“I’ve been waiting for you to reappear,” he said. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but you don’t seem to be heavily occupied with Grady in whatever frivolous venture he’s been up to since he walked out on me.”

“Well, I’m not as involved as he’d like.”

“Then let me offer an alternative. Come back and work with me.”

“Thank you, but…”

“I’m willing to make concessions,” he went on tolerantly. “I won’t prohibit your reading, although,” he added, “for the life of me I cannot comprehend why you insist on seeing everything secondhand.”

“I was raised that way,” I apologized. “I believe I learned to read before I learned to talk.”

“Or to think. But you must remember, I raised you from a sprout and I’m a flicker from being your father-in-law. Come back with me and I won’t even expect you to think—if you find cerebration that difficult.”

I didn’t want his job, not in a millennium of Mondays. But I was curious. What kind of job encouraged a total absence of thought?

“What kind of job?” I asked.

“I just told you,” he said, “that we are on the verge of the most desperately needed watershed in the history of the human race.” He gestured at a bowl of wild cherries sitting on a low table. “I’ve put the fipple flute and the cymbals and all the rest of it together—that was the key, you see, mixing the frequencies—and I’ve seen a whole batch of cherries, not two or three, cavort and prance to the music. Observe, and try to be objective.”

I did both as he gestured at the bowl of cherries. In it a few drupes popped about, as if prompted by an invisible hand. “And now,” he yelled, “the time has come to record our progress so that, soon as the breakthrough comes, we can submit it for publication. I want you to write down what I tell you and then kind of trick it up, you know, the way writers do? I’d do it myself if I had the time.”

“It wouldn’t require any thought on my part?”

“Goodness, no,” he said, “why should it? I’ll give you all the data, and supply the biographical background. All you have to do is rearrange it a little and you’ll have a runaway best seller.”

I could scarcely believe my ears. Here he was, a bludgeoner of books whose contempt for the written word bordered on hysteria, and suddenly hell-bent on sweet-talking me into doing a book about his obsession. I was the alembic that would transmute him, in a few hundred tricked-up pages, from kook to Mme. Curie.