"Rog Phillips - The Egg Head" - читать интересную книгу автора (Phillips Rog)

THE EGG HEAD
by Rog Phillips

Copyright ┬й 1961, H.S.D. Publications Inc.

eBook scanned & proofed by Binwiped 11-27-02 [v1.0]




I should have kept my big mouth shut, but I was tired that night. When I got home there was a letter from
our oldest, Doris, telling us she had married the scientist. Maybe I was a little put out that she hadn't
brought him home to meet us first. Mostly, though, I was disappointed that she hadn't married a cop.

Anyway, I snorted, "Marrying an egg head? Huh!"

Donald and Billie and Joanne and Patricia, who had been excited at the news, sobered at once.
MomтАФthat's my wife, Janet, but I've called her Mom or Mama since the day Doris was bornтАФsaid,
"Now John! That's no way to talk."

"I'm just tired," I said. "Had a rough day." I'm Captain Provident, Chief of Homicide for the past
eight years. Sometimes I'm hanging onto my job by the skin of my teeth, but I never let my family know
that. My kids are sure that I'm the greatest brain since Sherlock Holmes.

Hoping to find something to cheer me up, I read on in the letter. "Born and raised in Boston?" I said
in dismay. This meant he was a Harvard or Yale graduate, and brought to my mind the endless string of
fuzz-faced college boys assigned to the Department, who tried to tell me my businessтАФand sometimes
succeeded.

My dismay was so ludicrous that Billie started to laugh. Then they were all laughing at me, and I felt
better about Doris getting married.

"I guess it's okay," I said in better humor, giving the letter back to Mom.

But it wasn't. We'd been a close-knit family, until Doris left for California two years ago. Her
absence had been almost like a death in the family, and her frequent letters hadn't helped much. We
missed her.

She had been twenty-five then and a good secretary. She hadn't found anyone in Central City to
marry (plenty of them had wanted her, including some mighty fine boys on the force, but she had turned
thumbs down on all of them), so she had moved to San Francisco, though God knows why San
Francisco.

She'd worked at a couple of jobs she didn't like too well, and had been on the point of coming back
home when she hooked onto a job at the Lawrence Radiation Labs in Berkeley. She'd been enthusiastic
about it in her letters for six months, then had seemed to get bored. Mom had suspected it wasn't
boredom but secretiveness, and she'd been right. Doris had met Bob Nichols, the egg head from Boston,
judging from this letter.

During the next two weeks we got postcards from Niagara Falls, Starved Rock, Mammoth Caves. .