. Makes him appreciate what he had. He goes away again and feels just fine.”
“Shock therapy,” said Doc. “I’m all right, Mack. Don’t let anybody give me a wife though—don’t let them give me a wife! I guess a man needs a direction. That’s what I’ve been needing. You can only go in circles so long.”
“I kind of like it that way,” said Mack.
“I’m going to call my paper ‘Symptoms in Some Cephalopods Approximating Apoplexy.’ ”
“Great God Almighty!” said Mack.
4
There Would Be No Game
As he got to know him, Joseph and Mary regarded Doc with something akin to love—for love feeds on the unknown and unknowable. Doc’s honesty was exotic to Joseph and Mary. He found it strange. It attracted him in spite of the fact that he could not understand it. He felt that there was something he had missed, though he could not figure what it was.
One day, sitting in Western Biological, Joseph and Mary saw a chess board and, finding that it was a game and being good at games, he asked Doc to teach him. J and M easily absorbed the characters and qualities of castles and bishops and knights and royalty and pawns. During the first game Doc was called to the telephone, and when he returned he said, “You’ve moved a pawn of mine and your queen and knight.”
“How’d you know?” the Patrón asked.
“I know the game,” said Doc. “Look, Joseph and Mary, chess is possibly the only game in the world in which it is impossible to cheat.”
Joseph and Mary inspected this statement with amazement. “Why not?” he demanded.
“If it were possible to cheat there would be no game,” said Doc.
J and M carried this away with him. It bothered him at night. He looked at it from all angles. And he went back to ask more about it. He was charmed with the idea, but he couldn’t understand it.
Doc explained patiently, “Both players know exactly the same things. The game is played in the mind.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Well, look! You can’t cheat in mathematics or poetry or music because they’re based on truth. Untruth or cheating is just foreign, it has no place. You can’t cheat in arithmetic.”
Joseph and Mary shook his head. “I don’t get it,” he said.
It was a shocking conception, and he was drawn to it because, in a way, its outrageousness seemed to him like a new, strange way of cheating. In the back of his mind an idea stirred. Suppose you took honesty and made a racket of it—it might be the toughest of all to break. It was so new to him that his mind recoiled from it, but still it wouldn’t let him alone. His eyes narrowed. “Maybe he’s worked out a system,” he said to himself.
5
Enter Suzy
It is popular to picture a small-town constable as dumb and clumsy. In the books he plays the stock bumpkin part. And people retain this attitude even when they know it’s not true. We have so many beliefs we know are not true.
A constable, if he has served for a few years, knows more about his town than anyone else and on all levels. He is aware of the delicate political balance between mayor and councilmen, Fire Department and insurance companies. He knows why Mrs. Geltham is giving a big party and who is likely to be there. Usually he knows, when Mabel Andrews reports a burglar, whether it is a rat in the dining room, a burglar, or just wishful thinking. A constable knows that Mr. Geltham is sleeping with the schoolteacher and how often. He knows when high-school boys have switched from gin to marijuana. He is aware of every ripple on the town’s surface. If there is a crime the constable usually knows who didn’t do it and often who did. With a good constable on duty a hundred things don’t happen that might. Sometimes there’s a short discussion in an alley; sometimes a telephone call; sometimes only his shadow under a street light. When he gets a cat down out of a tree he knows all about the owner of the cat. And many weeping, parent-prodded little boys and girls put small things, stolen from the Five-and-Dime, in the constable’s hands, and he, if he is a good constable, gives them a sense of mercy-in-justice without injuring the dignity of the law.
A stranger getting off the Del Monte Express in Monterey wouldn’t be aware that his arrival was noted, but if something happened that night he would know it all right.
Monterey’s Joe Blaikey was a good constable. He wouldn’t ever be chief—didn’t much want to be. Everybody in town liked Joe and trusted him. He was the only man in town who could stop a husband-and-wife fight. He came by his techniques in both social life and in violence from being the youngest of fifteen nice but violent children. Just getting along at home had been his teacher. Joe knew everyone in Monterey and he could size up a stranger almost instantly.