They Walked Like Men Read online

  I had left the ceiling light on when I’d gone pottering off to bed, and the clock on the wall said it was three-thirty.

  I discovered that I was still better than half dressed and rather badly rumpled. My shoes were off and my tie was untied but still trailing from the collar, and I was a mess.

  I stood there, taking counsel with myself. If I went back to bed at this hour of the morning, I’d sleep like a sodden lump until noon or better and wake up feeling terrible.

  But if I got cleaned up now and got some food inside of me and went to the office early, before anyone else arrived, I’d get a lot of work done and could knock off early in the day and have a decent weekend.

  And it was a Friday and I had a date with Joy. I stood there for a while without doing anything, feeling good about Friday night and Joy.

  I planned it all—there’d just be time to boil the coffee

  water while I took a shower, and I’d have toast and eggs and bacon and I’d drink a lot of tomato juice, which might do something for the lonely coldness of the mind.

  But first of all, before I did anything at all, I’d look out in the hall and see if the semicircle still was gone from the carpeting.

  I went to the door and looked.

  In front of it lay the preposterous semicircle of bare flooring.

  I jeered thinly at my doubting mind and my outraged logic and went back into the kitchen to put on the coffee water.

  III

  A newsroom is a cold and lonely place early in the morning. It is big and empty, and it’s neat, so neat that it is depressing. Later in the day it takes on the clutter that makes it warm and human—the clipped, dismembered papers littered on the desks, the balls of scrunched-up copy paper tossed onto the floor, the overflowing spikes. But in the morning, after the maintenance crew has it tidied up, it has something of the pallor of an operating room. The few lights that are burning seem far too bright and the stripped-down desks and chairs so precisely placed that they spell a hard efficiency—the efficiency that later in the day is masked and softened when the staff is hard at work and the place is littered and that strange undertone of bedlam which goes into each edition of the paper is building to a peak.

  The morning staff had gone home hours before and Joe Newman also was gone. I had rather expected that I might find him there, but his desk was as straight and neat as all the rest of them and there was no sign of him.

  The pastepots, all freshly scraped and cleaned and filled with fresh, new paste, stood in solemn, shiny rows upon the city and the copydesks. Each pot was adorned with a brush thrust into the paste at a jaunty angle. The copy off the wire machines was laid out precisely on the news desk. And from the cubby hole over in the corner came the muted chuckle of the wire machines themselves, busily grinding out the grist of news from all parts of the world.

  Somewhere in the tangled depths of the half-dark newsroom a copyboy was whistling—one of those high-pitched, jerky tunes that are no tunes at all. I shuddered at the sound of it. There was something that was almost obscene about someone whistling at this hour of the morning.

  I went over to my desk and sat down. Someone on the maintenance crew had taken all my magazines and scientific journals and stacked them in a pile. Only the afternoon before, I’d gone through them carefully and set aside the ones I would be using in getting out my columns. I looked sourly at the stack and swore. Now I’d have to paw through all of them to find the ones I wanted.

  A copy of the last edition of the morning paper lay white and naked on the clean desk top. I picked it up and leaned back in the chair and began running through the news.

  There wasn’t much of anything. There still was trouble down in Africa, and the Venezuela mess was looking fairly nasty. Someone had held up a downtown drugstore just before closing time, and there was a picture of a buck-toothed clerk pointing out to a bored policeman where the holdup man had stood. The governor had said that the legislature, when it came back next year, would have to buckle down to its responsibility of finding some new sources of tax revenue. If this wasn’t done, said the governor, the state would be going down the drain. It was something that the governor had said many times before.

  Over in the top, left-hand corner of page one was an area economic roundup by-lined by Grant Jensen, business editor of the morning staff. Grant was in one of his professionally optimistic moods. The upward business trend, he wrote, was running strong and steady. Store sales were holding well, industrial indexes all were on the up side, there was no immediate prospect of any labor trouble—things were looking rosy. This was especially true, the article went on to say, in the home construction field. The demand for housing had outrun supply, and all the home builders in the entire federal reserve district were booked to full capacity for almost a year ahead.

  I am afraid I yawned. It all was true, undoubtedly, but it still was the same old crud that jerks like Jensen were forever handing out. But the publisher would like it, for it made the advertisers feel just fine and it promoted boom psychology, and the old war-horses of the financial district would talk about the piece that had been in the morning paper when they went to lunch this noon at the Union Club.

  Let it run the other way, I told myself—let the store sales drop off, let the housing boom go bust, let factories start to turn away their workers—and until the situation became inescapable, there’d be not a word about it.

  I folded the paper and put it to one side. Opening up a drawer, I got out a batch of notes I’d made the afternoon before and started going through them.

  Lightning, the early-morning copyboy, came out of the shadows and stood beside my desk.

  “Good morning, Mr. Graves,” he said.

  “Was that you whistling?” I asked.

  “Yeah, I guess it was.”

  He laid a proof on my desk.

  “Your column for today,” he said. “The one about how come the mammoth and all those other big animals happened to die out. I thought you’d like to see it.”

  I picked it up and looked at it. As usual, some joker on the copydesk had written a smart-aleck headline for it.

  “You’re in early, Mr. Graves,” said Lightning.

  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?”

  “I 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 background of gibberish for his polite snoring.

  We st
ood 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 absent-mindedly 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.”

  “But I 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 pub-lishable. 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.

  IV

  Gavin Walker came in. He pulled out his assignment book and looked at it. He made a disrespectful noise.

  “Shorthanded again,” he told me bitterly. “Charlie called in sick. Hangover, more than likely. AI is tied up with the Melburn case down in district court. Bert is trying to finish up that series of his on the freeway progress. The brass is screaming for it. It’s overdue right now.”

  He took off his jacket and hung it on the back of his chair. He threw his hat into a copy basket. He stood there, in the glare of the lights, pugnaciously rolling up his sleeves.

  “Someday, by God,” he said, “Franklin’s will catch fire, jammed with a million shoppers, who turn into a screaming, panic-stricken mob——”

  “And you won’t have a man to send there.”

  Gavin blinked at me owlishly. “Parker,” he said, “that is exactly it.”

  It was a favorite speculation of his in moments of great stress. We all knew it by heart.

  Franklin’s was the city’s biggest department store and our best advertising account.

  I walked over to the window and looked out. It was beginning to get light outside. The city had that bleak, frosty look of a thing not quite alive, a sort of sinister fairyland that is on the verge of winter. A few cars went drifting past in the street below. There was a pedestrian or two. Scattered early lights burned in the windows of some of the downtown buildings.

  “Parker,” said Gavin.

  I swung around to face him. “Now, look,” I said, “I know you are shorthanded. But I have work to do. I have a bunch of columns to get up. I came in early so
I could get them done.”

  “I notice,” he said nastily, “you’re working hard on them.” “Damn it,” I told him, “I have to get woke up.”

  I went back to my desk and tried to get to work.

  Lee Hawkins, the picture editor, came in. He was virtually frothing at the mouth. The color lab had bollixed up the picture for page one. Foaming threats, he went downstairs to get it straightened out.

  Other members of the staff came in and the place took on some warmth and life. The copy editors began to bawl for Lightning to go across the street and get their morning coffee. Protesting bitterly, Lightning went to get it.

  I settled down to work. It came easy now. The words rolled out and the ideas came together. For now there was the atmosphere for it, the feel for writing—the clamor and the bustle that spelled newspaper office.

  I had one column finished and was starting on the second when someone stopped beside my desk.

  I looked up and saw that it was Dow Crane, a writer on the business desk. I like Dow. He’s not a jerk like Jensen. He writes it as he sees it. He butters up no one. He polishes no apples.

  He was looking glum.

  I told him that he was.

  “I got troubles, Parker.”

  He pulled out a pack of cigarettes and offered one to me. He knows that I don’t smoke them, but he always offers one. I waved them off. He lit one for himself.

  “You do something for me, maybe?”

  I said that I would.

  “A man phoned me at home last night. He’s coming in this morning. Says he can’t find a house.”

  “What house does he want to find?”

  “A house to live in. Almost any house. Says he sold his home three or four months ago and now he can’t find one to buy.”

  “Well, that’s tough luck,” I said unfeelingly. “What can we do about it?”

  “He says he’s not the only one. Claims there are a lot of others. Says there isn’t a house or apartment to be had in town.”

  “Dow, the guy is crazy.”

  “Maybe not,” said Dow. “You been looking at the want ads?”

  I shook my head. “No reason to,” I told him.