"Darwin."
"Yes, Darwin. Mankind has come a long way on the evolutionary scale, but it's not over yet. Have you ever wondered about the next step?"
"No."
"No. No one wonders. It took millions of years for man to learn to walk erect, to develop the cranial capacity to house a manlike brain, to generate prehensile fingers and an opposable thumb. No one is quite certain how these developments occurred. They are still the subject of raging debate because they are not sudden occurrences. They happen over generations. Well, Mearle, I have discovered that the next stage in human evolution has already arrived. Now. Here in the U.S."
"I'll bet it's all that sugar we eat. It probably accelerates the process."
"Could I tell this? ... Thank you. At the Institute for Human Potential Awareness I went through literally tens of thousands of accounts of extraordinary human feats. I sorted them according to sex. Then within gender. I divided those accounts into incidents of accelerated reflex, heightened strength, and other like phenomena. Many of these incidents are easily explained with the parameters of known physiology. Adrenaline can convey great strength for short periods of time. High-speed mental calculations are possible by some brains-oddly, most of these are people who suffer from forms of retardation. Other traits are the product of a dominant gene that can disappear for generations."
"You're losing me."
"I'm just getting to my point," Naomi said quickly. "As I sorted these accounts, I was struck by certain commonalities among them. Do you remember the Yuma Emergency last Christmas?"
"Who doesn't? An American city taken over by a Japanese movie company. It was worse than the Chinese student massacres."
"The government hushed a lot of it up. But several eyewitness accounts made it into Arizona newspapers, and these came into my hands. During the height of the crisis, many people reported that the occupying army was attacked and virtually dismantled."
"By U.S. Rangers," Mearle said flatly.
"That's Washington's cover story," Naomi countered. "I personally flew to Yuma to interview some of the eyewitnesses, and they described to me a lone man who tore tanks apart, bested squads of heavily armed Japanese troops, and virtually lifted the siege of Yuma with his bare hands. Before the Rangers parachuted in."
"One man?" Mearle said skeptically.
"One unarmed man. A man who, by all accounts, was six feet tall and weighed no more than one hundred and sixty pounds. What we anthropologists call an ectomorph."
"I'll look it up."
"No need. An ectomorph is a thin person. An endomorph is a fat person. And a mesomorph is a normally muscled person."
"Which am I?"
"A biped. Barely."
"I'll look it up."
"Do." Naomi smiled fiercely. "This man was a casuasoid. Slim. Obviously not the weight-lifter type. Yet he bent gun barrels in his fingers. Bullets could not stop him."
"They're supposed to bounce off Superman."
"I have no reports of such a phenomenon. He evidently avoided them by pure reflex."
"Adrenaline or sugar?"
"Neither. This man sustained these impossible activities. Adrenaline is good for twenty-minute stretches. This man-this seemingly ordinary man-systematically dismantled the Japanese army in the course of a long day of hand-to-hand fighting. The reports described him as unremarkable except for two distinguishing features that stuck in the minds of the people who witnessed his destructive power. He had unusually thick wrists. And his eyes were dead."
Mearle gulped in spite of himself. "Dead?"
"Flat. Lifeless. Devoid of emotion. That kind of dead."
"I don't get it."
"There's more. Before I flew to Yuma to check out these reports firsthand, I collected all the Yuma reports and checked for similar reports elsewhere. I found them. Clipped from obscure newspapers and journals. Some of the sources were pretty disreputable. Fate magazine. The Fortean Journal. Publications that revel in ghosts and UFO's and Bigfeet."
"Foot. Bigfoot. Actually, I did a poll on UFO's. Do you know that over seventy-seven percent of Americans believe in flying saucers?"
"You people actually conducted a nationwide survey?"
"No," Mearle said casually. "We sampled an Akron neighborhood and extrapolated from there."
"That's statistically unsupportable!"
Mearle shrugged. "It sold papers."
"I'm sure that it did," Naomi said acidly. "In any case, I found other reports of incredible feats. All of them had one thing in common. The man who performed them had thick wrists and dark dead eyes. Sometimes he was not alone, but was accompanied by an enigmatic Asian. I don't understand that part myself. I doubt they could be related or even part of the same gene pool. Yet both performed similar extraordinary feats. And these reports come from all over America."
"This is great. This is wonderful," enthused Mearle, for the first time checking his tape recorder to see if it was running. It was.
"You see what I am leading up to?"
"Yeah! Space aliens. They're probably after our sugar."
"I am not talking about aliens," Naomi snorted. "I was trying to communicate to you that the next stage in human evolution has appeared in our society. In America. Now. The man who will lead humanity into the twenty-first century. The man who, once he begins to sow his seed, will usher in a new race of men, making all of us poor ethnocentric Homo sapiens as obsolete as Australopithecus."
"He's a farmer?"
"I had another kind of seed in mind. Sperm."
"Now I get it. He's a menace. Are you saying he should be destroyed before he breeds?"
"No, never. If this man is the next step in evolution, it will be up to us, as the former dominant species, to step aside, just as the Neanderthal man stepped aside for Cro-Magnon."
"That's crazy!"
"To the contrary. Evolution is wonderfully sane. And so am I. In fact, I would volunteer in a moment to bear the child of this next stage of Homo sapiens. It would be a privilege."
Mearle blinked. "That's what you want me to write? That you're looking for a date?"
Naomi's shark-fin face grew sharper. "That was very crudely put," she said primly. "This is science. This is the future."
"No," returned Mearle, shutting off his tape recorder as he got to his feet. "This is the front page of our next issue."
"Wait! Don't you want to hear the rest of my hypothesis?"
"Later. My editor is sure to want follow-up. Right now, I've got more than I need."
The door slammed after him, stirring the mousy tendrils of hair that framed Naomi Vanderkloot's narrow forehead like venetian-blind cords.
"I hope I haven't made a big mistake," she muttered under her breath. "I'm up for tenure next year...."
Buddy Newman was expecting the gray man.
On the third Tuesday of every month, the Sak-N-Sav where Buddy was a cashier ran a two-for-one special on certain slow-moving products, among them Flako Magic Potato Mix. It was the Flako that brought the gray man into the store, where once a month he invariably stocked up, buying as many as six boxes at a time.
After three years of ringing up the gray man's third-Tuesday purchases-all on sale and most unfit for discriminating stomachs-Buddy Newman looked forward to seeing the gray man the way he looked forward to registering for the draft. Not as bad as a root canal, but it was no walk in the park either.
So when the gray man came in through the photoelectric doors and made a beeline for the sale aisle, Buddy Newman groaned inwardly.
Buddy thought of him as the gray man even though he knew his name was Smith. Buddy knew that fact because he lived on the same street as the man, in Rye, New York. The front-door nameplate of the Tudor-style house said: Smith. That was as much about him as Buddy Newman knew or wanted to know.