"Uh-huh. Then that means Jesse…Not that it matters. You can tell him that one way or the other everything is being taken care of."
"What if you are wrong on the supernatural," I said, "but correct on the other? Supposing it is coming under the circumstances you feel it proper to resist? But supposing you are not next on its list? Supposing it gets to one of the others next, instead of you? If you are so sensitive about guilt and sin, don't you think that you would be responsible for that death, if you could prevent it by telling me just a little bit more? If it's confidentiality you're worried about…"
"No," he said. "You cannot trick me into applying my principles to a hypothetical situation which will only work out the way that you want it to. Not when I am certain that it will not arise. Whatever moves the Hangman, it will come to me next. If I cannot stop it, then it cannot be stopped until it has completed its job."
"How do you know that you are next?"
"Take a look at a map," he said. "It landed in the Gulf. Manny was right there in New Orleans. Naturally, he was first. The Hangman can move underwater like a controlled torpedo, which makes me Mississippi its logical route for inconspicuous travel. Proceeding up it then, here I am in Memphis. Then Leila,, up in St. Louis, is obviously next after me. It can worry about getting to Washington after that."
I thought about Senator Brockden in Wisconsin and decided it would not even have that problem. All of them were fairly accessible, when you thought of the situation in terms of river travel.
"But how is it to know where you all are?" I asked.
"Good question," he said. "Within a limited range, it was once sensitive to our brain waves, having an intimate knowledge of them and the ability to pick them up. I do not know what that range would be today. It might have been able to construct an amplifier to extend this area of perception. But to be more mundane about it, I believe that it simply consulted Central's national directory. There are booths all over, even on the waterfront. It could have hit one late at night and gimmicked it. It certainly had sufficient identifying information, and engineering skill."
"Then it seems to me that the best bet for all of you would be to move away from the river till this business is settled. That thing won't be able to stalk about the countryside very long without being noticed."
He shook his head.
"It would find a way. It is extremely resourceful. At night, in an overcoat, a hat, it could pass. It requires nothing that a man would need. It could dig a hole and bury itself, stay underground during daylight. It could run without resting all night long. There is no place it could not reach in a surprisingly short while…No, I must wait here for it."
"Let me put it as bluntly as I can," I said. "If you are right that it is a Divine Avenger, I would say that it smacks of blasphemy to try to tackle it. On the other hand, if it is not, then I think you are guilty of jeopardizing the others by withholding information that would allow us to provide them with a lot more protection than you are capable of giving them all by yourself."
He laughed.
"I'll just have to learn to live with that guilt, too, as they do with theirs," he said. "After I've done my best, they deserve anything they get."
"It was my understanding," I said, "that even God doesn't judge people until after they're dead, if you want another piece of presumption to add to your collection."
He stopped laughing and studied my face.
"There is something familiar about the way you talk, the way you think," he said. "Have we ever met before?"
"I doubt it. I would have remembered."
He shook his head.
"You've got a way of bothering a man's thinking that rings a faint bell," he went on. "You trouble me, sir."
"That was my intention."
"Are you staying here in town?"
"No."
"Give me a number where I can reach you, will you? If I have any new thoughts on this thing, I'll call you."
"I wish you would have them now, if you are going to have them."
"No, I've got some thinking to do. Where can I get hold of you later?"
I gave him the name of the motel I was still checked into in St. Louis. I could call back periodically for messages.
"All right," he said, and he moved toward the partition by the reception area and stood beside it.
I rose and followed him, passing into that area and pausing at the door to the hall.
"One thing…"I said.
"Yes?"
"If it does show up and you do stop it, will you call me and tell me that?"
"Yes, I will."
"Thanks then, and good luck."
Impulsively, I extended my hand. He gripped it and smiled faintly.
"Thank you. Mister Donne."
Next. Next, next, next…
I couldn't budge Dave, and Leila Thackery had given me everything she was going to. No real sense in calling Don yet, not until I had more to say.
I thought it over on my way back to the airport. The pre-dinner hours always seem best for talking to people in any sort of official capacity, just as the night seems best for dirty work. Heavily psychological, but true nevertheless. I hated to waste the rest of the day if there was anyone else worth talking to before I called Don. Going through the folder, I decided that there was.
Manny Burns had a brother, Phil. I wondered how worthwhile it might be to talk with him. I could make it to New Orleans at a sufficiently respectable hour, learn whatever he was willing to tell me, check back with Don for new developments, and then decide whether there was anything I should be about with respect to the vessel itself.
The sky was gray and leaky above me. I was anxious to flee its spaces. So I decided to do it. I could think of no better stone to upturn at the moment.
At the airport, I was ticketed quickly, in time for another close connection.
Hurrying to reach my flight, my eyes brushed over a half-familiar face on the passing escalator. The reflex reserved for such occasions seemed to catch us both, because he looked back, too, with the same eyebrow twitch of startle and scrutiny. Then he was gone. I could not place him, however. The half-familiar face becomes a familiar phenomenon in a crowded, highly mobile society. I sometimes think that that is all that will eventually remain of any of us: patterns of features, some a trifle more persistent than others, impressed on the flow of bodies. A small-town boy in a big city, Thomas Wolfe must long ago have felt the same thing when he had coined the word "manswarm." It might have been someone I'd once met briefly, or simply someone, or someone like someone, I had passed on sufficient other occasions such as this.
As I flew the unfriendly skies out of Memphis, I mulled over musings past on artificial intelligence, or AI as they have tagged it in the think-box biz. When talking about computers, the AI notion had always seemed hotter than I deemed necessary, partly because of semantics. The word "intelligence" has all sorts of tag-along associations of the non-physical sort. I suppose it goes back to the fact that early discussions and conjectures concerning it made it sound as if the potential for intelligence was always present in the array of gadgets, and that the correct procedures, the right programs, simply had to be found to call it forth. When you looked at it that way, as many did, it gave rise to an uncomfortable deja-vu, namely, vitalism. The philosophical battles of the nineteenth century were hardly so far behind that they had been forgotten, and the doctrine which maintained that life is caused and sustained by a vital principle apart from physical and chemical forces, and that life is self-sustaining and self-evolving, had put up quite a fight before Darwin and his successors had produced triumph after triumph for the mechanistic view. Then vitalism sort of crept back into things again when the AI discussions arose in the middle of the past century. It would seem that Dave had fallen victim to it, and that he'd come to believe he had helped provide an unsanctified vessel and filled it with Something intended only for those things which had made the scene in the first chapter of Genesis…