“But the world’s big. Complicated. Part-answer can look like the whole answer and act like the whole answer for a long time. For instance, Hawks can think of himself as manipulating causes an’ producing effects he wants. ’N you, Barker, you can think of Hawks and you as s’perior, Overman types. Hawks can think of you as specified factor t’ be inserted in new environment, so Hawks can solve new ’vironment. You can think of yourself as indomitable figure slugging it out with th’ unknown. And so it goes, roun’ and roun’, an’ who’s right? Both of you? Maybe. Maybe. But can you stan’ to be on the same job together?”

Connington laughed again, his high heels planted in the lawn. “Me, I’m personnel man. I don’t look cause and effect. I don’t look heroes. Explain the world in a different way. People — that’s all I know. ’S enough. I feel ’em. I know ’em. Like a chemist knows valences. Like a physicist knows particle charges. Positive, negative. Atomic weight, ’tomic number. Attract, repel. I mix ’em. I compound ’em. I take people, an’ I find a job for them, the co-workers for ’em. I take a raw handful of people, and I mutate it, and make isotopes out of it — I make solvents, reagents — an’ I can make ’splosives, too, when I want. That’s my world!

“Sometimes I save people up — save ’em for the right job to make ’em react the right way. Save ’em up for the right people.

“Barker, Hawks — you’re gonna be my masterpiece. ’Cause sure as God made little green apples, he made you two to meet An’ me, me, I found you, an’ I’ve done it, I’ve rammed you two together an’ now it’s done, an’ nothing’ll ever take the critical mass apart, and sooner, later, it’s got to ’splode, and who’re you gonna run to then, Claire?”

4

Hawks broke the silence. He reached out, pulled the bottle out of Connington’s hand, and swung toward the cliff. The bottle flailed away and disappeared over the edge. Then Hawks turned to Barker and said quietly, “There are a few more things I ought to tell you before you definitely accept the job.”

Barker’s face was strained. He was looking at Connington. His head snapped around in Hawks’ direction and he growled, “I said I’d do the damned job!”

Claire reached out and took hold of his hand, pulling him down beside her. She thrust herself forward to kiss the underside of Barker’s jaw. “That’s the ol’ fight, Hardrock.” She began nibbling the skin with its faint stubble of beard, gradually inching her mouth down his throat, leaving a row of regularly spaced marks: wet, round, red parentheses of her lipstick, enclosing the sharper, pinker blotches where her incisors had worried his flesh. “He’ll do it, Ed,” she murmured sidelong. “Or at least he’ll give it as much of a try as any man could.”

“Don’t the three of you care?” Connington blurted, his head jerking back and forth. “Didn’t you hear?”

“We heard you,” Hawks said.

“Well, what about it?” Connington challenged them incredulously.

“Tell me something, Connington,” Hawks said. “Did you make your little speech so we’d stop now? Or could anything make us stop, now things are in motion the way you hoped?”

“Not hoped,” Connington said. “Planned.”

Hawks nodded. “All right, then,” he said in a tired voice. “I thought so. All you wanted to do was make a speech. I wish you’d chosen another time.”

Claire chuckled, a silvery ladder of sound. “Isn’t it too bad, Connie? You were so sure we’d all fall down. But it’s just like it always was. You still don’t know where to push.”

Connington backed away incredulously, his arms spread as if to knock their heads together. “Are you three crazy? Do you think I made this stuff up out of my head? Listen to yourselves — even when you tell me it’s all malarkey, you have to say it each a certain way. You can’t shake loose from yourselves even for a second; you’ll go where your feet take you, no matter what — and you’re laughing at me? You’re laughin’ at me?”

He lurched around suddenly. “Go to hell, all of you!” he cried. ’G’wan!” He began to run clumsily across the grass to his car.

Hawks looked after him. “He’s not fit to drive back.”

Barker grimaced. “He won’t. He’ll cry himself to sleep in the car for a few hours. Then he’ll come in the house, looking for Claire’s comfort.” He looked down at Claire with a jerk of his head that broke the chain of nibbles. “Isn’t that right? Doesn’t he always do that?”

Claire’s lips pinched together. “I can’t help what he does.”

“No?” Barker said. “It’s me he’s after?”

In a vicious, throaty snarl, Claire said, “Maybe he’s had you. He’s never had me.”

Barker’s hand cracked over, and Claire fell back, holding her cheek. Then she grinned. “You’ve done better than that. You used to do a lot better. But that wasn’t bad,” she admitted.

“Barker,” Hawks said, “I want to tell you what you’re going to have to face.”

“Tell me when I get there!” Barker snapped. “I’m not going to back out now.”

Claire said, “Maybe that’s what he wants you to say, Al. Putting it that way.” She smiled up toward Hawks. “Who says Connington’s the only schemer?”

“What’s the simplest way for me to get back to town?” Hawks said.

“I’ll drive you,” Barker said coldly. His eyes locked on Hawks. “If you want to try it.”

Claire murmured a chuckle and suddenly rubbed her cheek down the length of Barker’s thigh. She did this with a spasm of her entire body; an undulant motion that was completely serpentine. She stared up at Hawks through wide, pleasurably moist eyes, her upstretched arms curled around Barker’s waist. “Isn’t he grand?” she said huskily to Hawks. “Isn’t he a man?”

5

Barker trotted stiffly down to the garage apron and flung up the overhead doors with a crash, as Hawks waited at the head of the flagstone steps. Claire said murmurously behind him, “Look at him move — look at him do things. He’s like a wonderful machine made out of gut and hickory wood. There aren’t any other men like him, Ed — nobody’s as much of a man as he is!” Hawks’ nostrils widened.

An engine came to waspish life in the garage, and then a short, broad, almost square-framed sports car came out in a glower of sound. “This is my new roadster,” Barker shouted up from behind the wheel.

Hawks came around, stepped over the doorless flank of the car, and cramped himself into the passenger side. He settled his lower back into the unpadded metal seat, which was slewed around to leave more room for the driver. The entire machine stood perhaps thirty inches high at the peak of its sharply curved dash.

“Hasn’t been really wrung out, yet!” Barker shouted into Hawks’ ear. Claire stood watching, her eyes ashine. Connington, slumped over the wheel of his Cadillac, facing them at an angle, lifted his swollen face and contorted his lips in a sad grimace.

“Ready?” Barker shouted, running up the engine and edging his right foot away from the center of the brake pedal until only the edge of his cheap shower slipper’s cardboard sole was holding it down. “Not frightened, are you?” He stared piercingly into Hawks’ face. “Are you?”

Hawks reached over and pulled out the ignition key. “I see,” he said quietly.

Barker’s hand flashed out and crushed his wrist. “I’m not Connington and that’s no bottle — hand over those keys.”

Hawks relaxed his fingers until the keys barely kept from falling. He put out his other arm and blocked Barker’s awkward, left-handed reach for them. “Use the hand that’s holding my wrist,” he said.

Barker slowly took the keys. Hawks climbed out of the car.

“How are you going to get to the city?” Claire asked as he walked past the steps.

Hawks said, “I walked long distances when I was a boy. But not to prove my physical endurance.”