"_And_," Mr. Fownes added, his voice a honeyed whisper, "they say
that somewhere out in the space and the roses and the moonlight,
the sleeping equinox yawns and rises because on a certain day it's
_vernal_ and that's when it roams the Open Country where geigers no
longer scintillate."
"_My._" Mrs. Deshazaway rose, paced slowly to the window and then came
back to the table, standing directly over Fownes. "If you can get us
outside the dome," she said, "out where a man stays _warm_ long enough
for his wife to get to know him ... if you can do that, Mr. Fownes ...
you may call me Agnes."
* * * * *
When Humphrey Fownes stepped out of the widow's house, there was a
look of such intense abstraction on his features that Lanfierre felt a
wistful desire to get out of the car and walk along with the man. It
would be such a _deliciously_ insane experience. ("April has thirty
days," Fownes mumbled, passing them, "because thirty is the largest
number such that all smaller numbers not having a common divisor
with it are _primes_." MacBride frowned and added it to the dossier.
Lanfierre sighed.)
Pinning his hopes on the Movement, Fownes went straight to the
library several blocks away, a shattered depressing place given over
to government publications and censored old books with holes in
them. It was used so infrequently that the Movement was able to meet
there undisturbed. The librarian was a yellowed, dog-eared woman of
eighty. She spent her days reading ancient library cards and, like the
books around her, had been rendered by time's own censor into near
unintelligibility.
"Here's one," she said to him as he entered. "_Gulliver's Travels._
Loaned to John Wesley Davidson on March 14, 1979 for _five_ days. What
do you make of it?"
In the litter of books and cards and dried out ink pads that surrounded
the librarian, Fownes noticed a torn dust jacket with a curious
illustration. "What's that?" he said.
"A twister," she replied quickly. "Now listen to _this_. Seven years
later on March 21, 1986, Ella Marshall Davidson took out the same book.
What do you make of _that_?"
"I'd say," Humphrey Fownes said, "that he ... that he recommended it
to her, that one day they met in the street and he told her about
this book and then they ... they went to the library together and she
borrowed it and eventually, why eventually they got married."
"Hah! They were brother and sister!" the librarian shouted in her
parched voice, her old buckram eyes laughing with cunning.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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