“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.
He turned back to the water. So restful, so peaceful …
“Hey, Mac, don’t do it! For God’s sake, don’t go off!”
There was a moment of confusion and silent regret and then something sank out of his mind like water draining from a basin. He felt weak and collapsed to his knees on the pier, almost falling over the side. Two men were racing towards him, down the strip of concrete. Soldiers, from a couple of cars parked on the slight cliff overlooking the lake. Their dates were standing on the shore, the wet wind plastering their dresses against them.
The man in the belted raincoat was gone.
“What the hell’s wrong, fella? You weren’t going to go off, were you?”
His teeth were chattering and they had to help him to his feet.
“Tell us where you live, buddy, and we’ll take you home. Life can’t be that bad. A good night’s sleep …”
“Not home,” he mumbled. “Some all-night restaurant where they’ve got a big crowd … don’t want to be alone.”
They helped him back towards the shore. He was so damned weak, he thought. So damned out of it. And so miserably frightened.
Something had toyed with him, like a very superior cat toying with a very stupid mouse. He had been handled like a two-year-old. Somebody had pulled the strings and he had jerked like a marionette, doing what they wanted him to, thinking what they wanted him to think.
He was a strong man, physically and mentally, but he had been handled like putty. A moment more and he’d have committed suicide. A dive into the lake and that would have been it.
Exit Professor Tanner. Exit the curious Professor Tanner who was in charge of a research project for the Navy and who had uncovered something that he shouldn’t have. Exit Professor Tanner who was in a position to learn too much.
It started to rain harder, the water coming down in huge drops that splashed on the pier and made small explosions in the lake and wet his hair until it was plastered over his forehead like tape.
The soldiers had thrown his friend off, he thought. They could probably have been handled but they were unexpected and apparently it took time to gain control of a man’s mind. So he had been saved. But at least it settled the questions that Marge had brought up earlier in the evening. Their friend was a menace and apparently his talents were limited. He had only one. One simple, terrible gift.
He could make people do what he wanted them to.
Tanner shivered and felt horribly sick. The night still reeked with murder and somewhere in the city a monster was loose.
3
THE soldiers took him to an all-night restaurant, had a cup of coffee with him, and left. After they had gone, he retrieved the Sunday papers that somebody had left behind and read everything including the want ads. Then he ordered more coffee and battled grimly with his nerves, looking up apprehensively every time somebody came in. When the morning finally came, he went to a Catholic church and sat through every Mass, hearing nothing of what was said but absorbing the comforting presence of the people in the pews. After lunch he went to a movie and saw a complete show. Twice.
People gave him a feeling of security, he was afraid to be without them. And he dreaded the evening when the streets would be empty and he would have to go home alone. He could go to the movies again, he thought—maybe take in an all-night feature. But the crowd would thin out at midnight and the interior of a deserted movie house would be just as bad as the lonely streets.
He finally went back up north to a druggist he knew and talked the man out of a small box of sleeping pills. Perhaps the danger was not in going to sleep but in staying awake … .
He roamed the crowded streets until six and then, without giving it any conscious thought, walked over to a little spaghetti house that was open Sunday night and which the bachelor faculty members had made their own particular hangout. He still hadn’t called Olson. He hadn’t gotten his courage up to that point.
He didn’t frighten easy, he thought, but this time he was scared to the point where he was close to being physically sick. No longer to be his own master, to feel that he was being used, that somebody had—in effect—put him on as casually as they would put on a glove … .
He spotted Eddy DeFalco alone in one of the booths and immediately tried to shrink back out of sight. DeFalco was too good a bet, too logical a choice for whatever had stalked him the night before.
“Hey, Bill, let’s be sociable—come on over!”
The restaurant was fairly crowded and he had a feeling that safety lay in numbers. He walked over woodenly and sat down.
DeFalco started to butter a thick slice of Italian bread. “You changing your diet? You’ve never had spaghetti on Sunday night before.”
I’m not good at acting, Tanner thought. I wonder if my suspicion shows. Have to be casual.
“I’m not having it now, either. Just coffee.”
DeFalco’s eyes narrowed. “You look white as a sheet, Bill. Feeling okay?”
No, I don’t Eddy. And maybe you know why … . “I guess I’m a little jumpy.”
DeFalco looked sympathetic. “Everybody’s upset. Nobody knows for sure yet whether it’s coincidence or exactly what it is.”
He had a curious feeling of disorientation, as if he and DeFalco were talking about two different things. “I wish to God that I had never gone to that meeting yesterday,” he said carefully.
“Who doesn’t? I’m not too happy I was there myself.”
He couldn’t help talking about it, even to DeFalco who might know all the answers. It was like reminding himself over and over that he wasn’t going to use a certain word and then having the pressure build up until he had to. And Eddy might say something about it that would give him a clue … .
“Ed, how do you feel towards him?”
“What do you mean?”
“Do you dislike him, do you hate him?”
“You know damned wel
l I’ll feel towards him exactly the way he wants me to.” DeFalco carefully wound up a forkful of spaghetti. “If I have my own way, I suppose I’ll dislike him. In fact, I might even hate his guts.”
“Why?”
“How well do you know me?”
Edward Marconi DeFalco, Tanner thought. Thick, black hair, high cheekbones, and full, sensuous lips. A beach-boy tan and physical build, just beginning to flesh out the way most athletes did later in life. The crooner type in light gray slacks and charcoal sport coat. A lot of men disliked him on sight and so did those women who considered him too “pretty” to be entirely masculine and then made the mistake of giving him a chance to prove it wasn’t so.
“Nobody ever really knows anybody else, Ed.”
“Then I’ll tell you something. Everything I am, I’ve had to work for.”
“Everybody …”
DeFalco held up his hand. “I don’t mean it that way. By what I am, I mean personality and I know how tough it is even to define the word. A person’s mannerisms, the way he acts, the little expressions he gets on his face—the things that go to make up the you that people remember. Like two kids selling popcorn in a ball park. One will make a mint and the other won’t be able to move half a dozen bags. What’s the difference? The personality.”
He pushed the plate of spaghetti away and dabbed at his face with a napkin. “I manufactured my own personality. I mean it. I made a study of what people liked in other people and tried to develop those traits myself. Hell, I even used to stand in front of a mirror and practice my winning ways. And if that makes me a hypocrite without a sincere bone in my body, I’ll admit it. But I only did consciously what every kid does unconsciously.
“And then I met a man who was a personality. He was the most alive person I ever met—there was more life in his little finger than in my whole body.” He hesitated. “Don’t get the wrong idea. I was running after little girls when I was nine years old. But like I say, I used to pal around with this friend of mine and you know what happened one day? I wasn’t Eddy DeFalco any more. I was this other person down to the last little mannerism, down to the way he used to accent his words. His personality had run right over mine and I was a carbon copy clear down to my toenails.”
Power, The Page 3