walked as close behind him as I dared, hoping we were being followed. After a block and a half of this, he turned on me and snarled: “Wadda you, mister? A wolf? Beat it!” “Okay,” I said mildly, and turned and walked the other way. Hig-gins and Dalhousie were standing there, flat-footed and open-mouthed. They sprinted back to the Porto Bello, and 7 followed them. But Julio and Rosa had already left. “Tough, fellows,” I said to them as they stood in the doorway. They looked as if they wanted to murder me. “He won’t get into any trouble,” I said. “He’s just going out with his girl.” Dalhousie made a strangled noise and told Higgins: “Cruise around the neighborhood. See if you can pick them up. I’ll follow Vilchek.” He wouldn’t talk to me. I shrugged and got a cab and went to the Madison Park Hotel, a pleasantly unfashionable old place with big rooms where I stay when business brings me to New York. They had a couple of adjoining singles; I took one in my own name and the other for Gomez. I wandered around the neighborhood for a while and had a couple of beers in one of the ultra-Irish bars on Third Avenue. After a pleasant argument with a gent who thought the Russians didn’t have any atomic bombs and faked their demonstrations and that we ought to blow up their industrial cities tomorrow at dawn, I went back to the hotel. I didn’t get to sleep easily. The citizen who didn’t believe Russia could maul the United States pretty badly or at all had started me thinking again-all kinds of ugly thoughts. Dr. Mines, who had turned into a shrunken old man at the mention of applying Gomez’s work. The look on the boy’s face. My layman’s knowledge that present-day “atomic energy” taps only the smallest fragment of the energy locked up in the atom. My layman’s knowledge that once genius has broken a trail in science, mediocrity can follow the trail. But I slept at last, for three hours. At four-fifteen A.M. according to my watch the telephone rang long and hard. There was some switchboard and long-distance-operator mumbo-jumbo and then Julio’s gleeful voice: “Beel! Congratulate us. We got marriage!” “Married,” I said fuzzily. “You got married, not marriage. How’s that again?” “We got married. Me and Rosa. We get on the train, the taxi
driver takes us to justice of peace, we got married, we go to hotel here.” “Congratulations,” I said, waking up. “Lots of congratulations. But you’re under age, there’s a waiting period-” “Not in this state,” he chuckled. “Here is no waiting periods and here I have twenty-one years if I say so.” “Well,” I said. “Lots of congratulations, Julio. And tell Rosa she’s got herself a good boy.” “Thanks, Beel,” he said shyly. “I call you so you don’t worry when I don’t come in tonight. I think I come in with Rosa tomorrow so we tell her mama and my mama and papa. I call you at the hotel, I still have the piece of paper.” “Okay, Julio. All the best. Don’t worry about a thing.” I hung up, chuckling, and went right back to sleep. Well, sir, it happened again. I was shaken out of my sleep by the strong, skinny hand of Admiral MacDonald. It was seven-thirty and a bright New York morning. Dalhousie had pulled a blank canvassing the neighborhood for Gomez, got panicky, and bucked it up to higher headquarters. “Where is he?” the admiral rasped. “On his way here with his bride of one night,” I said. “He slipped over a couple of state lines and got married.” “By God,” the admiral said, “we’ve got to do something about this. I’m going to have him drafted and assigned to special duty. This is the last time-” “Look,” I said. “You’ve got to stop treating him like a chesspiece. You’ve got duty-honor-country on the brain and thank God for that. Somebody has to; it’s your profession. But can’t you get it through your head that Gomez is a kid and that you’re wrecking his life by forcing him to grind out science like a machine? And I’m just a stupe of a layman, but have you professionals worried once about digging too deep and blowing up the whole shebang?” He gave me a piercing look and said nothing. I dressed and had breakfast sent up. The admiral, Dalhousie, and I waited grimly until noon, and then Gomez phoned up. “Come on up, Julio,” I said tiredly. He breezed in with his blushing bride on his arm. The admiral rose automatically as she entered, and immediately began tongue-lashing the boy. He spoke more in sorrow than in anger. He made it clear