“Emily.” Dr. Breed licked his lips, and he got a faraway look, and he said the name of the woman, of the woman so long dead, again. “Emily.”
“Do you think anybody would object if I used the story about the Marmon in my book?” I asked.
“As long as you don’t use the end of it.”
“The end of it?”
“Emily wasn’t used to driving the Marmon. She got into a bad wreck on the way home. It did something to her pelvis…” The traffic wasn’t moving just then. Dr. Breed closed his eyes and tightened his hands on the steering wheel.
“And that was why she died when little Newt was born.”
Merry Christmas 15
The Research Laboratory of the General Forge and Foundry Company was near the main gate of the company’s Ilium works, about a city block from the executive parking lot where Dr. Breed put his car.
I asked Dr. Breed how many people worked for the Research Laboratory. “Seven hundred,” he said, “but less than a hundred are actually doing research. The other six hundred are all housekeepers in one way or another, and I am the chiefest housekeeper of all.”
When we joined the mainstream of mankind in the company street, a woman behind us wished Dr. Breed a merry Christmas. Dr. Breed turned to peer benignly into the sea of pale pies, and identified the greeter as one Miss Francine Pefko. Miss Pefko was twenty, vacantly pretty, and healthy — a dull normal.
In honor of the dulcitude of Christmas time, Dr. Breed invited Miss Pefko to join us. He introduced her as the secretary of Dr. Nilsak Horvath. He then told me who Horvath was. “The famous surface chemist,” he said, “the one who’s doing such wonderful things with films.”
“What’s new in surface chemistry?” I asked Miss Pefko. “God,” she said, “don’t ask me. I just type what he tells me to type.” And then she apologized for having said “God.”