The hab theory, p.2
The HAB Theory, page 2
Now Herbert Boardman took the paraffin-slugged shell he was holding and, opening the cylinder of the revolver, slid it into one of the chambers. He turned the cylinder and then carefully closed it so the loaded chamber was in line with the barrel and firing pin. A thick, yellow-paged Red Book — the Chicago classified telephone directory — was on one side of the desk and Boardman propped it up against the slender metal stem of the desk light. Standing, he held the gun so the muzzle was no more than four feet from the directory and pulled the trigger.
The hammer merely clicked and, puzzled, Boardman inspected the gun. The bullet he had inserted in the cylinder was now one chamber clockwise away from the barrel. He realized then what had happened and he shook his head at his own ignorance of guns. Opening the cylinder again, he took the bullet out and put it into the chamber which was first to the left of the barrel. Again he pointed the weapon at the telephone book and slowly squeezed the trigger. He watched the cylinder as he did so and saw it advance clockwise one chamber as the hammer went back. This time, when the hammer leaped forward, it drove the firing pin into the primer of the shell.
The gun bucked in his hand less than expected, but with a much louder explosion than he had anticipated with only the primer firing. The directory jumped and fell to one side and then to the floor. Replacing the gun on his desk, Boardman picked up the telephone book and studied it carefully. The slick, heavy paper cover of the volume had a pronounced dent in the center, barely broken here and there with small radial cracks, and the pages of the directory for about a quarter of an inch inward showed the effects of the impact. Fragments of wax had melded with the cover at various places and smaller chunks sprinkled the top of the desk. Trying to estimate what the effect would be on skin with hard bone behind it, Boardman slowly nodded. It looked about right.
Reopening the cylinder, he extracted the spent cartridge and carefully reloaded all five chambers. He took off his suit coat, opened the bottom drawer of his desk, and extracted a contrivance of leather and elastic which, after some difficulty, he managed to place and secure properly over his left shoulder. The flat pouch which now hugged his side just under the armpit seemed ridiculously small to him, but the .38 revolver slipped into it neatly and firmly. He brought up his right hand and smoothly withdrew the weapon, reholstered it, and then did the same thing again. At last he put his coat back on, buttoned the front, and then twice more drew the gun and returned it to the holster. Now he walked across the room and for a long moment looked at himself in one of the full-length mirrors which flanked the fireplace. He nodded approvingly.
The image he saw reflected was that of a somewhat towering, rather thin and angular individual with very bushy gray eyebrows and a neatly combed shock of nearly pure white hair. He stood five inches over six feet in height, his gauntness along with the deeply-etched lines of his face and the white hair attesting fully to his advanced age, but the blue-gray eyes were very clear and alert, His penetrating gaze locked on the image of his own left side. There was no telltale swell or lump in the frontal reflection, and none that he could detect from either side as he turned. With a small grunt of satisfaction, he returned to the desk and began to write a letter.
Several times he paused to rub his eyes wearily or just sit and think. At last he finished, folded the sheets neatly in half, and then looked around the room slowly. Twice he shook his head and then, as he glanced down at the folded letter on the desktop blotter in front of him, he smiled faintly and reached into the top drawer. A minute or so later, the blotter now clear of everything, he stood up and switched off the desk light and walked to the door.
He paused there, his hand on the wall switch, as he took a final lingering look at the room, fully aware there was every likelihood that this was the last time he would see it. Then he turned off the overhead light and walked crisply from the study and the house, his step firm and his back straight.
Herbert Allen Boardman, ninety-four, was on his way to make an assassination attempt against the President of the United States.
2
Undoubtedly, it was a great tribute to Marie Grant’s self-control and inner strength that she looked as good as she did right now, considering what she had gone through today. Hearing John entering the front door, she touched her freshly combed hair here and there a final time in a thoroughly feminine gesture before switching off the bathroom light and starting toward the stairs to go down and greet him.
Decidedly attractive, Marie looked far more to be a woman in her early to mid-thirties than one rapidly approaching forty-five. Though not overly vain, she nevertheless always had prided herself on her appearance, and it had paid dividends. Five and a half feet tall, she moved with unconscious grace. Her hair was fairly long, rolling gently on her shoulders and naturally honey-blond with the lovely, almost shimmering quality seen on models who posed for the better shampoo ads. Only the first, vague, barely discernible lines at the outer corners of her eyes and on her classic neck just below the angle of her jaw, along with a few small brown spots on the backs of her hands, belied the more youthful impression she imparted. Her figure had never lost the quality that turned men’s heads.
As she passed through the bedroom now, she glanced at the second drawer of the huge satiny-smooth solid mahogany dresser and shook her head slightly, only too aware of the neatly folded papers she had hidden there a short time before. It was not until this moment that she made her decision not to tell him. At least not yet. Maybe never, depending on what the next day or two held in store.
That something was going sour between her and John over these many months had been quite evident, but though she had begun some time ago to watch more closely for clues, she had found nothing of a concrete nature until now.
In a married woman there is a psychological trauma at the sudden realization that she is forty-five. Even if she has retained her physical grace and well-being, as Marie certainly had, there is the inescapable knowledge that a threshold has been crossed. Estrogenic resources run down and the confidence she has enjoyed for a quarter-century abruptly diminishes. She begins to experience the fear that a major factor in what first attracted her husband to her and then kept him there for so many years — that elemental asset of pure animalistic appeal for the opposite sex — is leaving forever. It’s a traumatic time; one of deep self-doubts and sometimes suspicions, justified or not, of her mate. This described Marie Grant well, but in her case there now seemed to be that justification.
The change in John had been gradual but steady. A moodiness, a disinclination to talk with her and a desire more often to be by himself, a marked increase in his desire to plunge himself more deeply into his work and yet, at the same time, a seeming inability on his part to accomplish what he wanted to do. At times a black depression came over him and he would become so morose that she literally yearned to take his head in her lap and stroke his hair and, as if he were a little child, console him and tell him that everything would be all right. But somehow, conditions never lent themselves to that. Marie always had held a dislike for entering areas where she was not wanted; and it was clear that whatever was bothering John was just such an area. Thus, she guessed about it and watched for clues, but she really didn’t know.
The possibility of there being another woman — that monstrous fear which, even though it may be deep in the subconscious, plagues even the happiest of wives — occurred to her more frequently these days, but she always managed to throw it off. In seventeen years of marriage, John had never slipped. Yet, she watched him, while pretending not to watch him, and John knew this and it irked him considerably.
But if not another woman, then what could be upsetting him so badly? They’d skirted the edge of the subject in conversations lately and John had hinted that the cause was his work. As a writer it was imperative to him never to be at a loss for words and to let his creative thoughts flow regularly onto paper, but that was what seemed to have happened to him in the past couple of years. He had been working long and hard at writing assignments since then which were simply mundane jobs to him, requiring considerable manual effort, but no real measure of creativity. Recently, whenever he faced the blank page poised for creative thoughts, that page had remained blank and his depression deepened.
Today he’d gone to check out an assignment that a national magazine wanted him to do — an in-depth personality profile on a popular evangelist — but she was almost certain little would come of it. The blank page would remain blank in the typewriter before him.
With a fervency that surprised her, Marie hoped John wasn’t planning to spend much time in his den this evening trying to write. The intensity of that hope was deeply rooted in what she had discovered in that room today. The den originally had been an oversized bedroom when they’d bought this five-bedroom house four years ago, but it had served John’s needs ideally as a combination office and library, always simply called the den. Skilled carpenters had been hired to construct sturdy floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on three walls to hold John’s voluminous research library and bound manuscripts, as well as his numerous diaries.
John Grant had kept diaries ever since he was a boy of twelve. Sometimes, especially during those younger years, though he made regular entries for long periods, there were gaps of weeks or months when he hadn’t written. But the habit of writing each day’s events had become ingrained as the years passed and the gaps became fewer. There was only one major lapse in the entire chronology and it had occurred in his adult years — the two years which were the first half of his tour of duty in the United States Air Force. But he had come back to it eventually and now, on that special shelf, there were thirty of the fiberbound diaries, each labeled with the year it covered.
Not uncommonly in the past — though at the moment she could not recall when the last time had been — John had read excerpts to her from them and they had laughed together at the things he had written as a boy — his activities, his yearnings, his dreams, his problems; so intense and important and insoluble then, so poignantly simple and fresh and touching now. Once, when he had been reading from a diary kept long before she and John had met, she’d noticed over his shoulder that at the bottom of a day’s entry there were several lines written in an unintelligible string of letters. She had asked him about it and he’d grinned a bit sheepishly and explained it was a simple little code he’d devised at age twelve in which to write some of his innermost thoughts, which he preferred having no one else be able to read. At the time, he had explained, it was mainly because of his mother, who had a proclivity for surreptitiously reading his diary, but even after he left home he had continued the habit on occasion. He had flipped through the pages and pointed out other coded entries here and there, laughingly saying that maybe one day he would decode them and read them aloud to her and thereby let her enter that highly secret world of a young man growing up.
It was among these neatly handbound volumes, as Marie had been cleaning this morning in the den, that she had become sidetracked. While dusting the shelves she had paused and considered the books, vaguely wishing that she had been possessed of the discipline to keep a diary. She would then have had a clear record of her life — not of her birth and very young years as Marie Fischer in North Carolina, of course, but probably beginning about the time the Fischer family had moved to Reading, Pennsylvania, and, after that, during her sophomore year of high school, to Tampa, Florida. There would have been a record then, too, of her thoughts and dreams as she finished high school there, attended the University of South Florida for two years, and then got the civil service job as a secretary at McDill Air Force Base. And it was there at McDill that she had met and begun to date a handsome young air force captain by the name of John Charles Grant.
On sudden impulse, and feeling deliciously guilty about it, Marie had extracted the volume for the year she and John met in the spring and were married in the autumn, and she leafed through it, becoming absorbed in the scattered entries she read. They were a beautiful record of romance and marriage intermingled with the daily struggles of life itself. More than once her eyes flooded with tears as the words brought back into sharp focus events she had all but forgotten. She truly had intended to do no more than glance at that one volume, but that one led to the next, and so on, until by the end of an hour she had rapidly flicked through years of entries of their lives together, with passages here and there underlining the highlights of John Grant’s life. They were beautiful words and she wondered why John had not shown them to her before and, despite feeling guilty at reading them, she reveled in what they said.
Shortly after their wedding and John’s subsequent honorable discharge, they’d moved to his home city of Chicago where, after working on several different newspapers, he began hitting his writing stride by preparing free-lance articles for major magazines. The conciseness of his writing and his knack for homing in unwaveringly on issues of tremendous interest had put his talents in great demand and earned him respect and enmity and, ultimately, a Pulitzer Prize eight years ago.
Here in these volumes was recorded the excitement and profound joy, too, of the birth of their first child, Carol Ann, almost fifteen years ago, and their son, William Arthur, better known as Billy, thirty months later.
Marie’s glance had quickly traveled to the far right, and she took out the final volume, considerably more slender than the others since it was for the current year and far from finished. She had flipped it open at random to an entry of several months ago and then became stunned to see that the ordinary writing of the day’s events was followed by an even longer entry in code. As if she had touched a hot coal, she slammed the book shut and slid it back into its place on the shelf.
For several minutes thereafter she had dusted furiously across the room, but her mind was elsewhere. Why would John be writing coded entries now? No one ever touched his diaries here, so why would he feel it necessary to write in code? Certainly he was entitled to his own private thoughts, but why as private as that? All at once the coded entry was the enemy, an insidious threat, something between John and John, with Marie excluded.
In another moment the volume was back in her hands and she was riffling the pages rapidly from back to front. There were other coded entries. They were not daily, but where they occurred they usually were more extensive than the regular entry they followed. She replaced the book and took out the one next to it — last year’s. Again she riffled from back to front and again there were codes, but growing less frequent toward the beginning. As if possessed, she had continued looking. The diary for two years ago held far fewer and much shorter coded entries, and the one before that held only seven or eight, with all of those occurring during the last four months of the year. She took that one to the desk and sat there looking at it, studying the first coded entry it contained. At first it was nothing more than a confused hodgepodge of unrelated letters, but then she leaned back and closed her eyes, trying to remember exactly what John had said so casually in passing about the code several years ago… that he’d devised it when he was twelve… that it was simple… that it wasn’t meant not to be broken, but only to prevent just anyone from picking it up and reading it. If it was that simple, then she ought to be able to decipher it.
There was a legal pad on the right of the desk and she snatched it to her and copied the relatively short entry, leaving plenty of space between letters, words and lines. She was certainly no cryptographer, and though the code was, as John had said, ridiculously simple, it still took her the better part of an hour to crack it. Once she had the key, however, it was child’s play to decipher and she was able to do it nearly as fast as ordinary writing. Little wonder that John wrote so extensively in it, since it was every bit as simple to code as to decode.
She had the strange sensation, as she decoded that first relatively brief entry of nearly two and a half full years ago, of being two people simultaneously — the person who methodically, almost mechanically, changed the letters to their proper form, and the person who read them with mounting fear mingled with a strange admixture of understanding and incomprehension. After completing it, she went back and read it through twice more.
This next portion encoded, not because I am ashamed of it, but because, should Marie read it, she would find it hard to understand and her feelings might be hurt, and I wouldn’t want that. Lately I’ve been experiencing a peculiar restlessness and I’m not exactly sure why. I’m beginning to find Marie pretty dull. I suppose that’s fairly normal after so many years of marriage, but why with such keenness all of a sudden? I love Marie so much and she is such a fine and good woman, and yet… damn it, I’m restless and, I guess when you get right down to it, unhappy.
His comments about her were gratifying and touching to Marie, but the very fact that he could have been experiencing such inner restlessness then — and obviously prior to that entry — without her even sensing a suggestion of it caused the unnerving dread within her to expand. Her impulse was to close and replace the book, destroy her notes, and pry no further, but there was an almost hypnotic effect in the very process of decoding. The next coded entry followed a regular entry about two weeks later and, because it was much shorter, she swiftly decoded it even while a portion of her mind was arguing against carrying this any further.
The feeling persists. I think I’d like another woman. Oddly, I don’t mean that strictly on the basis of sex. It’s more than that. I long for someone stimulating, someone to converse with, to enjoy things with, to experience new things with.
Marie had sat back then and momentarily closed her eyes. If this was the way John was feeling over two and a half years ago, then what had happened since then, and what was the significance of the increasing number and length of coded entries up to the present? She wanted to know and yet she didn’t; she wanted to stop, but couldn’t. Abruptly she glanced at her watch and saw that John almost certainly would not get home from his downtown business meeting before another hour and a half had passed, but realizing that she herself might well lose track of time, she went to the bedroom and returned with the alarm clock, setting it to ring in exactly an hour. Again, thrusting back the guilt she felt inside over what she was doing, she began paging through the diary, decoding rapidly as she came to the entries she sought. She finished that volume and returned it to the shelf, bringing back the diary for the next year — the one for two years previously — becoming immersed in it at once. So absorbed in her efforts did she become that when the alarm went off she practically jumped in her seat. In something of a daze then, she replaced the diary which she had all but finished. With her own papers in hand, she returned the clock to the bedroom and then sat on the edge of the bed reading and digesting better what she had deciphered.
