The Return of the Black Widowers Read online

  Halsted, who had been whispering to Drake, passed a paper to him. Drake rose and declaimed:

  "Next a Lycian attempted a ruse With an arrow—permitted by Zeus.

  Who will trust Trojan candor, as

  This sly deed of Pandarus Puts an end to the scarce-proclaimed truce?"

  "Damn it," said Trumbull. "I ruled against reading it." "Against my reading it," said Halsted. "Drake read it." "It's disappointing not to have Mario here," said Avalon. "He would ask what it means."

  "Go ahead, Jeff," said Rubin. "I'll pretend I don't understand it and you explain."

  But Avalon maintained a dignified silence while Henry presented the appetizer and Rubin fixed it with his usual suspicious stare.

  "I hate stuff," he said, "that's so chopped up and drowned in goop that you can't see what the ingredients are."

  Henry said, "I think you'll find it quite wholesome."

  "Try it; you'll like it," said Avalon.

  Rubin tried it, but his face showed no signs of liking it. It was noted later, however, that he had finished it.

  Dr. Eldridge said, "Is there a necessity of explaining these limericks, Dr. Avalon? Are there tricks to them?"

  "No, not at all, and don't bother with the doctorate. That's only for formal occasions, though it's good of you to humor the club idiosyncrasy. It's just that Mario has never read the Iliad; few have, these days."

  "Pandarus, as I recall, was a go-between and gives us the word 'pander.' That, I take it, was the sly deed mentioned in the limerick."

  "Oh, no, no," said Avalon, unsuccessfully hiding his delight. "You're thinking now of the medieval Troilus tale, which Shakespeare drew on for his Troilus and Cressida. Pandarus was the go-between there. In the Iliad he was merely a Lycian archer who shot at Menelaus during a truce. That was the sly deed. He is killed in the next book by the Greek warrior Diomedes."

  "Ah," said Eldridge, smiling faintly, "it's easy to be fooled, isn't it?"

  "If you want to be," said Rubin, but he smiled as the London broil arrived. There was no mistaking the nature of the components there. He buttered a roll and ate it as though to give himself time to contemplate the beauty of the meat.

  "As a matter of fact," said Halsted, "we've solved quite a few puzzles in recent meetings. We did well."

  "We did lousy," said Trumbull. "Henry is the one who did well."

  "I include Henry when I say 'we,' " said Halsted, his fair face flushing.

  "Henry?" asked Eldridge.

  "Our esteemed waiter," said Trumbull, "and honorary member of the Black Widowers." Henry, who was filling the water glasses, said, "You honor me, sir."

  "Honor, hell. I wouldn't come to any meeting if you weren't taking care of the table, Henry."

  "It’s good of you to say so, sir."

  Eldridge remained thoughtfully quiet thereafter, as he followed the tide of conversation that, as was usual, grew steadily in intensity. Drake was making some obscure distinction between Secret Agent X and Operator 5, and Rubin, for some reason known only to himself, was disputing the point.

  Drake, whose slightly hoarse voice never rose, said, "Operator 5 may have used disguises. I won't deny that. It was Secret Agent X, however, who was 'the man of a thousand faces.' I can send you a photocopy of a contents page of a magazine from my library to prove it." He made a note to himself in his memo book.

  Rubin, scenting defeat, shifted ground at once. "There's no such thing as a disguise, anyway. There are a million things no one can disguise, idiosyncrasies of stance, walk, voice; a million habits you can't change because you don't even know you have them. A disguise works only because no one looks."

  "People fool themselves, in other words," said Eldridge, breaking in.

  "Absolutely," said Rubin. "People want to be fooled."

  The ice-cream parfait was brought in, and not long after that, Trumbull struck his water glass with his spoon.

  "Inquisition time," he said. "As Grand Inquisitor I pass, since I'm the host. Manny, will you do the honors?"

  Rubin said, at once, "Dr. Eldridge, how do you justify the fact of your existence?"

  "By the fact that I labor to distinguish truth from folly."

  "Do you consider that you succeed in doing so?"

  "Not as often as I wish, perhaps. And yet as often as most. To distinguish truth from folly is a common desire; we all try our hands at it. My interpretation of Pandarus' deed in Halsted's limerick was folly and Avalon corrected me. The common notion of disguise you claimed to be folly and you corrected it. When I find folly, I try to correct it, if I can. It's not always easy."

  "What is your form of folly correction, Eldridge? How would you describe your profession?"

  "I am," said Eldridge, "Associate Professor of Abnormal Psychology."

  "Where do you? . . . "began Rubin.

  Avalon interrupted, his deep voice dominating, "Sorry, Manny, but I smell an evasion. You asked Dr. Eldridge's profession and he gave you a title . . . What do you do Dr. Eldridge, to occupy your time most significantly?"

  "I investigate parapsychological phenomena," said Eldridge.

  "Oh, God," muttered Drake, and stubbed out his cigarette.

  Eldridge said, "You disapprove of that, sir?" There was no sign of annoyance on his face. He turned to Henry and said, "No, thank you, Henry, I've had enough coffee," with perfect calmness.

  Henry passed on to Rubin, who was holding his cup in the air as a signal of its emptiness.

  "It's not a question of approval or disapproval," said Drake. "I think you're wasting your time."

  "In what way?"

  "You investigate telepathy, precognition, things like that?"

  "Yes. And ghosts and spiritual phenomena, too."

  "All right. Have you ever come across something you couldn't explain?"

  "Explain in what way? I could explain a ghost by saying, 'Yes, that's a ghost.' I take it that's not what you mean."

  Rubin broke in. "I hate to be on Drake's side right now, but he means to ask, as you well know, whether you have ever come across any phenomenon you could not explain by the accepted and prosaic laws of science."

  "I have come across many such phenomena."

  "That you could not explain?" asked Halsted.

  "That I could not explain. There's not a month that passes but that something crosses my desk that I cannot explain," said Eldridge, nodding his head gently.

  There was a short silence of palpable disapproval and then Avalon said, "Does that mean that you are a believer in these psychic phenomena?"

  "If you mean: Do I think that events take place that violate the laws of physics? No! Do I think, however, that I know all there is to know about the laws of physics? Also, no. Do I think anyone knows all there is to know about the laws of physics? No, a third time."

  "That's evasion," said Drake. "Do you have any evidence that telepathy exists, for instance, and that the laws of physics, as presently accepted, will have to be modified accordingly?"

  "I am not ready to commit myself that far. I well know that in even the most circumstantial stories, there are honest mistakes, exaggerations, misinterpretations, outright hoaxes. And yet, even allowing for all that, I come across incidents I cannot quite bring myself to dismiss."

  Eldridge shook his head and continued, "It's not easy, this job of mine. There are some incidents for which no conceivable run-of-the-mill explanation seems possible; where the evidence for something quite apart from the known rules by which the universe seems to run appears irrefutable. It would seem I must accept—and yet I hesitate. Can I labor under a hoax so cleverly manipulated, or an error so cleverly hidden, that I take for the gold of fact what is only the brass of nonsense? I can be fooled, as Rubin would point out."

  Trumbull said, "Manny would say that you want to be fooled."

  "Maybe I do. We all want dramatic things to be true. We want to be able to wish on a star, to have strange powers, to be irresistible to women—and would inwardly conspire to believe such t
hings no matter how much we might lay claim to complete rationality."

  "Not me," said Rubin flatly. "I've never kidded myself in my life."

  "No?" Eldridge looked at him thoughtfully. "I take it then that you will refuse to believe in the actual existence of parapsychological phenomena under all circumstances?"

  "I wouldn't say that," said Rubin, "but I'd need damned good evidence—better evidence than I've ever seen advanced."

  "And how about the rest of you gentlemen?"

  Drake said, "We're all rationalists. At least I don't know about Mario Gonzalo, but he's not here this session."

  "You, too, Tom?"

  Trumbull's lined face broke into a grim smile. "You've never convinced me with any of your tales before this, Voss. I don't think you can convince me now."

  "I never told you tales that convinced me, Tom. . . . But I have one now; something I've never told you and that no one really knows about outside my department. I can tell it to you all and if you can come up with an explanation that would require no change in the fundamental scientific view of the universe, I would be greatly relieved."

  "A ghost story?" said Halsted.

  "No, not a ghost story," said Eldridge. "It is merely a story that defies the principle of cause and effect, the very foundation stone on which all science is built. To put it another way, it defies the concept of the irreversible forward flow of time."

  "Actually," said Rubin, at once, "it's quite possible, on the subatomic level, to consider time as flowing either—"

  "Shut up, Manny," said Trumbull, "and let Voss talk."

  Quietly, Henry had placed the brandy before each of the diners. Eldridge lifted his small glass absently and sniffed at it, then nodded to Henry, who returned a small, urbane smile.

  "It's an odd thing," said Eldridge, "but so many of those who claim to have strange powers, or have it claimed for them, are young women of no particular education, no particular presence, no particular intelligence. It is as though the existence of a special talent has consumed what would otherwise be spread out among the more usual facets of the personality. Maybe it's just more noticeable in women. "At any rate, I am speaking of someone I'll just call Mary for now. You understand I'm not using her real name. The woman is still under investigation and it would be fatal, from my point of view, to get any kind of publicity hounds on the track. You understand?"

  Trumbull frowned severely. "Come on, Voss, you know I told you that nothing said here is ever repeated outside the confines of these walls. You needn't feel constrained."

  "Accidents happen," said Eldridge equably. "At any rate, I'll return to Mary. Mary never completed grade school and has earned what money she could earn by serving behind a counter at the five-and-ten. She is not attractive and no one will sweep her away from the counter, which may be good, for she is useful there and serves well. You might not think so, since she cannot add correctly and is given to incapacitating headaches, during which she will sit in a back room and upset the other employees by muttering gibberish to herself in a baleful sort of way. Nevertheless, the store wouldn't dream of letting her go."

  "Why not?" asked Rubin, clearly steeling himself to skepticism at every point.

  "Because she spots shoplifters, who, as you know, can these days bleed a store to death through a thousand small cuts. It isn't that Mary is in any way shrewd or keen-eyed or unrelenting in pursuit. She just knows a shoplifter when he or she enters the store, even if she has never seen the person before, and even if she doesn't actually see the person come in.

  "She followed them herself at first for brief intervals; then grew hysterical and began her muttering. The manager eventually tied the two things together—Mary's characteristic behavior and the shoplifting. He started to watch for one, then the other, and it didn't take long for him to find out that she never missed.

  "Losses quickly dropped to virtually nothing in that particular five-and-ten despite the fact that the store is in a bad neighborhood. The manager, of course, received the credit. Probably, he deliberately kept the truth from being known lest anyone try to steal Mary from him.

  "But then I think he grew afraid of it. Mary fingered a shoplifter who wasn't a shoplifter but who later was mixed up in a shooting incident. The manager had read about some of the work my department does, and he came to us. Eventually, he brought Mary to us.

  "We got her to come to the college regularly. We paid her, of course. Not much, but then she didn't ask for much. She was an unpleasant not-bright girl of about twenty, who was reluctant to talk and describe what went on in her mind. I suppose she had spent a childhood having her queer notions beaten out of her and she had learned to be cautious, you see."

  Drake said, "You're telling us she had a gift for precognition?"

  Eldridge said, "Since precognition is just Latin for seeing -things-before-they-happen, and since she sees things before they happen, how else can I describe it? She sees unpleasant things only, things that upset or frighten her, which, I imagine, makes her life a hell. It is the quality of becoming upset or frightened that breaks down the time barrier."

  Halsted said, "Let's set our boundary conditions. What does she sense? How far ahead in time does she see things? How far away in space?"

  "We could never get her to do much for us," said Eldridge. "Her talent wasn't on tap at will and with us she could never relax. From what the manager told us and from what we could pick up, it seemed she could never detect anything more than a few minutes ahead in time. Half an hour to an hour at the most."

  Rubin snorted.

  "A few minutes," said Eldridge mildly, "is as good as a century. The principle stands. Cause and effect is violated and the flow of time is reversed.

  "And in space, there seemed no limits. As she described it, when I could get her to say anything at all, and as I interpreted her rather clumsy and incoherent words, the background of her mind is a constant flickering of frightening shapes. Every once in a while, this is lit up, as though by a momentary lightning flash, and she sees, or becomes aware. She sees most clearly what is close by or what she is most concerned about—the shoplifting, for instance. Occasionally, though, she sees what must be taking place farther away. The greater the disaster, the farther she can sense things. I suspect she could detect a nuclear bomb getting ready to explode anywhere in the world."

  Rubin said, "I imagine she speaks incoherently and you fill in the rest. History is full of ecstatic prophets whose mumbles are interpreted into wisdom."

  "I agree," said Eldridge, "and I pay no attention—or at least not much—to anything that isn't clear. I don't even attach much importance to her feats with shoplifters. She might be sensitive enough to detect some characteristic way in which shoplifters look and stand, some aura, some smell—the sort of thing you talked about, Rubin, as matters no one can disguise. But then—"

  "Then?" prompted Halsted.

  "Just a minute," said Eldridge. "Uh—Henry, could I have a refill in the coffee cup after all?"

  "Certainly," said Henry.

  Eldridge watched the coffee level rise. "What's your attitude on psychic phenomena, Henry?"

  Henry said, "I have no general attitude, sir. I accept whatever it seems to me I must accept."

  "Good!" said Eldridge. "I'll rely on you and not on these prejudiced and preconcepted rationalists here."

  "Go on, then," said Drake. "You paused at the dramatic moment to throw us off."

  "Never," said Eldridge. "I was saying that I did not take Mary seriously, until one day she suddenly began to squirm and pant and mumble under her breath. She does that now and then, but this time she muttered 'Eldridge. Eldridge.' And the word grew shriller and shriller.

  "I assumed she was calling me, but she wasn't. When I responded, she ignored me. Over and over again, it was 'Eldridge! Eldridge!' Then she began to scream, 'Fire! Oh, Lord! It's burning! Help! Eldridge! Eldridge!' Over and over again, with all kinds of variations. She kept it up for half an hour.

  "We tried to
make sense out of it. We spoke quietly, of course, because we didn't want to intrude more than we had to, but we kept saying, 'Where? Where?' Incoherently enough, and in scraps, she told us enough to make us guess it was San Francisco, which, I need not tell you, is nearly three thousand miles away. There's only one Golden Gate Bridge after all, and in one spasm, she gasped out, 'Golden Gate,' over and over. Afterward it turned out she had never heard of the Golden Gate Bridge and was quite shaky as to San Francisco.

  "When we put it all together, we decided that there was an old apartment house somewhere in San Francisco, possibly within eyeshot of the Bridge, that had gone up in fire. A total of twenty-three people were in it at the time it burst into fire, and of these, five did not escape. The five deaths included that of a child."

  Halsted said, "And then you checked and found there was a fire in San Francisco and that five people had died, including a child."

  "That's right," said Eldridge. "But here's what got me. One of the five deaths was that of a woman, Sophronia Latimer. She had gotten out safely and then discovered that her eight-year-old boy had not come out with her. She ran wildly back into the house, screaming for the boy, and never came out again. The boy's name was Eldridge, so you can see what she was shouting in the minutes before her death.

  "Eldridge is a very uncommon first name, as I need not tell you, and my feeling is that Mary captured that particular event, for all that it was so far away, entirely because she had been sensitized to the name, by way of myself, and because it was surrounded by such agony."

  Rubin said, "You want an explanation, is that it?"

  "Of course," said Eldridge. "How did this ignorant girl see a fire in full detail, get all the facts correct—and believe me, we checked it out—at three thousand miles."

  Rubin said, "What makes the three-thousand-mile distance so impressive? These days it means nothing; it's one sixtieth of a second at the speed of light. I suggest that she heard the tale of the fire on radio or on television—more likely the latter—and passed it on to you. That's why she chose that story; because of the name Eldridge. She figured it would have the greatest possible effect on you."