It was not difficult for me to scream when the time came, or to weep. I had felt like doing both for days and now it was a relief to let the hysteria out.
The doctor behaved precisely as Lancelot had said he would. The bottle of cyanide was virtually the first thing he saw. He frowned. ‘Dear me, Mrs Stebbins, he was a careless chemist.’
‘I suppose so,’ I said, sobbing. ‘He shouldn’t have been working himself, but both his assistants are on vacation.’
‘When a man treats cyanide as though it were salt, it’s bad.’ The doctor shook his head in grave moralistic fashion. ‘Now, Mrs Stebbins, I will have to call the police. It’s accidental cyanide poisoning, but it’s a violent death and the police—’
‘Oh, yes, yes, call them.’ And then I could almost have beaten myself for having sounded suspiciously eager.
The police came, and along with them a police surgeon, who grunted in disgust at the cyanide crystals on hand, apron, and chin. The police were thoroughly disinterested, asked only statistical questions concerning names and ages. They asked if I could manage the funeral arrangements. I said yes, and they left.
I then called the newspapers, and two of the press associations. I said I thought they would be picking up news of the death from the police records and I hoped they would not stress the fact that my husband was a careless chemist, with the tone of one who hoped nothing ill would be said of the dead. After all, I went on, he was a nuclear physicist rather than a chemist and I had a feeling lately he might be in some sort of trouble.
I followed Lancelot’s line exactly in this and that also worked. A nuclear physicist in trouble? Spies? Enemy agents?
The reporters began to come eagerly. I gave them a youthful portrait of Lancelot and a photographer took pictures of the laboratory buildings. I took them through a few rooms of the main laboratory for more pictures. No one, neither the police nor the reporters, asked questions about the bolted room or even seemed to notice it.
I gave them a mass of professional and biographical material that Lancelot had made ready for me and told several anecdotes designed to show a combination of humanity and brilliance. In everything I tried to be letter-perfect and yet I could feel no confidence. Something would go wrong; something would go wrong.
And when it did, I knew he would blame me. And this time he had promised to kill me.
* * *
The next day I brought him the newspapers. Over and over again, he read them, eyes glittering. He had made a full box on the lower left of the New York Times’ front page. The Times made little of the mystery of his death and so did the AP., but one of the tabloids had a front-page scare headline: atom savant in mystery death.
He laughed aloud as he read that and when he completed all of them, he turned back to the first.
He looked up at me sharply. ‘Don’t go. Listen to what they say.’
‘I’ve read them already, Lancelot.’
‘Listen, I tell you.’
He read every one aloud to me, lingering on their praises of the dead, then said to me, aglow with self-satisfaction, ‘Do you still think something will go wrong?’
I said hesitantly, ‘If the police come back to ask why I thought you were in trouble . . . ‘
‘You were vague enough. Tell them you had had bad dreams. By the time they decide to push investigations further, if they do, it will be too late.’
To be sure, everything was working, but I could not hope that all would continue so. And yet the human mind is odd; it will persist in hoping even when it cannot hope.
I said, ‘Lancelot, when this is all over and you are famous, really famous, then after that, surely you can retire. We can go back to the city and live quietly.’
‘You are an imbecile. Don’t you see that once I am recognized, I must continue? Young men will flock to me. This laboratory will become a great Institute of Temporal Investigation. I’ll become a legend in my lifetime. I will pile my greatness so high that no one afterward will ever be able to be anything but an intellectual dwarf compared to me.’ He raised himself on tiptoe, eyes shining, as though he already saw the pedestal onto which he would be raised.
It had been my last hope of some personal shreds of happiness and a small one. I sighed.
* * *
I asked the undertaker that the body be allowed to remain in its coffin in the laboratories before burial in the Stebbins family plot on Long Island. I asked that it remain unembalmed, offering to keep it in a large refrigerated room with the temperature set at forty. I asked that it not be removed to the funeral home.
The undertaker brought the coffin to the laboratory in frigid disapproval. No doubt this was reflected in the eventual bill. My offered explanation that I wanted him near me for a last period of time and that I wanted his assistants to be given a chance to view the body was lame and sounded lame.
Still, Lancelot had been most specific in what I was to say.
Once the dead body was laid out, with the coffin lid still open, I went to see Lancelot.
‘Lancelot,’ I said, ‘the undertaker was quite displeased. I think he suspects that something odd is going on.’
‘Good,’ said Lancelot with satisfaction.
‘But—’
‘We need only wait one more day. Nothing will be brought to a head out of mere suspicion before then. Tomorrow morning the body will disappear, or should.’
‘You mean it might not?’ I knew it; I knew it.
‘There could be some delay, or some prematurity. I have never transported anything this heavy and I’m not certain how exactly my equations hold. To make the necessary observation is one reason I want the body here and not in a funeral parlor.’
‘But in the funeral parlor it would disappear before witnesses.’
‘And here you think they will suspect trickery?’
‘Of course.’
He seemed amused. ‘They will say: Why did he send his assistants away? Why did he run experiments himself that any child could perform and yet manage to kill himself running them? Why did the dead body happen to disappear without witnesses? They will say: There is nothing to this absurd story of time travel. He took drugs to throw himself in a cataleptic trance and doctors were hoodwinked.’
‘Yes,’ I said faintly. How did he come to understand all that?
