First it was part of the garden with its colonnaded Terrace—and then, with its rock walls (too massive to be called fieldstone) part of the mountain. It was on and in the hillside. Its roof paralleled the skylines, front and sides, and part of it was backed against an out-jutting cliff face. The door, beamed and studded and featuring two archers’ slits, was opened for them (but there was no one there) and when it closed it was silent, a far more solid exclusion of things outside than any click or clang of latch or bolt.
She stood with her back against it watching him cross what seemed to be the central well of the house, or at least this part of it. It was a kind of small court in the center of which was an atrium, glazed on all of its five sides and open to the sky at the top. In it was a tree, a cypress or juniper, gnarled and twisted and with the turnedback, paralleled, sculptured appearance of what the Japanese call bonsai.
“Aren’t you coming?” he called, holding open a door behind the atrium.
“Bonsai just aren’t fifteen feet .tail,” she said.
“This one is.”
She walked past it slowly, looking.
“How long have you had it?”
His tone of voice said he was immensely pleased. It is a clumsiness to ask the owner of a bonsai how old it is —you are then demanding to know if it is his work or if he has acquired and continued the concept of another; you are tempting him to claim for his own the concept and the meticulous labor of someone else and it becomes rude to tell a man he is being tested. Hence, How long have you had it? is polite, forbearing, profoundly cour-teous.
He answered, “Half my life.”
She looked at the tree. Trees can be found, sometimes, not quite discarded, not quite forgotten, potted in rusty gallon cans in not quite successful nurseries, unsold because they are shaped oddly or have dead branches here and there, or because they have grown too slowly in whole or part. These are the ones which develop inter-esting trunks and a resistance to misfortune that makes them flourish if given the least excuse for living. This one was far older than half this man’s life, or all of it. Looking at it. She was terrified by the unbidden thought that a fire, a family of squirrels, some subterranean worm or termite could end this beauty—something working outside any concept of rightness or justice or of respect.
She looked at the tree. She looked at the man.
“Coming?”
“Yes,” she said and went with him into his laboratory.
“Sit down over there and relax,” he told her. “This might take a little while.”
“Over there” was a big leather chair by the bookcase.
The books were right across the spectrum—reference works in medicine and engineering, nuclear physics, chemistry, biology, psychiatry. Also tennis, gymnastics, chess, the oriental war game Go, and golf. And then drama, the techniques of fiction. Modern English Usage, The American Language and supplement. Wood’s and Walker’s Rhyming Dictionaries and an array of other dictionaries and encyclopedias. A whole long shelf of biographies.
“You have quite a library.”
He answered her rather shortly—clearly he did not want to talk just now, for he was very busy.
He said only, “Yes I have—perhaps you’ll see it some time” which left her to pick away at his words to find out what on earth he meant by them.
He could only have meant, she decided, that the books beside her chair were what he kept handy for his work that his real library was elsewhere. She looked at him with a certain awe.
And she watched him. She liked the way he moved swiftly, decisively. Clearly he knew what he was doing.
He used some equipment that she recognized a glass still, titration equipment, a centrifuge. There were two refrigerators, one of which was not a refrigerator at all, for she could see the large indicator on the door. It stood at 70 F. It came to her that a modern refrigerator is perfectly adaptable to the demand for controlled environ-ment, even a warm one.
But all that and the equipment she did not recognize was only furniture. It was the man who was worth watching, the man who kept her occupied so that not once in all the long time she sat there was she tempted toward the bookshelves.
At last he finished a long sequence at the bench, threw some switches, picked up a tall stool and came over to her. He perched on the stool, hung his heels on the cross-spoke and lay a pair of long brown hands over his knees.
“Scared.”
He made it a statement.
“I suppose I am.”
“You don’t have to stay.”
“Considering the alternative” she began bravely but the courage-sound somehow oozed out. “It can’t matter much.”
“Very sound,” he said almost cheerfully. “I remember when I was a kid there was a fire scare in the apartment house where we lived. It was a wild scramble to get out and my tea-year-old brother found himself outside in the street with an alarm clock in his hand. It was an old one and it didn’t workbut of all the things in the place he might have snatched up at a time like that, it turned out to be ‘the clock. He’s never been able to figure out why.”
“Have you?”
“Not why he picked that particular thing—no. But I think I know why he did something obviously irrational.
You see, panic is a very special state. Like fear and flight, or fury and attack, it’s a pretty primitive reaction to extreme danger. It’s one of the expressions of the will to survive. What makes it so special is that it’s
