I put the receiver back into the cradle, and my hand was shaking, so that it made a clatter when I put it down.
I stood in the darkness and felt the terror closing in. And when I tried to put a finger on the terror, there was nothing there. For it wasn’t terrible; it was comic—a trap set outside a door, a pack of bowling balls trundling sedately down a country lane. It was the stuff cartoons are made of. It was something that was too ridiculous to believe. It was something that would send you off into helpless guffaws even as it killed you.
If it meant to kill.
And that was the question, certainly. Was it meant to kill?
Had that trap outside the door actually been a trap, made of honest steel or its equivalent? Or had it been a toy, made of harmless plastic or its equivalent?
And the hardest question of them all—had it actually been there? I knew it had, of course. For I had seen it there. But my mind kept trying to reject it. For my comfort and my sanity, my mind pushed it away and the logic in me screamed against the very thought of it.
I had been drunk, of course, but not as drunk as that. Not falling-down drunk, not seeing-things drunk just a little shaky in the hands and weakish in the knees.
Now I was all right except for that terrible, lonely coldness of the mind. Type three hangover—and, in many ways, the worst of all of them.
By now my eyes had become somewhat dark-adapted and I could make out the formless shape of furniture. I made my way to the kitchen without stumbling over anything. The door was open a crack and a shaft of light streamed through.
I had left the ceiling light on when I’d gone pottering off to bed, and the clock on the wall said it was three-thirty.
I discovered that I was still better than half dressed and rather badly rumpled. My shoes were off and my tie was untied but still trailing from the collar, and I was a mess.
I stood there, taking counsel with myself. If I went back to bed at this hour of the morning, I’d sleep like a sodden lump until noon or better and wake up feeling terrible.
But if I got cleaned up now and got some food inside of me and went to the office early, before anyone else arrived, I’d get a lot of work done and could knock off early in the day and have a decent weekend.
And it was a Friday and I had a date with Joy. I stood there for a while without doing anything, feeling good about Friday night and Joy.
I planned it all—there’d just be time to boil the coffee water while I took a shower, and I’d have toast and eggs and bacon and I’d drink a lot of tomato juice, which might do something for the lonely coldness of the mind.
But first of all, before I did anything at all, I’d look out in the hall and see if the semicircle still was gone from the carpeting.
I went to the door and looked.
In front of it lay the preposterous semicircle of bare flooring.
I jeered thinly at my doubting mind and my outraged logic and went back into the kitchen to put on the coffee water.
A newsroom is a cold and lonely place early in the morning. It is big and empty, and it’s neat, so neat that it is depressing. Later in the day it takes on the clutter that makes it warm and human—the clipped, dismembered papers littered on the desks, the balls of scrunched-up copy paper tossed onto the floor, the overflowing spikes. But in the morning, after the maintenance crew has it tidied up, it has something of the pallor of an operating room. The few lights that are burning seem far too bright and the stripped-down desks and chairs so precisely placed that they spell a hard efficiency—the efficiency that later in the day is masked and softened when the staff is hard at work and the place is littered and that strange undertone of bedlam which goes into each edition of the paper is building to a peak.
The morning staff had gone home hours before and Joe Newman also was gone. I had rather expected that I might find him there, but his desk was as straight and neat as all the rest of them and there was no Sign of him.
The pastepots, all freshly scraped and cleaned and filled with fresh, new paste, stood in solemn, shiny rows upon the city and the copydesks. Each pot was adorned with a brush thrust into the paste at a jaunty angle. The copy off the wire machines was laid out precisely on the news desk. And from the cubby hole over in the corner came the muted chuckle of the wire machines themselves, busily grinding out the grist of news from all parts of the world.
Somewhere in the tangled depths of the half-dark newsroom a copyboy was whistling—one of those high-pitched, jerky tunes that are no tunes at all. I shuddered at the sound of it. There was something that was almost obscene about someone whistling at this hour of the morning.
I went over to my desk and sat down. Someone on the maintenance crew had taken all my magazines and scientific journals and stacked them in a pile. Only the afternoon before, I’d gone through them carefully and set aside the ones I would be using in getting out my columns. I looked sourly at the stack and swore. Now I’d have to paw through all of them to find the ones I wanted.
A copy of the last edition of the morning paper lay white and naked on the clean desk top. I picked it up and leaned back in the chair and began running through the news.
There wasn’t much of anything. There still was trouble down in Africa, and the Venezuela mess was looking fairly nasty. Someone had held up a downtown drugstore just before closing time, and there was a picture of a buck-toothed clerk pointing out to a bored policeman where the holdup man had stood. The governor had said that the legislature, when it came back next year, would have to buckle down to its responsibility of finding some new sources of tax revenue. If this wasn’t done, said the governor, the state would be going down the drain. It was something that the governor had said many times before.
Over in the top, left-hand corner of page one was an area economic roundup by—lined by Grant Jensen, business editor of the morning staff. Grant was in one of his Professionally optimistic moods. The upward business trend, he wrote, was run- fling strong and steady. Store sales were holding well, industrial indexes all were on the up side, there was no immediate prospect of any labor trouble things were looking rosy. This was especially true, the article went on to say, in the home construction field. The demand for housing had outrun supply, and all the home builders in the entire federal reserve district were booked to full capacity for almost a year ahead.
I am afraid I yawned. It all was true, undoubtedly, but it still was the same old crud that jerks like Jensen were forever handing out. But the publisher would like it, for it made the advertisers feel just fine and it promoted boom psychology, and the old war-horses of the financial district would talk about the piece that had been in the morning paper when they went to lunch this noon at the Union Club.
Let it run the other way, I told myself—let the store sales drop off, let the housing boom go bust, let factories start to turn away their workers—and until the situation became inescapable, there’d be not a word about it.
I folded the paper and put it to one side. Opening up a drawer, I got out a batch of notes I’d made the afternoon before and started going through them.
Lightning, the early-morning copyboy, came out of the shadows and stood beside my desk.
“Good morning, Mr. Graves,” he said.
“Was that you whistling?” I asked.
“Yeah, I guess it was.”
He laid a proof on my desk.
“Your column for today,” he said. “The one about how come the mammoth and all those other big animals happened to die out. I thought you’d like to see it.”
I picked it up and looked at it. As usual, some joker on the copydesk had written a smart-aleck headline for it.
“You’re in early, Mr. Graves,” said Light- fling.