"To take it on the lam, or else!" Mike broke in.
"No fooling?"
"So help me!" Mort swore. "What a loony. He went on to say--this fake
Angel Gabriel--that his boss just wanted to tell those two jerks,
Adolf and Benito, that enough was enough and they were dead ducks for
sure."
"What made this Gabriel from the nut house get so confidential all of
a sudden?" I demanded. "He wouldn't tell his business at all at
first."
"This'll kill you," Mort said. "The connection, like I say, kept
getting fainter and fainter, and our goofy Gabriel said it was fading
off and that we'd have to hand the message on to Hitler and Mussolini
for his boss, if we couldn't bring the two jerks to the phone to hear
it in person."
"Did he bother to explain," I asked, "why he didn't call Adolf and
Benito directly, if his boss wanted to tell them off?"
"So help me," Mort declared, "he did. He said that with the war all
over our globe like it is, there was a lot of space interference
everywhere preventin' communication. He said he couldn't be choosy,
and had to use any wire he could get through to. It happened to be
ours. Can you beat it?"
I shook my head slowly. "No," I said, "I can't. But what trick could
he have used to stay on the phone indefinitely, connected right to
your wire, even after you hung up on him each time?" And then,
briefly, I explained the rest of my puzzle over that little item.
"If you can figure that out," I concluded, "we'll have to admit that,
loony or not, he was nothing less than a mad genius."
Mort shrugged. "I'm no telephone man," he said, "but there must be
some explana--" His sentence stopped abruptly, and he and Mike seemed
to be looking over my shoulder.
I turned, to see an overall clad chap carrying a canvas toolbag just
stepping through the door. He smiled cheerfully at the three of us.
"I'm the man from the telephone company," he said amiably. "I got here
a little earlier today, missed you last night. Had to have the night
elevator operator let me into your store. Hope you weren't too
inconvenienced today."
"What's it all about?" Mort demanded. "What do you mean? You know
about the loony?"
The telephone man had stopped by the booth. He was opening his tool
bag. He looked up.
"Loony? No, I'm sorry, I don't know anything about any loony."
"Who called himself the Angel Gabriel?" Mike broke in.
The telephone man smiled up at us in genial bewilderment.
"I'm sorry, gentlemen," he said, "I don't quite get the drift of all
this. All I know is that I was in here last night to disconnect your
telephone temporarily, and I'm back again tonight to return it to
service. I saw your "Out of Order" sign there, so I thought you'd
expected me and knew all about it."
* * * * *
Mort stepped forward. His face a curious picture of bewilderment and
disbelief, he asked:
"Wait a minute! You mean to say this telephone hasn't been connected
all day today?"
The telephone man nodded. "That's right. But I'm putting it back in
order now."
"We got calls over that phone today!" Mike asserted vigorously. "It
couldn't have been disconnected."
The telephone man chuckled. "Good joke. You couldn't have received a
call over this telephone. It would have been utterly impossible. It
was completely disconnected." He went on tool sorting.
Mike was looking at Mort. Mort was looking at the telephone man. I was
looking at all three, and the telephone man was unconcernedly taking
out wires from his bag.
"You--you aren't kidding?" Mort's voice came choked. "This was really
disconnected?"
The telephone man shoved the booth a little to one side, grabbed some
wires then visible beneath the booth, and pulled them forth. They were
all neatly severed, with the ends taped.
Mike and Mort were staring at the severed ends of the wires, then at
one another.
"Mike," said Mort, "I think it is a good idea we should get drunk."
"My old lady," said Mike, "used to believe in this sort of stuff.
Maybe she wasn't such a dope."