CHAPTER SIX

"You look tired," Elizabeth said as the studio's overhead fluorescents tittered into light and Hawks sat down on the couch.

He shook his head. "I haven't been working very hard. It's the same old story when I was a boy on the farm, I'd wear myself out with physical labor, and I'd have no trouble getting to sleep. But now I just sit around and think. I can't sleep at night, and I wake up in the morning feeling worse than I did the day before. I look at myself in the mirror, and a sick man looks back at me—the kind of a man I wouldn't trust to do his share, if we were on a job together." Elizabeth raised an eyebrow. "I think you could use some coffee." He grimaced. "I'd rather have tea, if you have some." "I think so. I'll see." She crossed the studio to the curtained-off corner where the hotplate and cupboard were. . . .

"Or—look," he called after her, "coffee would be fine, if there's no tea."

They sat on the couch together, drinking tea. Elizabeth put her cup down on the table. "What happened tonight?"

Hawks shook his head. Then, after a while, he said abruptly:

"Women"—he said earnestly—"women have always fascinated me. When I was a boy, I did the usual amount of experimenting. It didn't take me long to find out life wasn't like what happened in those mimeographed stories we had circulating around the high school. No, there was something else—what, I didn't know, but there was something about there being two sexes. I don't mean the physical thing. I mean, the intellectual problem.

"What bothered me was that here were these other intelligent organisms, in the same world with men. Now there were plenty of men to do the thinking. If all women were for was the continuance of the race, what did they need with intelligence at all? A simple set of instincts would have been enough. So why was it necessary for women to have intelligence? What function had forced them to evolve it?

"But I never found out. I've always wondered."

Elizabeth smiled at him. "Doctor, would you like another cup of tea?"

He stood up finally, his hands in his pockets, having sat without saying anything for a long time. "It's late. I'd better go," he said.

She drove him home to the stuccoed pastel apartment house, built in the mid 1920's, where he had his one-and-one-half room efficiency flat.

"Call me again when you need me," she said.

"I—I will. Look; I don't want you to always have to come rescue me, or listen to my troubles. I want—" He gestured vaguely. "I don't know what I want for the two of us. But I don't want it to always be like this."

"Finish the project," she smiled, "and there'll be time."

"Yes," he said bleakly.