I told him I thought it was time to tell him. “Shall we wake up Jenny? She’s entitled to hear it too.”
“Mmm. . . no. Let her nap until just before you have to leave. Jenny is a very uncomplicated person, Dan. She doesn’t care who you are or where you came from as long as she likes you. If it seems a good idea, I can pass it on to her later.”
“As you will.” He let me tell it all, stopping only to fill our glasses-mine with ginger ale; I had a reason not to touch alcohol. When I had brought it up to the point where I landed on a mountainside outside Boulder, I stopped. “That’s it,” I said. “Though I was mixed up on one point. I’ve looked at the contour since and I don’t think my fall was more than two feet. If they had-I mean `if they were going to’-bulldoze that laboratory site any deeper, I would have been buried alive. Probably would have killed both of you too-if it didn’t blow up the whole county. I don’t know just what happens when a fiat wave form changes back into a mass where another mass already is.”
John went on smoking. “Well?” I said. “What do you think?”
“Danny, you’ve told me a lot of things about what Los Angeles-I mean `Great Los Angeles’-is going to be like. I’ll let you know when I see you just how accurate you’ve been.”
“It’s accurate. Subject to minor slips of memory.”
“Mmm . . . you certainly make it sound logical. But in the meantime I think you are the most agreeable lunatic I’ve ever met. Not that it handicaps you as an engineer. . . or as a friend. I like you, boy. I’m going to buy you a new strait jacket for Christmas.”
“Have it your own way.”
“I have to have it this way. The alternative is that I myself am stark staring mad. . . and that would make quite a problem for Jenny.” He glanced at the clock. “We’d better wake her. She’d scalp me if I let you leave without saying good-by to her.”
“I wouldn’t think of it.”
They drove me to Denver International Port and Jenny kissed me good-by at the gate. I caught the eleven o’clock shuttle for Los Angeles.
CHAPTER 11
The following evening, 3 December, 1970, I had a cabdriver drop me a block from Miles’s house comfortably early, as I did not know exactly what time I had arrived there the first time. It was already dark as I approached his house, but I saw only his car at the curb, so I backed off a hundred yards to a spot where I could watch that stretch of curb and waited.
Two cigarettes later I saw another car pull up there, stop, and its lights go out. I waited a couple of minutes longer, then hurried toward it. It was my own car.
I did not have a key but that was no hurdle; I was always getting ears-deep in an engineering problem and forgetting my keys; I had long ago formed the habit of keeping a spare ditched in the trunk. I got it now and climbed into the ear. I had parked on a slight grade heading downhill, so, without turning on lights or starting the engine, I let it drift to the corner and turned there, then switched on the engine but not the lights, and parked again in the alley back of Miles’s house and on which his garage faced.
The garage was locked. I peered through dirty glass and saw a shape with a sheet over it. By its contours I knew it was my old friend Flexible Frank.
Garage doors are not built to resist a man armed with a tire iron and determination-not in southern California in 1970. It took seconds. Carving Frank into pieces I could carry and stuff into my car took much longer. But first I checked to see that the notes and drawings were where I suspected they were-they were indeed, so I hauled them out and dumped them on the floor of the car, then tackled Frank himself. Nobody knew as well as I did how he was put together, and it speeded up things enormously that I did not care how much damage I did; nevertheless, I was as busy as a one-man band for nearly an hour.