'It's not an asylum,' the attendant corrected him.

'No,' Abe said, 'it's a nursing home. Only the people who run it are crazy; we're just old and decrepit.'

He quivered with soundless mirth as the attendant grinned at Bradley, shook his head in a rueful manner, then said, 'Enjoy!' and walked away. Bradley settled into his chair facing the grinning old man, whose thick-lashed brown eyes were still bright.

'So,' Goldman said, 'you said on the phone you wanted to talk about my old company.'

'That's right. Goldman and Cohn. Based and registered in New York, back in the nineties. A finance company, I gather.'

'Yep.' Goldman shook his head emphatically. 'Old Jack and me, we made a G.o.dd.a.m.ned fortune and retired at an early age. Of course, Jack,' he said, blowing a cloud of smoke, 'kicked off a few years back. He didn't smoke or drink, that was his problem. Living clean isn't good for you.'

'I'll try to remember that,' Bradley said.

'You do that, son. Pearls of wisdom from the ancients. Now what did you want to know?'

'Is it true that your company was involved in the financing of airship designs?'

'It sure is, son. And it's what made us rich. There was a lot of loot in airship designs if you knew which hands to shake.'

'You built a secret research centre here, in Iowa, didn't you?'

'Yep. That's why I'm retired here. Jack Cohn and I, we both came out here in the nineties, to supervise the research center then, when we had to close it down, we decided to stay on. Our wives and kids loved it here.'

'I want to ask you about that about why you closed the plant down but first I want to know if your chief aeronautical engineer was a guy named John Wilson.'

'I do believe it was. I'm not good at remembering names, but I'm good at the faces and I'd never forget that engineer. He was a weird one, I tell you.'

'Weird?'

'He surely was though he was also the most brilliant designer we'd ever come across. Miles ahead of the others.'

'What do you mean by weird?'

Goldman inhaled and puffed, looking thoughtful. 'Not too sure,' he said. 'Such a long time ago. At my age, memory plays some awful tricks. Not reliable, son.'

'I don't mind,' Bradley said.

Goldman puffed out his cheeks and blew more smoke; he had a lot of it in there. 'Brilliant,' he reiterated. 'But cold. Cold as ice. Something almost inhuman about him there. Always well mannered and pleasant, but not really concerned. He saw people he watched them like a hawk but he never seemed to feel anything.'

'Obsessed with his work?'

'Christ, yes. It was bread and water to him. He had nothing except his work. I remember once asking him about his childhood you know, I thought he might have been mistreated as a child or something

and he said, no, that his parents had been fine, he just hadn't been interested, that's all. Life, he said, was too precious to waste on small things, on the ordinary, and his parents, while decent, had been ordinary, so he lost interest in them. He thought that people wasted their lives, that most of them were too emotional, and that the mind and what it could achieve were all that really mattered in life. Any human activity that didn't have a specific, evolutionary purpose was to him a complete waste of time, maybe even degenerate. You know sports, games, romantic love, kids, reading just for pleasure you name it if it wasn't somehow advancing science or evolution, it was pretty despicable.'

'Yet he was well mannered and polite.'

'Right. You couldn't even prod him to anger. I do remember him telling me that any emotion that blurred objective thought was an unhealthy emotion. He didn't involve himself with people he worked with them or studied them and although he had some women in his life, I think they were just there for the s.e.x: a way of scratching at the one distracting itch he couldn't get rid of.'

'He wasn't married?'

'No and never had been.'

'A real loner.'

'More like a recluse. I don't think we socialized once we only met to discuss work and even then, it was always at the research centre.'

'How did you find him?'

'Me and my partner Jack Cohn, G.o.d rest his soul were looking for someone, preferably young, bright, and willing to work cheap, to design pa.s.senger-carrying airships, which we were convinced would revolutionize transport. So, we placed an ad' in various newspapers, asking for aeronautical engineers, and Wilson called and we fixed up a meeting. He'd just graduated from Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York, which was convenient, since that's where we were based. Anyway, we met him and he impressed the h.e.l.l out of us he was so obviously brilliant so we had no hesitation in putting him in charge of our airship development project.'

'Why did you move it all the way from the East Coast to here?'

'Wilson's idea. In those days, you know, there was an awful lot of experimentation going on patents flying all over the place and so all of us were obsessive about protecting what we were doing. Lots of secrecy, right? So we wanted our project to be kept under wraps and preferably located well away from the prying eyes of our compet.i.tors. Jack, I think, suggested California, but then Wilson said he knew of this great place near where he'd come from in the wilds of Iowa, near the Illinois border and when he also informed us that land and property there were cheap, we bought the idea. We sent Wilson out here to find us what we needed, and he came up with the plant in Mount Pleasant. We not only built the plant there, but took all our workers from the area, which meant there was no gossip back in New York.'