At that time, he still hesitated to apply the term gemus to himself.

It didn’t help. The fall of chance remained always and perpetually against him. His laboratory hummed with work; he hired assistants at excellent salaries; he drove himself roughly and pitilessly. Nothing came of it.

I kept hoping he would give up someday; return to the_city; allow us o lead a normal, quiet life. I waited, but always when he might have admitted defeat, some new battle would be taken up, some new attempt to storm the bastions of fame. Each time he charged with such hope and fell back in such despair.

And always he turned on me; for if he was ground down by the world, he could always grind me in return. I am not a brave person, but I was coming to believe I must leave him.

And yet . . .

In this last year he had obviously been girding himself for another battle. A last one, I thought. There was something about him more intense, more a-quiver than I had ever seen before. There was the way he murmured to himself and laughed briefly at nothing. There were the times he went for days without food and nights without sleep. He even took to keeping laboratory notebooks in a bedroom safe as though he feared.even his own assistants.

Of course I was fatalistically certain that this attempt of his would fail also. But surely, if it failed, then at his age, he would have to recognize that his last chance had gone. Surely he would have to give up.

So I decided to wait, as patiently as I could.

But the affair of the obituary at breakfast came as something of a jolt. Once, on an earlier occasion of the sort, I had remarked that at least he could count on a certain amount of recognition in his own obituary.

I suppose it wasn’t a very clever remark, but t en my remarks ne er are. I had meant it to be lighthearted, to pull him out of a gathermg depression during which I knew, from experience, he would be most intolerable.

And perhaps there had been a little unconscious spite in it, too. I cannot honestly say.

At any rate, he turned full on me. His lean body shook and his dark eyebrows pulled down over his deep-set eyes as he shrieked at me in falsetto, ‘But I’ll never read my obituary. I’ll be deprived even.of that.’

And he spat at me. He deliberately spat at me.

I ran to my bedroom.

He never apologized, but after a few days in which I avoided him completely, we carried on our frigid life as before. Neither of us ever referred to the incident.

Now there was another obituary.

Somehow, as I sat there alone at the breakfast table, I felt it to be the last straw for him, the climax of his long-drawn-out failure.

I could sense a crisis coming and didn’t know whether to fear or welcome it. Perhaps, on the whole, I would welcome it. Any change could not fail to be a change for the. better.

Shortly before lunch, he came upon me in the living room, where a basket of unimportant sewing gave my hands something to do and a bit of television occupied my mind.

He said abruptly, ‘I will need your help.’

It had been twenty years or more since he had said anything like that and involuntarily I thawed toward him. He looked unhealthily excited. There was a flush on his ordinarily pale cheeks.

I said, ‘Gladly, if there’s something I can do for you.’

‘There is. I have given rpy assistants a month’s vacation. They will leave Saturday and after that you and I will work alone in the laboratory. I tell you now so that you will refrain from making any other arrangements for the coming week.’

I shriveled a bit. ‘But Lancelot, you know I can’t help you with your work. I don’t understand—’

‘I know that,’ he said with complete contempt, ‘but you don’t have to understand my work. You need only follow a few simple instructions and follow them carefully. The point is that I have discovered something, finally, which will put me where I belong—’

‘Oh, Lancelot,’ I said involuntarily, for I had heard this before a number of times.

‘Listen to me, you fool, and for once try to behave like an adult. This time I have done it. No one can anticipate me this time because my discovery is based on such an unorthodox concept that no physicist alive, except me, is genius enough to think of it, not for a generation at least. And when my work bursts on the world, I could be recognized as the greatest name of all time in science.’

‘I’m sure I’m very glad for you, Lancelot.’

‘I said I could be recognized. I could not be, also. There is a great deal of injustice in the assignment of scientific credit. I’ve learned that often enough. So it will not be enough merely to announce the discovery. If I do, everyone will crowd into the field and after a while I’ll just be a name in the history books, with glory spread out over a number of Johnny-come-latelies.’

I think the only reason he was talking to me then, three days before he could get to work on whatever it was he planned to do, was that he could no longer contain himself. He bubbled over and I was the only one who was nonentity enough to be witness to that.

He said, ‘I intend my discovery to be so dramatized, to break on mankind with so thunderous a clap, that there will be no room for anyone else to be mentioned in the same breath with me, ever.’

He was going too far, and I was afraid of the effect of another disappointment on him. Might it not drive him mad? I said, ‘But Lancelot, why need we bother? Why don’t we leave all this? Why not take a long vacation? You have worked hard enough and long enough, Lancelot. Perhaps we can take a trip to Europe. I’ve always wanted to—’

He stamped his foot. ‘Will you stop your foolish meowing? Saturday, you will come into my laboratory with me.’

I slept poorly for the next three nights. He had never been quite like this before, I thought, never quite as bad. Might he not be mad already, perhaps?

It could be madness now, I thought, a madness born of disappointment no longer endurable, and sparked by the obituary. He had sent away his assistants and now he wanted me in the laboratory. He had never allowed me there before. Surely he meant to do something to me, to make me the subject of some insane experiment, or to kill me outright.

During the miserable, frightened nights I would plan to call the police, to run away, to – to do anything.

But then morning would come and I would think surely he wasn’t mad, surely he wouldn’t offer me violence. Even the spitting incident was not truly violent and he had never actually tried to hurt me physically.

So in the end I waited and on Saturday I walked to what might be my death as meekly as a chicken. Together, silently, we walked down the path that led from our dwelling to the laboratory.

The laboratory was frightening just in itself, and I stepped about gingerly, but Lancelot only said, ‘Oh, stop staring about you as though something were going to hurt you. You just do as I say and look where I tell you.’

‘Yes, Lancelot.’ He had led me into a small room, the door of which had been padlocked. It was almost choked with objects of very strange appearance and with a great deal of wiring.

Lancelot said, ‘To begin with, do you see this iron crucible?’

‘Yes, Lancelot.’ It was a small but deep container made out of thick metal and rusted in spots on the outside. It was covered by a coarse wire netting.

He urged me toward it and I saw that inside it was a white mouse with its front paws up on the inner side of t4e crucible and its small snout at the wire netting in quivering curiosity, or perhaps in anxiety. I am afraid I jumped, for to see a mouse without expecting to is startling, at least to me.

Lancelot growled, ‘It won’t hurt you. Now just back against the wall and watch me.’

My fears returned most forcefully. I grew horribly certain that from somewhere a lightning bolt would shoot out and incinerate me, or some monstrous thing of metal might emerge and crush me, or – or –

I closed my eyes.

But nothing happened; to mr, at least. I heard only a phfft as though a small firecracker had misfired, and Lancelot said to me, ‘Well?’

I opened my eyes. He was looking at me, fairly shining with pride. I stared blankly.

He said, ‘Here, don’t you see it, you idiot? Right here.’

A foot to one side of the crucible’was a second one. I hadn’t seen him put it there.