Rogue Moon

CHAPTER FOUR

Hawks sat with his back pressed into the angle of the couch in Elizabeth Cummings’ studio. He held his brandy glass cupped loosely in his hands, and watched the’ night sky through the frames of glass behind her. She was curled in the window seat, her profile to him, her arms clasped around her drawn-up knees.

“My first week in high school,” he said to her, “I had to make a choice. Did you go to grammar school here in the city?”

“Yes.”

“I went to school in a very small town. The school was fairly well equipped — there were four rooms for less than seventy pupils. But there were only three teachers, including the principal, and each of them taught three grades, including preprimary. It meant that, two thirds of each day, my teachers were unavailable to me. They were there, teaching the other two grades things I either knew or wasn’t expected to understand. Then when I went to high school, I suddenly found myself with a teacher for each subject. Toward the end of the first week, the high school principal and I happened to meet in the hall. She’d read my intelligence test results and things, and she asked me how I liked high school. I told her I was having a wonderful time. Hawks smiled down at his brandy glass. “She drew herself up and her face turned to stone. ‘You’re not here to have fun!’ she said, and marched away.

“So I had a choice. I could either find my school work a punishment, after that, and find ways to evade it, or I could pretend I felt that way about it, and use the advantages that pretense gives. I had a choice between honesty and dishonesty. I chose dishonesty. I became very grim, and marched to classes carrying a briefcase full of books and papers. I asked serious questions and mulled over my homework even in the subjects that bored me. I became an honor student. In a very little while, it was a punishment. But I had done it to myself, and I took the consequences of my dishonesty.” He took a sip of brandy. “I wonder, sometimes, what I would have become if I’d chosen to go on the way I had been in grammar school — dipping into my teachers for whatever interested me, letting the rest of it slide, and continuing to enjoy my education”

He looked around. “This is a very nice studio you have here, Elizabeth. I’m glad I was able to see it. I wanted to see where you worked — what you did.”

“Please go on telling me about yourself,” she said from the window.

“I had only one other choice to make in high school,” he said after a while in which he had simply sat and looked at her. “It was in my junior year, and I was about to take my first science subject. Physics. The physics teacher during my sophomore year had been a first-class man named Haziet. His students nearly worshipped the ground he walked on. I had begun thinking by then in my life that going into the sciences was the answer for me.

“When I reported to class the first day of my junior year, I was full of anticipation. I had read a great deal of fiction about super-science and competent people doing competent things with it, and I expected more, I think, than even Hazlet could have crammed into a high-school physics class.

“But Hazlet wasn’t there. I don’t know what happened to him — went into government work, or, more likely, moved on to another school with a bigger budget. Whatever had happened, the school administration’d had to replace him. They had a woman teacher on their staff — a teachers’college graduate, and all that, with all the necessary certificates — who had been hired to teach Spanish. She was a very gentle lady from the South, named Mrs. Cramer, with fine, delicate bones and pale features. Her skin was almost translucent, and her voice was perpetually breathless. While I was a sophomore, as I said, she’d been trying to teach Spanish grammar to a roomful of boys in patched bib overalls and farm work shoes. Just as everybody in the school knew about Hazlet, everybody also knew which side of Mrs. Cramer’s desk had been in control of the class.

“So the next year, when I came into the physics lab, I found that Mrs. Cramer had been given a two-month summer education course in physics teaching, and had taken Hazlet’s place. It didn’t work out very well. She had all sorts of teachers’ guides to help her, and physics manuals detailing the classic formulae and problems. I imagine she went home every night and tried to memorize the next day’s answers. But it just didn’t work — she found that when she tried to do a blackboard problem for us as best she could, the result didn’t agree with the answer she’d memorized. So she’d wipe out her answer and substitute the one in the manual, and tell us that even if she hadn’t gotten the equations straight, this was the proper answer, and we should memorize it. When she gave tests, they never called for any problem calculations. They simply stated the problem and left a blank space for the proper answer.

“Even approaching it that way, she couldn’t jam enough into her mind every night to cover all the necessary ground. She never learned, for example, that the chemical symbol for mercury wasn’t Mk. It wasn’t funny; it was pathetic. And she’d flare up into a gentlewomanly outrage whenever something went wrong, and sometimes she’d weep at her desk. I hope she found a job, somewhere — she wasn’t back next year.

“But I had a choice. I had to decide whether I would join the class in staring out the window and tittering at Mrs. Cramer, or put in my time there each day, ignoring the whole business — it was either ignore it or burst into tears myself — and prowl through the public library for science texts to teach myself. It meant cutting myself off from the path the other individuals in the class were taking, and watching them lose themselves. I had a choice of staying with my own kind, or of being off by myself, knowing I was swimming while they drowned.

“I chose to save myself. After awhile, I began to reason that if they had embryo physicists among them, they’d straighten themselves out in college. I’d tried helping them with their work, some of them, until I realized they’d lost interest in understanding why the answers were what they were. If they really want to live, I said to myself, they’ll find the energy to swim. If none of them swim, ipso facto none of them are really cut out to be scientists.” He smiled with his eyes shadowed. “Life and science seem to have been equally important to me, when I was a boy. Nearly the same thing.”

“And now?” Elizabeth asked.

“I’m not a boy any more. It isn’t nineteen thirty-two.”

“Is that your answer?”

“I can say the same thing with more words. I have work that has to be done by me, because I made it. I can’t go back now and change the boy that I grew out of. I can see him; I can see his mistakes as well as his correct decisions. But I’m the man who grew out of the mistakes as well as out of the choices an adult would approve. I have to work with what I am. There’s nothing else I can do — I can’t forever sit in judgment on myself. A lump of carbon can’t rearrange its own structure. It’s either a diamond or a lump of coal — and it doesn’t even know what coal or diamonds are. Someone else has to judge it.”

They sat for a long time without speaking, Hawks with the empty brandy glass set on the coffee table beside his outthrust legs, Elizabeth watching him from the window, the side of her face resting against her drawn-up knees.

“What were you thinking of now?” she asked when he stirred again and looked at his wrist watch. “Your work?”

“Now?” He smiled from a great distance. “No — I was thinking about something else. I was thinking about how X-ray photographs are taken.”

“What about it?”

He shook his head. “It’s complicated. When a physician X-rays a sick man, he gets a print showing the spots on his lungs, or the calcium in his arteries, or the tumor in his brain. But to cure the man, he can’t take scissors and cut the blotch out of the print. He has to take his scalpel to the man, and before he can do that, he has to decide whether his knife could reach the disease without cutting through some part of the man that can’t be cut. He has to decide whether his knife is sharp enough to dissect the malignancy out of the healthy tissue, or whether the man will simply regrow his illness from the scraps left behind — whether he will have to be whittled at again and again. Whittling the X-ray print does nothing. It only leaves a hole in the celluloid. And even if there were some way to arrange the X-ray camera so that it would not photograph the malignancy, and if there were some way of bringing the X-ray print to life, the print still would have a hole through it to where the malignancy had been, just as if a surgeon had attacked it there with his scalpel. It would die of the wound.

“So what you would need is an X-ray film whose chemicals will not only not reproduce the malignancy but would reproduce healthy tissue, which they have never seen, in its place. You would need a camera that could intelligently rearrange the grains of silver on the film. And who could build such a camera? How am I to do that, Elizabeth? How am I going to build that sort of machine?”

She touched his hand at the door. His fingers quivered sharply. She said, “Please call me again as soon as you can.”

“I don’t know when that will be,” he answered. “This — this project I’m on is going to take up a lot of time, if it works out.”

“Call me when you can. If I’m not here, I’ll be home.”

“I’ll call.” He whispered, “Good night, Elizabeth.” He was pressing his hand against the side of his leg. His arm began to tremble. He turned before she could touch him again and went quickly down the loft stairs to his car, the sound of his footsteps echoing clumsily downward.