He took the cigar out of his mouth and studied it intently, then popped it back in again.
“As I was saying, Hiram, that’s the difference in us. You can do the stuff, but you miss the possibilities. I can’t do a thing, but I can organize it once the thing is done. Before we get through with this, you’ll be wading in twenty dollar bills clear up to your knees.”
“But I don’t have –”
“Don’t worry. Just leave it all to me. I’ve got the plant and whatever money we may need. We’ll figure out a split.”
“That’s fine of you,” said Taine mechanically.
“Not at all,” Henry insisted, grandly. “It’s just my aggressive, grasping sense of profit. I should be ashamed of myself, cutting in on this.”
He sat on the keg, smoking and watching the TV perform in exquisite color.
“You know, Hiram,” he said, “I’ve often thought of this, but never got around to doing anything about it. I’ve got an old computer up at the plant that we will have to junk because it’s taking up room that we really need. It’s one of our early models, a sort of experimental job that went completely sour. It sure is a screwy thing. No one’s ever been able to make much out of it. We tried some approaches that probably were wrong – or maybe they were right, but we didn’t know enough to make them quite come off. It’s been standing in a corner all these years and I should have junked it long ago. But I sort of hate to do it. I wonder if you might not like it – just to tinker with.”
“Well, I don’t know,” said Taine.
Henry assumed an expansive air. “No obligation, mind you. You may not be able to do a thing with it – I’d frankly be surprised if you could, but there’s no harm in trying. Maybe you’ll decide to tear it down for the salvage you can get. There are several thousand dollars worth of equipment in it. Probably you could use most of it one way or another.”
“It might be interesting,” conceded Taine, but not too enthusiastically.
“Good,” said Henry, with an enthusiasm that made up for Taine’s lack of it. “I’ll have the boys cart it over tomorrow. It’s a heavy thing. I’ll send along plenty of help to get it unloaded and down into the basement and set up.”
Henry stood up carefully and brushed cigar ashes off his lap.
“I’ll have the boys pick up the TV set at the same time,” he said. “I’ll have to tell Abbie you haven’t got it fixed yet. If I ever let it get into the house, the way it’s working now, she’d hold on to it.”
Henry climbed the stairs heavily and Taine saw him out the door into the summer night.
Taine stood in the shadow, watching Henry’s shadowed figure go across the Widow Taylor’s yard to the next street behind his house. He took a deep breath of the fresh night air and shook his head to try to clear his buzzing brain, but the buzzing went right on.
Too much had happened, he told himself. Too much for any single day – first the ceiling and now the TV set. Once he had a good night’s sleep he might be in some sort of shape to try to wrestle with it.
Towser came around the corner of the house and limped slowly up the steps to stand beside his master. He was mud up to his ears.
“You had a day of it, I see,” said Taine. “And, just like I told you, you didn’t get the woodchuck.”
“Woof,” said Towser, sadly.
“You’re just like a lot of the rest of us,” Taine told him, severely. “Like me and Henry Horton and all the rest of us. You’re chasing something and you think you know what you are chasing, but you really don’t. And what is even worse, you have no faint idea of why you’re chasing it.”
Towser thumped a tired tail upon the stoop.
Taine opened the door and stood to one side to let Towser in, then went in himself.
He went through the refrigerator and found part of a roast, a slice or two of luncheon meat, a dried out slab of cheese and half a bowl of cooked spaghetti. He made a pot of coffee and shared the food with Towser.
Then Taine went back downstairs and shut off the television set. He found a trouble lamp and plugged it in and poked the light into the innards of the set.
He squatted on the floor, holding the lamp, trying to puzzle out what had been done to the set. It was different, of course, but it was a little hard to figure out in just what ways it was different. Someone had tinkered with the tubes and had them twisted out of shape and there were little white cubes of metal tucked here and there in what seemed to be an entirely haphazard and illogical manner – although, Taine admitted to himself, there probably was no haphazardness. And the circuit, he saw, had been rewired and a good deal of wiring had been added.
But the most puzzling thing about it was that the whole thing seemed to be just jury-rigged – as if someone had done no more than a hurried, patch-up job to get the set back in working order on an emergency and temporary basis.
Someone, he thought!
And who had that someone been?
He hunched around and peered into the dark corners of the basement and he felt innumerable and many-legged imaginary insects running on his body.
Someone had taken the back off the cabinet and leaned it against the bench and had left the screws which held the back laid neatly in a row upon the floor. Then they had jury-rigged the set and jury-rigged it far better than it had ever been before.
If this was a jury-job, he wondered, just what kind of job would it have been if they had had the time to do it up in style?
They hadn’t had the time, of course. Maybe they had been scared off when he had come home – scared off even before they could get the back on the set again.
He stood up and moved stiffly away.
First the ceiling in the morning – and now, in the evening, Abbie’s television set.
And the ceiling, come to think of it, was not a ceiling only. Another liner, if that was the proper term for it, of the same material as the ceiling, had been laid beneath the floor, forming a sort of boxed-in area between the joists. He had struck that liner when he had tried to drill into the floor.
And what, he asked himself, if all the house were like that, too?
There was just one answer to it alclass="underline" There was something in the house with him!
Towser had heard that something or smelled it or in some other manner sensed it and had dug frantically at the floor in an attempt to dig it out, as if it were a woodchuck.
Except that this, whatever it might be, certainly was no woodchuck.
He put away the trouble light and went upstairs.
Towser was curled up on a rug in the living room beside the easy chair and beat his tail in polite decorum in greeting to his master.
Taine stood and stared down at the dog. Towser looked back at him with satisfied and sleepy eyes, then heaved a doggish sigh and settled down to sleep.
Whatever Towser might have heard or smelled or sensed this morning, it was quite evident that as of this moment he was aware of it no longer.
Then Taine remembered something else.
He had filled the kettle to make water for the coffee and had set it on the stove. He had turned on the burner and it had worked the first time.
He hadn’t had to kick the stove to get the burner going.
He woke in the morning and someone was holding down his feet and he sat up quickly to see what was going on.
But there was nothing to be alarmed about; it was only Towser who had crawled into bed with him and now lay sprawled across his feet.
Towser whined softly and his back legs twitched as he chased dream-rabbits.