He finished his coffee and went out into the quiet street.
Overhead a jet flashed past, streaking low, the mutter of its tubes bouncing back against the walls. He watched its lights draw twin lines of fire over the night horizon, and then went for a walk.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
WHEN Vickers opened the door of the room, he saw that the top was gone. He had left it on the chair, gaudy in its new paint, and it wasn't on the chair or on the floor. He got down on his belly and looked underneath the bed and it wasn't there. It wasn't in the closet and it wasn't in the hall outside.
He came back into the room again and sat down on the edge of the bed.
After all the worry and the planning the top had disappeared. Who would have stolen it? What would anyone want with a battered top?
What had he himself wanted with it?
It seemed faintly ridiculous now, sitting on the edge of the bed in a strange hotel room, to ask himself these questions.
He had thought the top would buy his way into fairyland and now, in the white glare of the ceiling light, he wondered at himself for the madness of his antics.
Behind him, the door came open and he heard it and wheeled around.
In the door stood Crawford.
The man was even more massive than Vickers had remembered him. He filled the doorway and he stood motionless, without a single flicker, except for slowly winking eyelids.
Crawford said: "Good evening, Mr. Vickers. Won't you ask me to come in?"
"Certainly," said Vickers. "I was waiting for a call from you. I never thought that you would take the trouble to travel here in person."
And that was a lie, of course, because he'd not been waiting for a call.
Crawford moved ponderously across the room. "This chair looks strong enough to hold me. You don't mind, I hope."
"It's not my chair," said Vickers. "Go ahead and bust it."
It didn't break. It creaked and groaned, but it held.
Crawford relaxed and sighed. "I always feel so much better when I get a good strong chair beneath me."
"You tapped Ann's phone," said Vickers.
"Why, certainly. How else would I have found you? I knew that, sooner or later, you would call her."
"I saw the plane come in," said Vickers. "If I had thought that it was you, I'd driven out to meet you. I have a bone to pick with you."
"I don't doubt it," Crawford said.
"Why did you almost get me lynched?"
"I wouldn't have you lynched for all the world," said Crawford. "I'm too much in need of you."
"What do you need me for?"
"I don't know," said Crawford. "I thought maybe you would know."
"I don't know a thing," said Vickers. "Tell me, Crawford, what is all this about? You didn't tell the truth that day I came in to see you."
"I told you the truth, or at least part of it. I didn't tell you everything we knew."
"Why not?"
"I didn't know who you were."
"But you know now?"
"Yes, I know now," said Crawford. "You are one of them."
"One of whom?"
"One of the gadgeteers."
"What in hell makes you think so?"
"Analyzers. That's what the psych boys call them. Analyzers. The damn things are uncanny. I don't pretend to understand them."
"And the analyzers said there was something strange about me?"
"Yes," said Crawford. "That's about the way it is."
"If I am one of them, why come to me?" asked Vickers. "If I am one of them, you are fighting me. Remember? A world with its back against the wall. Surely, you remember."
"Don't say 'if," said Crawford. "You _are_ one of them all right, but quit acting as if I were an enemy."
"Aren't you?" asked Vickers. "If I am what you say I am, you are my enemy."
"You don't understand," said Crawford. "Let's try analogy. Let's go back to the day when the Cro-Magnon drifted into Neanderthaler territory…"
"Don't give rue analogy," Vickers told him. "Tell me what's on your mind."
"I don't like the situation," Crawford said. "I don't like the way things are shaping up."
"You forget that I don't know what the situation is."
"That's what I was trying to tell you with my analogy. You are the Cro-Magnon. You have the bow and arrow and the spear. I am the Neanderthaler. I only have a club. You have the knife of polished stone; I have a piece of jagged flint picked out of a stream bed. You have clothing fashioned out of hides and furs and I have nothing but the hair I stand in."
"I wouldn't know," said Vickers.
"I'm not so sure myself," said Crawford. "I'm not up on that sort of stuff. Maybe I gave the Cro-Magnon a bit too much and the Neanderthaler less than what he had. But that's not the point at all."
"I appreciate the point," said Vickers. "Where do we go from there?"
"The Neanderthaler fought back," said Crawford, "and what happened to him?"
"He became extinct."
"They may have died for many reasons other than the spear and arrow. Perhaps they couldn't compete for food against a better race. Perhaps they were squeezed out of their hunting grounds. Perhaps they crawled off and starved. Perhaps they died of an overpowering shame — the knowledge that they were outdated, that they were no good, that they were, by comparison, little more than beasts."
"I doubt," said Vickers dryly, "that a Neanderthaler could work up a very powerful inferiority complex."
"The suggestion may not apply to the Neanderthaler. It does apply to us."
"You're trying to make me see how deep the cleavage goes."
"That is what I'm doing," Crawford told him. "You can't realize the depth of hate, the margin of intelligence and ability. Nor can you realize how desperate we really are.
"Who are these desperate men? I'll tell you who they are. They're the successful ones, the industrialists, the bankers, the businessmen, the professional men who have security and hold positions of importance, who move in social circles which mark the high tide of our culture.
"They'd no longer hold their positions if your kind of men took over. They'd be Neanderthaler to your Cro-Magnon. They'd be like Homeric Greeks pitchforked into the complex technology of this century of ours. They'd survive, of course, physically. But they'd be aborigines. Their values would be swept away and those values, built up painfully, are all they have to live by."
Vickers shook his head. "Let's not play games, Crawford. Let's try to be honest for a while. I imagine you think I know a whole lot more than I really do. I suppose I should pretend I know as much as you think I do — act smart and make you think I know all there is to know. Fence with you. Get you to tip your hand. But somehow I haven't got the heart to do it."
"I know you don't know too much. That's why I wanted to reach you as soon as possible. As I see it, you aren't entirely mutant yet, you haven't yet shed the chrysalis of an ordinary man. There's a lot of you that still is normal man. The tendency is to shift toward mutation — more today than yesterday, more tomorrow than today. But tonight, in this room, you and I still can talk man to man,"
"We could always talk."