“I think there’ll be a story,” be said, looking worried, as if he were afraid there mightn’t be. “I’ve worked on it for years. Magnetism is still one of the phenomena we don’t know too much about. Once we knew nothing about electricity, and even now we do not entirely understand it; but we found out about it, and when we knew enough about it, we put it to work, We could do the same with magnetism, perhaps-if we only could determine the first fundamentals of it.”
He stopped and looked straight at me. “When you were a kid, did you believe in brownies?”
That one threw me and he must have seen it did.
“You remember – the little helpful people. If they liked you, they did all sorts of things for you; and all they expected of you was that you’d leave out a bowl of milk for them.”
I told him I’d read the stories, and I supposed that at one time I must have believed in them – although right at the moment I couldn’t swear I had.
“If I didn’t know better,” he said, “I’d think I had brownies in this lab. Someone – or something – shuffled my notes for me. I’d left them on the desktop held down with a paperweight; the next morning they were spread all over, and part of them dumped onto the floor.”
“A cleaning woman,” I suggested.
He smiled at my suggestion. “I’m the cleaning woman here.”
I thought he had finished and I wondered why all this talk of notes and brownies. I was reaching for my hat when he told me the rest of it.
“There were two sheets of the notes still underneath the paperweight,” he said. “One of them had been folded carefully. I was about to pick them up, and put them with the other sheets so I could sort them later, when I happened to read what was on those sheets beneath the paperweight.”
He drew a long breath. “They were two sections of my notes that, if left to myself, I probably never would have tied together. Sometimes we have strange blind spots; sometimes we look so closely at a thing that we are blinded to it. And there it was – two sheets laid there by accident. Two sheets, one of them folded to tie up with the other, to show me a possibility I’d never have thought of otherwise. I’ve been working on that possibility ever since; I have hopes it may work out.”
“When it does…” I said.
“It is yours,” he told me.
I got my hat and left.
And I thought idly of brownies all the way back to the office.
I had just got back to the office, and settled down for an hour or two of loafing, when old J. H. – our publisher – made one of his irregular pilgrimages of good will out into the newsroom. J. H. _is_ a pompous windbag, without a sincere bone in his body; he knows we know this and we know he knows-but he, and all the rest of _us_, carry out the comedy of good fellowship to its bitter end.
He stopped beside my desk, clapped me on the shoulder, and said in a voice that boomed throughout the newsroom: “That’s a tremendous job you’re doing on the Community Chest, my boy.”
Feeling a little sick and silly, I got to my feet and said, “Thank you, J. H.; it’s nice of you to say so.”
Which was what was expected of me. It was almost ritual.
He grabbed me by the hand, put the other hand on my shoulder, shook my hand vigorously and squeezed my shoulder hard. And I’ll be damned if there weren’t tears in his eyes as he told me, “You just stick around, Mark, and keep up the work. You won’t regret it for a minute. We may not always show it, but we appreciate good work and loyalty and we’re always watching what you do out here.”
Then he dropped me like a hot potato and went on with his greetings.
I sat down again; the rest of the day was ruined for me. I told myself that if I deserved any commendation I could have hoped it would be for something other than the Community Chest stories. They were lousy stories; I knew it, and so did the Barnacle and all the rest of them. No one blamed me for their being lousy – you can’t write anything but a lousy story on a Community Chest drive. But they weren’t cheering me.
And I had a sinking feeling that, somehow, old J. H. had found out about the applications I had planted with a half dozen other papers and that this was his gentle way of letting me know he knew – and that I had better watch my step.
Just before noon, Steve Johnson – who handles the medical run along with whatever else the Barnacle can find for him to do – came over to my desk. He had a bunch of clippings in his hand and he was looking worried. “I hate to ask you this, Mark,” he said, “but would you help me out?”
“Sure thing, Steve.”
“It’s an operation. I have to check on it, but I won’t have the time. I got to run out to the airport and catch an interview.”
He laid the clips down on my desk. “It’s all in there,”
Then he was off for his interview.
I picked up the clippings and read them through; it was a story that would break your heart.
There was this little fellow, about three years old, who had to have an operation on his heart. It was a piece of surgery that had been done only a time or two before, and then only in big Eastern hospitals by famous medical names – and never on one as young as three.
I hated to pick up the phone and call; I was almost sure the kind of answer I would get.
But I did, and naturally I ran into the kind of trouble you always run into when you try to get some information out of a hospital staff – as if they were shining pure and you were a dirty little mongrel trying to sneak in. But I finally got hold of someone who told me the boy seemed to be okay and that the operation appeared to be successful.
So I called the surgeon who had done the job. I must have caught him in one of his better moments, for he filled me in on some information that fit into the story.
“You are to be congratulated, Doctor,” I told him and he got a little testy.
“Young man,” he told me, “in an operation such as this the surgeon is no more than a single factor. There are so many other factors that no one can take credit.”
Then suddenly he sounded tired and scared. “It was a miracle,” he said.
“But don’t you quote me on that,” he fairly shouted at me.
“I wouldn’t think of it,” I told him.
Then I called the hospital again, and talked to the mother of the boy.
It was a good story. We caught the home edition with it, a four-column head on the left side of page one, and the Barnacle slipped a cog or two and gave me a byline on it.
After lunch I went back to Jo Ann’s desk; she was in a tizzy. The Barnacle had thrown a church convention program at her and she was in the midst of writing an advance story, listing all the speakers and committee members and special panels and events. Ifs the deadliest kind of a story you can be told to write; it’s worse, even, than the Community Chest.
I listened to her being bitter for quite a while; then I asked her if she figured she’d have any strength left when the day was over.
“I’m all pooped out,” she said.
“Reason I asked,” I told her, “is that I want to take the boat out of the water and I need someone to help me.”
“Mark,” she said, “if you expect me to go out there and horse a boat around…”
“You wouldn’t have to lift,” I told her. “Maybe just tug a little. We’ll use a block and tackle to lift it on the blocks so that I can paint it later. All I need is someone to steady it while I haul it up.”
She still wasn’t sold on it, so I laid out some bait.
“We could stop downtown and pick up a couple of lobsters,” I told her. “You are good at lobsters. I could make some of my Roquefort dressing, and we could have a…”
“But without the garlic,” she said. So I promised to forego the garlic and she agreed to come.