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 pre-primary. It meant that two thirds of each day, my teachers were unavailable to me. 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 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.

"Well, you see," he said after a while in which he simply sat and looked at her, smiling, "that tells a great deal about me. I'd been made to realize so many things in one blow. I was never the same after that. I was—well, I was on my way here." He smiled uncomfortably.

"It happens to a lot of us—I mean, to a lot of us youngsters who aren't constituted to see learning as work, or even as a luxury. Some of us react one way, some of us another, on that day when we suddenly see into the hearts of our fellow men. I did what a lot of us do— I shut myself up, and kept out of the world's way. It seemed to me that science; a place where I could deal with known quantities, or at least with a firm discipline, away from people who might be concealing anything within them—it seemed to me, as I say, that science was the best place for me.

"And now I have work that has to be done by me, because I made it. I can't go back now and change the boy I grew out of, nor do I want to. How can I deny what I am? I have to work with what I am. A lump of carbon can't rearrange its own structure. It's either a diamond or a lump of coal—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 out-thrust legs, Elizabeth watching him from against her drawn-up knees. "What are you thinking of now?" she asked when he stirred again and looked at his wristwatch. "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 re-grow 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 an X-ray print to life, the living print would only have a hole in it through to where the malignancy had been, just as if the surgeon had attacked it that way 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 malignancy but would reproduce healthy tissue which they have never seen. You would need a camera that could re-arrange the grains of silver on the film. And who can build such a camera?

"How am I to do that, Elizabeth? How am I to build that sort of machine?"

She touched his hand at the door, and his fingers quivered sharply. "Please call me again as soon as you can," she said.

"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.