Bill Cuff flung himself onto the couch beside me, leaning near, breathing into my face. His breath smelled like raw meat, or maybe it was my imagination. He said, his voice a rumbling growl, "No, that isn't why I came. I want to find Howard. And I think you know where he is."
My belly contracted and my palms that were already damp became clammy.
I got up and paced the room nervously. My brain was clanking and buzzing in a kind of scrambled gear.
Howard Rollins was my brother. He was a scientist, a top-flight brain; serious where I'm flippant, keen where I'm fuzzy, and high-IQed where I'm sort of upper-middle-minded. He'd been working for the government since the establishment of Oak Ridge. Right at that moment he was on a small heavily forested scrap of land off the Maine coast, a bit of wind-swept earth called Odo Island. I knew what he was doing and it was as important as the atom bomb, or maybe even more so. I knew these things because Howard trusted me. I said to Bill Cuff, "He's on Pompey Island."
Cuff's gray eyes glinted. I noticed now that Old One's eyes were exactly the same color. "Cachug," said Cuff, or some damn fool grunt that sounded like it, and Old One got up and went out of the French windows into the wind and rain, lurching like a clothed gorilla. Then my cousin turned to me once more.
"We know what he's doing, Ray; but we couldn't find out where he was doing it. We have Old Companions in the government, but none who were placed in your position, who'd know where Howard was despite the heavy curtain of secrecy. So I had to risk coming into the city to see you." He seemed to listen then, to sounds which I couldn't hear. He grinned. "Now," he said, "how soon can you wind up your affairs for, say, a week?"
"Right now," I said, almost without thinking. "I have six scripts completed—"
"Then you'll meet us in Boston tomorrow afternoon—five sharp beside the City Hall on School Street."
"Wait a minute," I protested. "What—"