Mr. Bauer nodded thoughtfully. “Then I won't need any of those radium treatments?"
“Absolutely not.” Dr. Jacobson removed his glasses, wiped them with a bit of rice paper, then mopped his forehead with a handkerchief. Mr. Bauer lingered.
He looked at the X-ray machine bolted down by the window. It still looked as solid and mysterious as when he had first glimpsed a corner of it from Myna's bedroom. He hadn't gotten any farther.
Dr. Jacobson replaced his glasses.
“It's funny, you know, but I've been thinking...” Mr. Bauer plunged.
“Yes?"
“I guess all this atomic stuff got me started, but I've been thinking about all the energy that's in the atoms of my body. When you start to figure it out on paper—well, two hundred million electron volts, they say, from just splitting one atom, and that's only a tiny part of it.” He grinned.
“Enough energy in my body, I guess, to blow up, maybe ... the world."
Dr. Jacobson nodded. “Almost. But all safely locked up."
Mr. Bauer nodded. “They're finding out how to unlock it."
Dr. Jacobson smiled. “Only in the case of two rare radioactive elements."
Mr. Bauer agreed, then gathered all his courage. “I've been wondering about that too,” he said. “Whether a person could somehow make himself ... I mean, become ... radioactive?"
Dr. Jacobson chuckled in the friendliest way. “See that box at your elbow?” He reached out and turned something on it. The box ticked. Mr. Bauer jerked.
“That's a Geiger-Muller counter,” Dr. Jacobson explained. “Notice how the ticks come every second or so? Each tick indicates a high-frequency wave. If you were radioactive, it would tick a lot oftener."
Mr. Bauer laughed. “Interesting.” He got up. “Well, thanks about the cancer."
Dr. Jacobson watched him fumble for his panama hat and duck out. So that was it. He'd sensed all along something peculiar about Bauer. He'd even felt it while looking over the X-ray and lab reports— something intangibly wrong. Though he hadn't thought until now of paranoia, or, for that matter, any other mental ailment, beyond the almost normal cancer-fear of a man in his fifties.
Frank Bauer hesitated at the corridor leading to Myna's apartment, then went on. His heart hammered enragedly. There he'd gone chicken again, when he knew very well that if he could ever bring himself to state his fear coldly and completely—that crazy fear that a man's thoughts could do to the atoms of his body what the scientists had managed to do with uranium 235 and that other element—why, he'd be rid of the fear in a minute.
But a man just didn't go around admitting childish things like that. A human bomb exploded by thought! It was too much like his wife Grace and her mysticism.
Going crazy wouldn't be so bad, he thought, if only it weren't so humiliating.
Frank Bauer lived in a world where everything had been exploded. He scented confidence games, hoaxes, faddish self-deception, and especially (for it was his province) advertising copy exaggerations behind every faintly unusual event and every intimation of the unknown. He had the American's nose for leg-pulling, the German's contempt for the non-factual. Mention of such topics as telepathy, hypnotism, or the occult—and his wife managed to mention them fairly often—sent him into a scoffing rage. The way he looked at it, a real man had three legitimate interests—business, bars and blondes. Everything else was for cranks, artists, and women.
But now an explosion had occurred which made all other explosions, even of the greatest fakeries, seem like a snap of the fingers.
By the time he reached the street, he thought he was beginning to feel a bit better. After all, he had told the doctor practically everything, and the doctor had disposed of his fears with that little box. That was that.
He swabbed his neck and thought about a drink, but decided to go back to the office. Criminal to lose a minute these days, when everybody was fighting tooth and nail to get the jump. He'd be wanting money pretty soon, the bigger the better. All the things that Grace would be nagging for now, and something special for Myna—and then there was a chance he and Myna could get away together for a vacation, when he'd got those campaigns lined out.
The office was cool and dusky and pleasantly suggestive of a non-atomic solidity. Every bit of stalwart ugliness, every worn spot in the dark varnish, made him feel better. He even managed to get off a joke to ease Miss Minter's boredom. Then he went inside.
An hour later he rushed out. This time he had no joke for Miss Minter. As she looked after him, there was something in her expression that had been in Dr. Jacobson's.
It hadn't been so bad at first when he'd got out paper and black pencil. After all, any advertising copy had to make Atomic Age its keynote these days. But when you sat there, and thought and thought, and whatever you thought, you always found afterwards that you'd written:
INSIDE YOU ... TRILLIONS OF VOLTS!
You wouldn't think to look at them, that there was much resemblance between John Jones and the atom bomb...
UNLOCKED!
THE WORLD IN YOUR HANDS JUST A THOUGHT—
Frank Bauer looked around at the grimy street, the windows dusty or dazzingly golden where the low sun struck, the people wilted a little by the baking pavement—and he saw walls turned to gray powder, their steel skeletons vaporized, the people became fumes, or, if they were far enough away, mere great single blisters. But they'd have to be very far away.
He was going crazy—and it was horribly humiliating. He hurried into the bar.
After his second bourbon and water he began to think about the scientists. They should have suppressed the thing, like that one fellow who wanted to. They shouldn't ever have told people. So long as people didn't know, maybe it would have been all right ... But once you'd been told...
Thought was the most powerful force in the world. It had discovered the atom bomb. And yet nobody knew what thought was, how it worked inside your nerves, what it couldn't manage.
And you couldn't stop thinking. Whatever your thoughts decided to do, you couldn't stop them.
It was insanity, of course.
It had better be insanity!
The man beside him said, “He saw a lot of those Jap suicide flyers. CRAZY as loons. Human bombs."
Human bombs! Firecrackers. He put down his drink.
As he hurried through the thinning crowd, retracing the course he had taken early in the afternoon, he wondered why there should be so much deadly force locked up in such innocent-seeming, inert things. The whole universe was a booby trap. There must be a reason. Who had planned it that way, with the planets far enough apart so they wouldn't hurt each other when they popped?
He thought he began to feel sharp pains shooting through his nerves, as the radioactivity began, and after he had rushed up the steps the pain became so strong that he hesitated at the intersection of the corridors before he went on to Myna's.
He closed the door and leaned back against it, sweating. Myna was drinking and she had her hair down. There was a pint of bourbon on the table, and some ice. She jumped up, pulling at her dressing gown.
“What's wrong? Grace?"
He shook his head, kept staring at her, at her long curling hair, at her breasts, as if in that small hillocky, yellow entwined patch of reality lay his sole hope of salvation, his last refuge.
“But my God, what is it!"
He felt the pains mercifully begin to fade, the dangerous thoughts break ranks and retreat. He began to say to himself, “It must have hit a lot of people the same way it hit me. It's just so staggering. That must be it. That must be it."
Myna was tugging at him. “It's nothing,” he told her. “I don't know. Maybe my heart. No, I don't need a doctor."