“Why?”
She shrugged. “Maybe I’m reading too much into it. But why did he show himself at all? John dared him, and he responded. That’s a very human thing to do—to give in to a dare.”
He thought about it for a moment. “You think he might be sort of a Johnny one-note, then? A one-fault Jones? A few superior talents and …”
“ … and very human failings. And I think the combination is dangerous, like a three-hundred-horsepower motor in a nineteen-fifteen car body.”
“Just what do you think his talents might be?”
“I really don’t have any idea. And I hope I never find out.”
There was a little silence between them and for the first time he became aware of the slight hum of conversation in the room. Finally he said, “I’ll give him the benefit of a doubt, Marge. I think he might be all right. It’s a human reaction to be afraid of something we don’t understand and I think that half the time we cut our own throats when we are. I know one thing: I’d like to find out who it is.”
She lowered her voice. “Bill, what about the government? Don’t you think you ought to notify them?”
“Maybe they’d think we were all a little off.”
“That’s not a good reason.”
“I know. So I tried to place a call from the laboratories.”
“And?”
“The phone wasn’t working.” She looked startled and he said dryly, “Don’t let your imagination run away with you. A falling tree limb snapped the wires right at the insulators.”
“You’re sure of that?” She glanced at the other couples huddled over the polished wooden tables. “Lord, I’ll never forget the look on Professor Scott’s face!”
“Which one do you think it is?” Tanner asked abruptly.
“I’d almost rather not know.”
“Nordlund?”
“I doubt it. He doesn’t get along very well with people, which I think would be vitally necessary.”
“It could be a pose.”
“Maybe.”
He hunched over the table. “What about Van Zandt?”
“That one I might buy.” She frowned. “He’s brilliant, he’s cold, and he doesn’t hide the fact that he holds the human race in low esteem.”
“What do you know about him?”
“Not a great deal. Unhappy marriage, which is nothing unusual, I guess. He and Susan met during the war. He was a captain in psychological warfare and she was a singer in one of the Chicago night clubs. He wanted to marry glamour and she wanted to marry a homebody. They were both disappointed.”
“Grossman?”
“Physicist type. Believes strictly in what he can measure and doesn’t believe in what he can’t. At least, he didn’t until this morning—and he was mumbling something about short-wave radiation when we left. By tomorrow he’ll be denying that he saw it at all. He’s supposed to be a genius, one who’s on remarkably good terms with the common herd.” She paused. “There’re rumors that he uses a Linguaphone so he can keep his accent.”
“No doubt a superior trait.”
The waitress came back with more drinks and Tanner buried himself in the beer for a moment.
Grossman is a possibility,
he thought.
There’s no doubt that he’s a superior human being. But just how superior?
“What about Eddy DeFalco, Bill? You know him better than I do.”
“His reputation is not exaggerated, if that’s what you mean.”
“I know all about Rosemary O’Connor—but that isn’t what I meant.”
He shrugged. “Sorry. Eddy’s an odd combination. Animalistic, idealistic, and brainy. No conscience. He knows what he wants and goes all out to get it and to hell with society.”
“He’d fit.”
“Maybe.”
“I suppose we can leave out Professor Scott.”
“Why? There’s nothing that says our superman has to be young, is there?”
She looked dubious. “No, I suppose not. It just doesn’t seem logical, though.”
“Things haven’t seemed logical since nine o’clock this morning. What about John Olson himself?”
“The personality zero?”
He felt irritated. “So some time ago somebody stepped on him. It happens to a lot of people.”
“It could be a cover-up.”
If it was, it was one of the best, he thought. Olson was a nervous, finger-plucking, pale young man who made a fetish out of being cautious. He was the kind of man who wouldn’t be positive about the time of day. Likable in a way—you felt sorry for him—but there was something unpleasant hidden behind the perpetually frightened eyes. Something so unpleasant you had the feeling that no matter what you guessed it to be, it was bound to be something worse.
“I would tend to eliminate John first of all,” Marge said thoughtfully. “Which is probably the most logical reason for considering him.”
“Then that leaves you and Petey.”
“Me!”
He half smiled. “Why not? Superman doesn’t have to be a
man,
you know.”
“And it wouldn’t do much good for me to deny it, would it?”
“That’s just what you would be expected to do, under the circumstances.”
“All right,” she said coolly. “Then I don’t deny it.”
For a moment he felt like somebody had dropped an ice cube down his back. “How do I know you’re kidding?”
“You don’t,” she said maliciously.
He drained the rest of his beer. “Let’s talk about something else.”
An hour later the bartender flicked the lights twice in rapid succession and Tanner glanced at his watch. Closing time—and early Sunday morning. He helped Marge on with her jacket and they stepped out into the night. Outside, a light fog had rolled in from the lake and it had started to mist. The dark clouds had settled so low that Tanner felt a slight touch of claustrophobia.
They started walking down the street and he brushed her hand with his. Their fingers met and clung.
“Do you ever get lonely, Marge?” He let it hang there.
“Sometimes.”
“You don’t have to be.”
He could sense her smiling faintly in the dark. “Is this a proposal or a proposition?”
“You want an honest answer?”
“Naturally.”
He was quiet for a moment. “All right, I’ll be honest and call it both.”
“You’re nice, Bill.”
“But not that nice?”
She seemed distant. “It’s a cold night, isn’t it?”
He walked her to her apartment, kissed her lightly on the cheek, and left her fumbling for the door key. He was at the bottom of the steps when she said, “Bill? John Olson called me earlier this evening and said you should be sure to look him up tomorrow. He said he had been trying to get hold of you all afternoon, he had something to tell you.”
He wished to hell she had told him sooner. “I’ll give him a ring in the morning.”
She worked the key, then paused in the open doorway. “Bill?”
He whirled. “What?”
She was smiling down at him, half hidden in the darkness. “Good night.”
He stared at the closing door, then turned and started down the street. It was only a mile back to his own apartment and there was no sense in waiting for a bus that might never come.
Street lamps on the shadowed streets, a haloed nimbus surrounding the globes. The store fronts dark and haunted, the pavement deserted. Life had retreated from the streets into snug little homes and apartments and rose-wallpapered bedrooms. It gave him the willies. It was as if the city were totally empty, mile after mile of desolate streets, a no-man’s land with himself as the only living person … .
The click of his heels echoed back and forth from store to store—the solid, steady sound of leather hitting concrete. The solitary
click-click-click
, like the ticking of some huge watch.
He had covered three blocks before he caught the tiny separation in the sounds, the minute distinctions between the sound of his own heels on the sidewalk and the sound of someone else’s a block down. So he wasn’t the only one out late at night, he thought. In a way, it spoiled the illusion … .
He turned a corner and crossed over a block. The footsteps that paralleled his own also turned a corner and crossed over a block.
He changed step, just to vary the rhythm.
A block away, somebody else changed step.
Sweat oozed out on his forehead and the pounding of his heart filled his ears. He stopped under an awning to light a cigarette and the flame jiggled uncertainly in his hands. His palms felt damp and greasy.
If somebody was after him, he’d wait for them to come; he could take care of himself. And if it was just somebody out walking, he’d wait for the sound to die away.
Thirty seconds.
One minute.
Five minutes.
There was no sound except the rising wind and the rustle of leaves. He forced a smile. It had been his imagination. He’d been acting like a kid sidling past a graveyard.
He started walking.
And there were the sounds of footsteps a block away. A little faster. He quickened his own step.
It hit him just when he was walking past a street lamp and he had to hold on to the post for support. It felt like being slugged and for a moment he almost blacked out. Something tore and buffeted at his mind, forcing the essential bit of personality that was
him
to scuttle into the dim recesses. For a brief moment he felt the helpless inferiority of a very small man in a very large room, as if he were drunk and there were a small kernel of sobriety in the back of his mind wondering why he was saying and doing the things that he was.
It passed quickly and he straightened up, no longer afraid of the evening and the footsteps.
Footsteps. Odd he should have thought of them. There were no footsteps other than his own. He had been walking down the street in the middle of a deserted city. Alone.
Alone.
His mind plucked curiously at the word and it struck him how appropriate it was. He had been alone all of his life. Alone in this damned vale of tears that people called life. Alone in the rabbit warrens of the cities.
The unfriendly city. The houses, the apartment buildings, the stores—all frowning at him, dark and unfriendly. Like the world. The whole, entire world.
He turned another corner and walked slowly towards the park, It loomed ahead, a darkened stretch of trees and winding paths and small, crouching hills. The string of street lamps wound through the hills like a gigantic pearl necklace. To the right there was … the lake.
He was sweating. His hands were shaking and the salt perspiration crept down his forehead and beaded into the corners of his eyes. He had a headache, a whopping big headache, and somewhere lost inside him a voice was crying:
not the lake, not the lake, not the lake!
People didn’t care, he thought. People never gave a damn about each other. About him. Marge would smile and kid him to his face but she didn’t really mean it. And it was that way with everybody he knew. Not a single friend among them, not a single person who cared …
What was it the man had said? The epitaph?
He lived, he suffered, he died.
But there was always the lake. The beautiful lake. The cool, black, rolling lake with the long concrete piers that fingered out into the friendly water, into depths where the level was well above a man’s head. Just a few steps down the sloping sands and onto the concrete …
Not the lake!
William Tanner was going to die, he thought, and felt something salt crawl down his cheek. Little Willie Tanner whose mother had died when he was eight, despite everything the Science practitioner could do. And whose father had been killed in an airplane accident, one of those fateful accidents that you have a premonition about. “
I shouldn’t go, Willie. I don’t feel right about it … .”
And now Mom and Dad and Grandma Santucci would be waiting for him and he’d show the people who didn’t care … .
Just a few more steps to the pier. The black water, quietly lapping against the concrete in small waves that were getting bigger as the wind rose. The black-green, friendly water. Waiting for him.
He turned for one last look, his cheeks streaked with tears. A man was standing at the head of the pier. A tall man, with a slouch hat that was pulled down over his face, wearing a belted raincoat. The man was waiting for him to take that long, last dive and Willie didn’t want to disappoint him, did he?
No, Tanner thought. He didn’t want to disappoint his friend. The friend who would call the police so they could fish out his body when they found it lodged against the pier supports below.