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Harry’s expressed mission in this country was to woo home those British scientists who had been bled away from their country’s service by gross American offers; the Center’s privately expressed hope was to bleed away him. Both sides were delicately showing their medals. All the Center’s luminaries, attended by every scrap of staff, were here. Over there was Meyer, marshaled at the head of a departmental claque from which only one was missing. And there—He had no trouble finding him. Anders was on the platform. She was the only one not here.
    As Linhouse tiptoed out, the speaker, stretching his cosmorama so that even the secretaries might see its limits, had just dubbed the sun a third-generation, run-of-the-mill star. From Sir Harry’s tone, it seemed doubtful, in that case, that he would consider spending his declining years up the Hudson. But the old man could be thanked in another quarter. Houseguest. Absurd that it hadn’t occurred to Linhouse before. Whomever she’d had there all these weeks, perhaps months, was being harbored in the house.
    Outside, snow was falling steadily, helping him obscure his real reason for driving instead of walking. On that quiet lane a car motor could be heard, and he would see to it that a car door was slammed. In the far corner of himself that had still been critic, he wished more than anything not to see Jack Linhouse sink to an even lower level of Paul Pry. To those who, like his former self, had never had such an obsession, he could now report that its sensation—as of helium in the head and lead in the shoes—was desperately tiring. Especially so if, with the same schizoid keenness, its owner disapproved of it as highly as if it had belonged to somebody else. On her doorstep, the car motor left chugging, he waited in what he did recognize—an onslaught of the tenderness, false as hope, which could vine any doorway in one’s mental life, no matter how dubious a one, let one only know for sure that one was leaving it.
    Later on, from the short vantage of the next night (in his plane seat as emergency duenna to the suddenly taken ill Sir Harry) he’d seen how lucky his own awkwardly hiccuped greeting might have been for her, allowing her to cover, with his confusion, some very much more grave lack of it in her. There’d been no scene—for one thing, she’d been fully and calmly clothed. If, instead, she had come to the door in any one of the snatched-up mandarin-coats or cleverly managed serapes in which, during his own tenure, she’d used to answer an inconvenient bell, he might have learned more than what he had—that in this house there was something important to be learned. But not many embarrassments were harder to bridge than the formal meeting, after some estrangement, of two parties who’d last seen each other in the nude.
    “All that wiggery!” Sir Harry, opening his eyes after takeoff and refusing a pill, resettled himself. “No—I don’t mean all this—” The takeoff had been extra deluxe, in fact floated on music. “—and I’ll keep my seatbelt, theng kew. I meant last night.” Under the eye of last night’s doctor, he had told the provost that if popping off was the question, it had come to him that now or later, he would rather wait for that event at home. The provost, much disappointed, had declined to bear the responsibility of Sir Harry’s making it there alone.
    “Good of you to volunteer, though,” said Sir Harry now, “to accompany me.”
    “Glad to,” said Linhouse, smiling truthfully. Toward such sound old persons as well-seasoned with the oils-and-vinegar of life as this one, those who above all still carried their hardness of mind like altar boys the holy vessel, Linhouse had the veneration of a man who dared to hope for an old age of the same. “Also, free ride home to mother. She won’t visit me here.” He looked outside. “Here” was already well over the Atlantic.
    “Ah?” Sir Henry stretched one long, tentative