They checked into the Haddon Hall, where Coverly was given a room of his own. Brunner, who was friendly, suggested that Coverly might like to attend some of the open lectures and so he did. The first was by a Chinese on the legal problems of interstellar space. The Chinese spoke in French and a simultaneous translation was broadcast through transistor radios. The legal vocabulary was familiar but Coverly couldn’t grasp its application to the cosmos. He could not easily apply phrases like National Sovereignty to the moon. The following lecture dealt with experiments in sending a man into space in a sack filled with fluid. The difficulty presented was that men immersed in fluid suffered a grave and sometimes incurable loss of memory. Coverly wanted to approach the scene with his best seriousness—with a complete absence of humor—but how could he square the image of a man in a sack with the small New England village where he had been raised and where his character had been formed? It seemed, in this stage of the Nuclear Revolution, that the world around him was changing with incomprehensible velocity but if these changes were truly incomprehensible what attitude could he take, what counsel could he give his son? Had his basic apparatus for judging true and false become obsolete? Leaving the lecture hall he ran into Brunner and asked him to lunch. His motive was curiosity. Compared to Brunner’s high-minded scientific probity the rhythms of his own nature seemed wayward and sentimental. Brunner’s composure challenged his own disciplines and his own usefulness and he wondered if his pleasure in the unscientific landscape of the Atlantic City boardwalk was obsolete. On his right were the singing waves and on his left a generous show of that mysterious culture that springs up at the edges of the sea and that, with its overt concern with mystery—seers, palmists, fortunetellers, gambling games and tea-leaf diviners—seems like a product of the thunderous discourse between the ocean and the continent. Seers seemed to thrive in the salty air. He wondered what Brunner made of the scene. Did the smell of fried pork excite his memory or what he called his playback? Would the sighing of the waves present him with a romantic vision of the possibilities of adventure? Coverly looked at his companion but Brunner stared out so flatly, so impassively, at the scene that Coverly didn’t ask his question. He guessed that Brunner saw what was to be seen—brine, a boardwalk, some store fronts—and that if he went beyond the moment, which seemed unlikely, he would have seen the store fronts demolished and replaced by public playgrounds, ball fields and picnic groves. But who was wrong? The possibility that Coverly was wrong made him very uncomfortable. Brunner said that he had never eaten a lobster and so they went into an old matchboard lobster palace at a turn in the walk.
Coverly ordered a bourbon. Brunner sipped a beer and whistled loudly at the prices. He had a very large head and a heavy but not a dark beard. He must have shaved that morning, perhaps carelessly, but the outlines of his brown beard were, by noon, clearly defined. He was pale and his pallor seemed heightened by the largeness and the redness of his ears. The redness stopped abruptly at the point where his ears joined his head. The rest of him was all pallor. It was not a sickly or a dissipated pallor, it was not a Levantine or a Mediterranean pallor—it was probably an inherited characteristic or the product of a bad diet—but it was, to give him credit, a virile pallor, thick-skinned and lit by those flaming ears. He had his charms, they all had, and it was Coverly’s feeling that these were based on the possession of a vision of surmountable barriers, a sense of the future, a means for expressing his natural zeal for progress and change. He drank his beer as if he expected it to incapacitate him and here was another difference. With a single exception they were all temperate men. Coverly was not temperate but his intemperance was his best sense of the abundance of life.
“You live in Talifer?” Coverly asked. He knew that Brunner did.
“Yes. I have a little pad on the west side. I live alone. I was married but that was no go.”
“I’m sorry,” Coverly said.
“There’s nothing to be sorry about. The marriage was no go. We couldn’t optimize.” He tackled his salad.
“You live alone?” Coverly asked.
“Yes.” He spoke with his mouth full.
“How do you spend your evenings?” Coverly asked. “I mean, do you go to the theater?”
Brunner laughed kindly. “No, I don’t go to the theater. Some of the team have outside interests but I can’t say that I have.”
“But if you don’t have any outside interests what do you do in the evenings?”
“I study. I sleep. Sometimes I go to a restaurant on Route 27 where you can get all the chicken you can eat for two-fifty. I’m keen on chicken and when I get my appetite dialed up I can put away a very satisfactory payload.”
“You go with friends?”
