"Well, the son's prison time was up, so they let him go."
"Yeah? And?"
"And he went home."
"And?"
Peg shrugged, looked away, looked back. "And," she said, "he took the ax to his mother, so now he's back inside forever, no parole, and the car came on the market."
"The car came on the market," Freddie echoed, looking at the lumpy green Hornet.
"It's a very hard sell, all in all," Peg said. "But I figured, a guy like you, a story like that wouldn't bother you."
"Oh," Freddie said. "Right. Not a bit."
Peg smiled fondly on the little green monster. "And if you don't think about its history," she said, "it's perfect, right?"
"Right," Freddie said. The Dick Tracy head nodded and nodded. "Perfect," he said.
47
The worst thing was knowing they'd never be invited back.
Well, was that the worst thing? Wasn't the worst thing losing Freddie, the invisible man, twice? This time, no doubt, for good? Wasn't that the worst thing? And if not that, then wasn't the worst thing losing their funding for their melanoma research and having to do the bidding of a monomaniac out of James Bond, who wanted to genetically alter the human race so he could sell cigarettes? Wouldn't that be the worst thing on a whole lot of lists?
Well, yes, of course. And both of those are extremely bad and terrible and horrendous and unfortunate. But nevertheless, when you come right on down to the nitty-gritty, the worst thing was knowing they'd never be invited back.
Not that Robert and Martin displayed by the merest iota of a scintilla that anything was even the teeniest weeniest bit wrong. They were as polite and civilized as ever, or almost; the destruction of their landscape had necessarily dimmed their sparkle somewhat.
And there had been an extra moment of trouble, unfortunately, when Peter — and then David, just a few seconds later — had tried to limit the damage by insisting that none of the thirty-four guests soon to arrive for the dinner party should be told about the invisible man. "And just what," demanded Robert, waving a hand that quivered over the moonscape of his former lawns, "am I supposed to say happened here? A remake of All Quiet on the Western Front?"
"You can say," Peter suggested, "you're redoing the exterior."
"And that wouldn't be a lie."
But there was no hope for it. Even if the physical evidence hadn't been so extreme, there was the fact that the eleven people already present were absolutely bursting with the story, bubbling over with it, half-wanting to end the weekend now so they could go away and regale someone who hadn't been here. If gossip is the fuel of social interchange, this was rocket fuel, and no power on earth would keep it from going off.
"All I ask, then," Peter said, when everything else he'd asked for had been refused, "is to make the announcement. At dinner, let me tell the story."
"When at dinner?" Robert asked, suspicious. "Over coffee? Believe me, everybody will know by then."
"No no no, before dinner is served."
Dinner would be buffet-style, and announced, so people could get on line. Peter said, "They'll be waiting for you to announce dinner, so announce me instead, and I'll tell them what happened, and then we'll have dinner, and that will be that."
"Please, Robert," David said. "Our future hangs on this. Robert, Martin, you've always been dear friends, you know how horribly we feel about what happened here, please let Peter tell everybody in his own fashion."
"Put his spin on it," Robert suggested.
"If you like," Peter said, who would have agreed with anybody about anything at that point.
Well. It was easy to refuse Peter, no problem, but everybody had always found it hard to refuse David, so it was finally agreed, with great reluctance, that no one would tell the new arrivals anything about the invisible man before Peter stood up and made his general announcement.
And that, a few hours later, was what he did: "Thank you, Robert, thank you, Martin. Thank you for a lovely weekend, as usual, for charming and exciting guests, for a dinner that we already know is going to be superb. And thank you both for being so understanding and sympathetic and forgiving about an experiment that went so very very wrong."
Peter sipped his vodka. There was so little grapefruit juice in it by now it looked pretty much like the invisible man himself. Peter went on: "You all saw that horrible destruction outside, when you came in."
They had. The murmuring the last half hour had been about nothing else, with those privy to the story merely giggling or sighing or shaking their heads, saying only, "We promised to let Peter tell."
So here it came: "As most of you know, David and I are scientific researchers, and skin cancer, melanoma, is the area of our research. An experiment on a willing — and I must emphasize willing — volunteer subject went terribly awry. It affected his body in the way, well, somewhat in the fashion we'd expected and hoped, but it seems to have, well, affected his mind as well, making him angry and mistrustful, and possibly even violent. I'm sorry, I don't mean to tell you a wolfman story here, but the fact is this fellow, who happens to be a convicted felon, by the way, and his name is Freddie, is, well, he's, you can't see him."
Everybody looked around. Can't see whom? So what?
Robert called out, "Say the word, Peter, say the goddam word!"
"Oh, all right!" Peter cried, and finished his vodka, and announced, "He's invisible! All right? He came here because he knew we were here, and he wanted us to help him stop being invisible, and we can't! And he's, he's extremely angry! And he had a, he had a cohort here—"
"Peter," David interrupted, "I don't think one person can be a cohort."
"I don't care!"
The newcomers were wide-eyed, disbelieving, asking quick whispered questions, getting quick whispered answers, yes, yes, it's true, it's all true, an invisible man, in this very room!
Peter drank from his empty vodka glass, rolled his eyes, took a deep breath, and said, "This man, this Freddie, is invisible. Yes, he is. He was here, and now he's gone away, we don't know where, we wish we could help him—"
"Oh, yes, we do!" David cried.
"— but we can't, and he's probably gone for good, and we're just so sorry that Robert and Martin's beautiful house and beautiful grounds were just so wantonly, wantonly, that everything here was so, so, so . . ."
Peter was floundering by now, which Martin saw and understood, so he got to his feet and stood in front of Peter, faced the openmouthed guests, and said, "Peter and David asked if they could invite this person here, this man who'd been a volunteer in their experiment and was turned invisible, and we said yes, of course, because nobody realized, and certainly not Peter and David, just how much trouble this individual would be once he understood that the effects of the experiment were irreversible. It did upset him terribly, and I'm sure we can all sympathize with what he must have been going through, even while we do regret the certain amount of damage that resulted. And now that's the whole story, and I believe dinner is served, and now we can forget all this and go on and discuss other things."
Not one word was said, on any other topic, the entire weekend.
"A fantastic weekend," David said, on Sunday afternoon, as he shook Robert's hand and then Martin's, out by the cars in the sunshine. "You rose to the emergency so well."
"And so did you, David," Martin assured him. "And Peter, too."