Nothing.
He stripped off his robe and pajamas in the master bedroom and went into the bathroom. Turning on the shower, he waited until steam was pouring out of the stall, then adjusted the temperature so it was just off the scalding point. With a sigh of pleasure he stepped into the stinging spray, lathered himself luxuriantly, then let the steaming water sluice over him, relaxing his muscles as it washed the last of the hospital odor from his skin. Only when he felt the water beginning to cool and realized he’d nearly exhausted the heater’s supply did he shut off the faucets, step out onto the cold marble tiles of the bathroom floor and begin toweling himself dry. After taking a swipe at the steamy mirror on the bathroom door, he tossed the soggy towel toward the hamper that stood next to the sink, missed, but let it lay where it fell as he caught a smeared glimpse of himself in the still mostly fogged mirror.
He’d lost at least ten pounds while he was in the hospital, and it wasn’t a ten pounds he was happy to have gone. In fact, he’d spent months gaining those pounds, exercising, running, doing all the right things. Now they were gone, and he was nearly back to the skinny frame he’d hated so much during the first thirty years of his life, before he’d discovered working out.
Well, he’d just have to start over, regain the weight, and retone the muscles that had gone flaccid while he lay in the hospital bed.
Turning away from the full-length mirror, he moved to the sink, brushed his teeth, then used his hand to wipe a small patch of the mirror above the sink. Bending close, he examined his reflection.
Christ! He looked like a homeless person: his cheeks had hollowed, his eyes were sunken, and the laugh lines around them were threatening to turn into genuine wrinkles. Worst of all, the stubble on his cheeks and jowls had taken on a gray cast he’d never noticed before.
That, at least, he could fix right now.
Opening the medicine cabinet, he picked up the shaver Heather and Kevin had given him for his last birthday and switched it on.
Suddenly, the sensation that he was no longer alone — that someone else was not only in the house, but in the bathroom itself — became overpowering. Every muscle in his body tensing, Glen readied himself to whirl around to confront whoever was there. But even as he turned, the shock struck him, and he tumbled once more into the kind of blackness that had yawned beneath him on the day of his heart attack. In less than a second he was unconscious.
***
The Experimenter gazed at the razor that had dropped into the sink as Glen Jeffers had fallen into unconsciousness.
Tentatively, he reached out and touched it lightly with a single finger. Then he picked it up, turning it over in his hand, examining it the way he liked to examine everything he came in contact with. It seemed perfectly all right — no cracks in its case; its hard plastic shell hadn’t even chipped when it struck the porcelain of the sink. Satisfied, he held the appliance to his face and gently rubbed it over his right cheek.
And instantly dropped it as millions of tiny electric needles seemed to shoot from the shaving head into his skin.
Picking the shaver up again, the Experimenter turned it over in his hand once more.
There was a flaw in it — there had to be.
There were flaws in everything, if you looked closely enough. He’d found that out from all the examinations he’d conducted. In even the most perfect of the specimens he’d observed, he’d always been able to find a flaw. So now he turned his full concentration to the shaver, focusing his mind, searching for the cause of the shocks he’d just felt. Yet no matter how hard he looked, he could find no sign of damage.
The object sat in his hand, purring and vibrating almost like a living thing.
The Experimenter’s mind began to work once more, and his yearning to understand the force he’d felt grew stronger.
Had it truly been electricity he’d felt?
He pressed the shaver against his skin, and felt again the prickling tingle.
This time, though, it felt slightly different.
Different, and familiar.
He moved the appliance over the skin of his face, and now he imagined it was something else.
The touch of a finger, stroking him gently, exciting him.
The stroke of a woman.
Yes, that was it. It felt like the stroke of a woman, and he’d felt it before. The same erotically caressing sensation, as if an electrical charge were flowing out of her.
But how could it be flowing out of the thing in his hand?
It wasn’t alive, it held no blood, carried no spirit, no energy of its own. It was only an object, totally inanimate. Yet the tingling … the tingling … He had to know.
Had to experiment, as he always had before.
Clutching the shaver with the same grip he’d used on all his subjects — tight enough for security, but not so tightly as to harm — the Experimenter carried it to the basement below the house.
Excitement was growing in him — the same excitement he’d always felt before one of his experiments — and it was good to feel it again.
He’d been idle too long.
He pulled the string of the fluorescent light suspended above the three two-by-twelve planks that formed a rough workbench. Laying the shaver down, he glanced around the area, finding a toolbox at the end of the bench, exactly where it should be. Rummaging through it, he found a set of miniature tools. Choosing a tiny Phillips screwdriver, he set to work.
As always, he worked in the nude.
Twenty minutes later the shaver lay in pieces, the major section of its black case broken into three fragments. Its motor and battery sat next to the case, the wires of the motor torn away from their connections to the battery. The gears that connected the three blades were scattered on the bench, and the Experimenter knew they would never be fitted together again.
Like all his previous researches, this one, too, had ultimately failed.
The Experimenter stood trembling in the basement, glowering at the ruined shaver, his frustration and anger growing by the second.
Why hadn’t he been able to find what he’d been searching for?
Why hadn’t he been able to determine from where the energy in the shaver had been leaking?
He knew he’d felt it — even now he could almost feel the tingling on his face!
It should have been perfectly simple. An idiot should have been able to take the machine apart, find the flaw, fix it, and reassemble it!
After all, it wasn’t a living tiling. It was only an object!
And now it was broken beyond repair, or at least beyond his ability to repair it Seized suddenly by a desire to be rid of the offending object — a desire that was at least as strong as had been his urge to disassemble it — the Experimenter picked up the pieces of the shaver, mounted the stairs, and left the house through the back door. Crossing the yard, he strode past the garage, toward the back fence where the four recycling barrels were lined up.
Lifting the lid of the first one that came to hand, he threw the broken shaver inside, slammed the lid back onto the can, and started back toward the house.
He was halfway across the yard when he heard a faint gasp.
Stopping short, the Experimenter glanced around, his attention immediately caught by a flicker of movement from the house next door.
He was being watched.
A blowzy-looking woman had been about to step out onto her back porch. The Experimenter gazed coldly at her, and for a brief moment their eyes locked. Then, as if frightened by what she was seeing, the woman’s face turned scarlet and she backed away, disappearing into her house as suddenly as she’d come. Her back door slammed sharply behind her.