I explained: “I have to get my columns out for a couple of weeks ahead. I’ll be going on a trip.”
“I heard about it,” said Lightning eagerly. “Astronomy.”
“Well, yes, I guess you could say that. All the big observatories. Have to write a series about outer space. Way out. Galaxies and stuff.”
“Mr. Graves,” said Lightning, “do you think maybe they’ll let you look through some of the telescopes?”
“I doubt it. Telescope time is pretty tightly scheduled.”
“Mr. Graves . .
“What is it, Lightning?”
“You think there are people out there? Out on them other stars?”
CJ wouldn’t know. No one knows. It stands to reason there must be other life somewhere.”
“Like us?”
“No, I don’t think like us.”
Lightning stood there, shuffling his feet; then he said suddenly: “Gosh, I forgot to tell you, Mr. Graves. There’s someone here to see you.”
“Someone here?”
“Yeah. He came in a couple of hours ago. I told him you wouldn’t be in for a long time yet. But he said he’d wait.”
“Where is he, then?”
“He went into the monitoring room and took the easy chair in there. I guess he fell asleep.”
I heaved myself out of the chair. “Let’s go and see,” I said.
I might have known. There was no one else who would do a thing like that. There was no one else to whom the time of day meant nothing.
He lay back in the chair, with a silly smile pasted on his face. From the radio panel issued the low-voiced gabble of the various police departments, the highway patrol, the fire departments, and the other agencies of law and order, forming a back—ground of gibberish for his polite snoring.
We stood and looked at him.
Lightning asked: “Who is he, Mr. Graves? Do you know him, Mr. Graves?”
“His name,” I said, “is Carleton Stirling. He’s a biologist over at the university and a friend of mine.”
“He don’t look like no biologist to me,” said Lightning firmly.
“Lightning,” I told the skeptic, “you will find in time that biologists and astronomers and physicists and all the rest of that ungodly tribe of science are just people like the rest of us.”
“But coming in at three o’clock to see you. Expecting you’d be here.”
“That’s the way he lives,” I said. “It wouldn’t occur to him that the rest of the world might live differently. That’s the kind of man he is.”
And that’s the kind of man he was, all right.
He owned a watch, but he never used it except to time off the tests and experiments he happened to be doing. He never, actually, knew what time of day it was. When he got hungry, he scrounged up Some food. When he couldn’t keep awake, he found a place to curl up and hammered off some sleep. When he had finished what he Was doing or, maybe, got discouraged, he’d set off for a cabin that he owned on a lake up north and spend a day or week loafing.
He so consistently forgot to go to classes, so seldom turned up for scheduled lectures, that the university administration finally gave up. They no longer even bothered to pretend that he instructed. They let him keep his lab and let him hole up there with his cages of guinea pigs and rats and his apparatus. But they got their money’s worth. He was forever coming up with something that spelled publicity—not only for himself but for the university. So far as he, himself, was concerned, the university could have had it all. In the public eye or the public print, or out of it—there was no difference so far as Carleton Stirling was concerned.
The only things he lived for were his experiments, his ceaseless delvings into the mysteries that lay like a challenge to him. He had an apartment, but there were times when he didn’t visit it for days. He tossed paychecks into drawers and left them accumulating there until the university’s accounting people phoned him urgently to find out what could have happened to them. Once he won a prize—not one of the big, imposing ones, but still one full of honor and with some cash attached—and forgot entirely to attend the dinner where it was to have been awarded to him.
And now he lay back in the chair, with his head rolled against its back and his long legs outthrust into the shadow underneath the radio console. He was snoring gently and he looked not like one of the world’s most promising research men but like a transient who might have wandered in to find a place to sleep. He needed not only a shave but a haircut as well. His tie was knotted unevenly and pulled around to one side, and there were spots upon it, more than likely from the cans of soup he had heated up and spooned down absentmindedly while he continued to wrestle with whatever problem he currently was concerned with.
I stepped into the room and put a hand down on his shoulder and shook him gently.
He came awake easily, not startled, and looked up at me and grinned.
“Hi, Parker,” he said to me.
“Hi, yourself,” I said. “I would have let You finish out your sleep, but I was afraid You’d break your neck the way you had it twisted.”
He uncoiled and got up and followed me out into the newsroom.
“Almost morning,” he said, nodding at the windows. “Time to get awake.”
I looked and saw that the windows were no longer black but beginning to get gray.
He ran his fingers through his shock of hair, went through the motions of wiping off his face with an open hand. Then he dug into a pocket and brought out a fistful of crumpled bills. He selected two of them and handed them to me.
“Here,” he said. “Just happened to remember. Thought I’d better do it before I forgot again.”
“But, Carl . . .”
He shook the two bills impatiently, shoving them at me.
“A couple of years ago,” he told me. “That weekend up at the lake. I ran out of money playing slot machines.”
I took the bills and put them in my pocket. I could just vaguely remember the incident.
“You mean you stopped by just to pay me off?”
“Sure,” he said. “Was passing the building and there was a parking place. Thought I’d run up and see you.” don’t work at night.”
He grinned at me. “Didn’t matter, parker. It got me some sleep.”
“I’ll stand you breakfast. There’s a joint across the street. Ham and eggs are good.”
He shook his head. “Must be getting back. Wasted too much time. I have work to do.”
“Something new?” I asked him. He hesitated for a moment, then he said:
“Nothing publishable. Not yet. Maybe later, but not yet. A long way yet to go.”
I waited, looking at him. “Ecology,” he said. “I don’t get you.”
“You know what ecology is, Parker.”
“Sure. The interrelation of life and conditions in a common area.”
He asked me: “You ever wonder what kind of life pattern it would take to be independent of all surrounding factors—a nonecological creature, so to speak?”
“It’s impossible,” I told him. “There is food and air—”
“Just an idea. Just a hunch. A puzzle, let us say. A conundrum in adaptability. It’ll Probably come to nothing.”
“Just the same, I’ll ask you every now and then.”
“Do that,” he said. “And the next time You come over, remind me about the gun.
The one you loaned me to take up to the lake.”
He’d borrowed it a month before to do some target shooting when he’d gone up to his cabin. No one in his right mind, no one but Carleton Stirling, would want to do target practice with a .303.
“I used up your box of cartridges,” he said. “I bought another box.”
“It wasn’t necessary.”
“Well, hell,” he said, “I had a lot of fun.”
He didn’t say good-bye. He just turned on his heels and strode out of the newsroom and down the corridor. We heard him go clattering down the stairs.
“Mr. Graves,” said Lightning, “that guy is plumb nuts.”
I didn’t answer Lightning. I went back to my desk and tried to get to work.
Gavin Walker came in. He pulled out his assignment book and looked at it. He made a disrespectful noise.