Justin put the phone back on its cradle, picked up the spider half unconsciously. Devereux Chandler, cheerfully sardonic, polite, urbane, was the most difficult human being to interpret correctly the younger man had encountered in his not inconsiderable experience. Why was Chandler seeking preliminary knowledge of the decision?
Until then Justin had thought of it as no more than another job to be handled to the best of his ability, one of a long series of decisions that had brought him to his present position.
Now other considerations began to crowd this basis for judgment. It occurred to him that quite literally the fate of a goodly portion of the world might well depend upon his answer. There seemed little question but that Henri Dubois could not get the money he wanted elsewhere.
Or, if the evangelist should obtain such financing, it might not come in time—or in sufficient quantity. And if Dubois were forced to use the contributions sent by his followers to promote his own cause he might be laying himself open to sordid subsequent court actions that, however unjustified, would inevitably soil his character and reputation in the public mind.
Justin became aware of an ominous physical sensitivity that caused him to feel every thread of the nylon pajamas which encompassed his body, every bit of linen in the fine sheet that covered his bare feet.
Twice before he had felt such heightened awareness—once on the eve of his marriage to Marie, again on the night before he had made his first important decision at the bank. On each occasion it had been the prelude to an event that had shaped inexorably the life that followed.
Now it was sharper than ever before—and he wondered if perhaps it meant that the decision he would have to make on the morrow might shape not only his own life but that of the world. He discovered that he was sweating lightly and that the sweat was cold.
This, he told himself, was nonsense. No matter how far-reaching its results a decision was a decision, to be decided one way or the other, according to the best available facts, thereafter to be abided by whatever happened.
He tossed the whole mess out of his mind, turned off the light, pushed one of the two pillows from beneath his head and rolled over on his right side. He had just remembered how to lick it.
The device dated back to his childhood and adolescence in the Midwest, to his years at college, to the early years of his job. It involved a mixture of all three elements—the small town within commuting distance of a medium-sized city, Harvard and Boston—connected by an odd Toonerville-ish single-track railroad on which ran just two passenger trains a day.