Jennilou Caswell buried her face in her hands and began to weep as though her heart was broken.
“Are you convinced?” Bill Dorvan asked the tall blond girl.
She had gnawed her lipstick off her lower lip. Her eyes had a glazed look. “Little man, I am more than convinced.”
“Something happened in that bus. I had a tingling feeling. Did you?”
“Now that you mention it.”
“We don’t feel any different. It’s like you said — as though everything had become mealy. But it hasn’t. We’re different, you and I — and of course the others on that bus. I’ll never forget your face after you took a poke at that telephone pole.”
“You told me to, smartie.”
“Just like somebody had hit it with the blunt end of a steel baseball bat. You punched a hole six inches deep.”
She shuddered. “Don’t talk about it.”
“It isn’t what you’d call a feminine characteristic, babe. You could take on Ray Robinson and Gorgeous George at the same time.”
“You cease to amuse.”
“I made up my mind not to talk to any more women.”
“How lucky for them!”
“But we’ve got something in common and somehow I don’t want to be alone with this nasty little knack we’ve developed. Do you?”
“I... I guess not.”
“Let’s go back to town. I’ll buy you a meal near a place where I can get a shave. Then I’ll look a little more respectable.”
She gave him a sudden grin which wrinkled her nose. “Okay, iron man.”
An hour later the barber lathered Bill Dorvan’s face, took a glance at the clock. Five minutes to go.
He stropped the razor, made a long stroke from temple to chin. The razor rasped across the beard with none of the usual sleek sound. It lifted the lather off and left the beard. The barber grunted and got another razor. Same thing. He examined the edges of the blades. The notches were visible to the naked eye.
With a wet towel he mopped off the lather. He tilted the chair back to normal position. He said, “Mister, you take that beard to somebody else. Already two razors ruined. Please go away. No charge.”
Bill stood up. Before the barber could protest, he picked up a pair of shears. Looking in a mirror he grasped a thick-lock of hair, tried to cut it with the shears. It bent the center rivet and sprung the blades. He threw the shears aside and stalked out of the shop, wondering how he’d look in a full beard.
McGoran hid until night, then made his way into the city. He could not tear his mind from what he had seen when he had pulled his shirt open to examine his wounds. There were four round bruises on his chest, the skin faintly broken over two of them. Other things had begun to add up. In the patch of woods where he hid he had found a rusty horseshoe. It had been simple to twist it until the metal snapped.
His clothes were a giveaway. In the city he found a man his size. He followed him. On a dark street he caught up with him. He had meant to take the man very gently by the throat. But the throat pulped under his fingers and the man was dead before McGoran dragged him away. It was difficult to undress the body but he managed it. He left the man naked in the small court behind the dark office building, stuffed his own clothes into a wastepaper bin three blocks away.
He then walked boldly into a good restaurant and ordered dinner. It wasn’t until he took his first bite of steak that some of the more horrid aspects of this odd change became more evident. The steak dissolved like gelatin. The flavor was right but he could part it with his lips. The texture was sickeningly bland. He could barely detect the substance of the bread. It was akin to eating cobwebs.
Chapter IV
Hell to Pay
Tom Bellbight was a physically lazy man, lank, languid. A pipe smoker, a congenital bachelor, a hanger of legs over chair arms, a fight fan, a doctor of physics, research chief of Program Ten for Loma.
He came shuffling into Dickinson’s office with a sheaf of newspapers in his hand. Dickinson looked up impatiently. “Well?”
Tom Bellbight knocked the ashes out of his pipe and shoved it into his pocket. He collapsed into a chair like a scarecrow blown over by the wind. “Now beat on your chest like a partridge, Dick. You can spare a couple of minutes.”
Dickinson sighed. “Okay. What goes?”
“Accident yesterday. Old lady hit by a truck.”
“That’s hardly earthshaking, Tom.”
“This old lady walked out in front of a bus. Truck hit her. Did two hundred and eighty-six dollars damage to the front end of the truck. Knocked the old lady thirty feet. Didn’t even bruise her.”
“She sounds like my mother-in-law.”
“The bus was stopped because the driver pushed the brake pedal down through the floor. I stopped down and looked at the bus. Take about eleven hundred pounds to push that pedal down that way.”
“Are you trying to confuse me?”
“After he did that the bus driver pushed his finger through the side of the bus. About a dozen times.”
“Probably the old lady’s son — the old lady you were talking about.”
“Oh, I checked on her in the hospital. They had to use a diamond drill to open a vein in her arm.”
“This isn’t April first, Tom.”
“Just keep listening, Dick. Yesterday afternoon a cop shot a kid in the back. The kid kept running. The kid, about fourteen, had broken the cop’s arm. Cop weighed two ten. That happened at about the same time plainclothes cops tried to pick up one Addison McGoran. They shot him three times in the back, four times in the chest, twice in the back of the head.”
“Thorough job.”
“He ran away.”
Dickinson flushed. “Listen, Dr. Bellbight, if you think that I’m going to stop what I’m doing and—”
“Keep your balance sheet buttoned, Dick. Man found in Bell City last night. Throat so crushed the coroner was ready to swear he’d been strangled by an ape. Lawyer out at the accident got his wrist broken by a blond gal who just grabbed him. She didn’t twist. She grabbed him.”
“What are you—”
“A scientist is supposed to correlate interesting little facts. Today the police in Stockland found a lot of busted pay phone and pinball machines. In each case the metal on the coin box looked as though it had been tinfoil grabbed by a small hand, a kid’s hand. His fingers punched through the metal and the coins were gone.
“A babe, at midnight last night, Civil Service steno, tried to commit suicide. Jumped out of her apartment window. Eighth story. Half dressed. She hit on the asphalt, got up and went back to her room. I went out this afternoon and took a look at the spot. You can see a clear imprint of the side of her face in the asphalt.”
“I am beginning to suspect that this isn’t some idiotic joke. But I can’t guess what your object is.”
“Coming to it. Yesterday evening a guy went into a barbershop just before closing time. Barber tried two razors — couldn’t cut a hair. Then the guy took scissors and tried to cut a lock of his own hair. Here’s the scissors. I got ’em from the cops. The barber reported him. The bus driver went home last night and gave his wife a light love tap. Broke her jaw and knocked two teeth out and gave her a concussion. Swears that he only tapped her with his fingertips.”
“This seems to be an amazing account of durability.”
“Seven people on that bus. The old lady, the driver, the babe who tried to kill herself, the blondie who broke the guy’s wrist, the fellow with a beard too tough to cut, the kid who was shot in the back and the guy who stopped nine slugs.”