"No," he said without thinking; then, realizing his mistake, quickly
added, "I'll buy some in Wheaton. There's enough to get us there."
"You didn't think so yesterday," she objected. "You said the tank was
nearly empty."
"I was wrong. Look, the gauge shows it's half full."
"But then how ... Ernie, didn't you once tell me the gauge doesn't
work?"
"Did I?"
"Yes. Look, there's a station. Why don't you buy gas now?"
"No, I'll wait for Wheaton--I know a place there I can get it cheaper,"
he insisted, rather lamely, he feared.
His sister looked at him steadily. He settled his head between his
shoulders and concentrated on driving. His feeling of excitement was
spoiled, but a few minutes of silence brought it back. He thought of
the blur of green flashes inside the purring motor. If the passing
drivers only knew!
Uncle Fabius, retired perhaps a few years too early and opinionated,
was a trial, but he did know something about the automobile industry.
Ernie chose a moment when his sister was out of the room to ask if
he'd ever heard of a white powder that would turn water into gasoline
or some usable fuel.
"Who's been getting at you?" Uncle Fabius demanded sharply, to Ernie's
surprise and embarrassment. "That's one of the oldest swindles.
They always tell this story about how this man had a white powder
or something and demonstrated it once with a pail of water and then
disappeared. You're supposed to believe that Detroit or the big oil
companies got rid of him. It's just another of those malicious legends,
concocted--by Russia, I imagine--to weaken your faith in American
Industry, like the everlasting battery or the razor blade that never
gets dull. You're looking pale, Ernie--don't tell me you've already put
money in this white powder? I suppose someone's approached you with a
proposition, though?"
* * * * *
With considerable difficulty, Ernie convinced his uncle that he had
"just heard the story from a friend."
"In that case," Uncle Fabius opined, "you can be sure some fuel-powder
swindler has been getting at _him_. When you see him--and be sure to
make that soon--tell him from me that--" and Uncle Fabius began an
impassioned ninety-minute defense of big business, small business,
prosperity, America, money, know-how, and a number of other
institutions that defended pretty easily, so that the situation was
wholly normal when Ernie's sister returned.
As soon as the car pulled away from the curb on their way back to
Chicago, she reminded him about the gas.
"Oh, I've already done that," he assured her. "Made a special trip so I
wouldn't forget. It was while you were out of the room. Didn't you hear
me?"
"No," she said, "I didn't," and she looked at him steadily, as she had
that morning. He similarly retreated to driving.
Stopping for a railroad crossing, he braked too hard and the car
stalled. His sister grabbed his arm. "I knew that was going to happen,"
she said. "I knew that for some reason you lied to me when--" The
motor, starting readily again, cut short her remark and Ernie didn't
press his small triumph by asking her what she was about to say.
To tell the truth, Ernie wasn't feeling as elated about today's
fifty-mile drive as he'd imagined he would. Now he thought he could put
his finger on the reason: It was the completely ... well, _arbitrary_
way in which the white powder had come into his possession.
If he'd concocted it himself, or been given it by a shady promoter, or
even seen the box fall out of the pocket of a suspicious-looking man
in a trenchcoat, _then_ he'd have felt more able to _do_ something
about it, whether in the general line of starting a fuel-powder company
or of going to the F.B.I.
But just having the stuff drop into his hands from the sky, so to
speak, as if in a crazy dream, and for that same reason not feeling
able to talk about it and assure himself he wasn't going crazy ... oh,
it is rough when you can't share things, really rough; not being able
to share depressing news corrodes the spirit, but not being able to
share exciting news can sometimes be even more corroding.
Maybe, he told himself, he could figure out someone to tell. But who?
And how? His mind shied away from the problem, rather decisively.
* * * * *
When he checked the blue box that night, the original sodium
bicarbonate lettering had returned with all its humdrum paragraphs. Not
one word about exhaust velocities.
From that moment, the fuel-powder became a trial to Ernie rather than a
secret glory. He'd wake in the middle of the night doubting that he had
ever really read the mind-dizzying lettering, ever really tested the
stuff--perhaps he'd bring from sleep the chilling notion that in the
dimness and excitement of Saturday morning he'd put the water in some
other car's gas tank, perhaps Mr. Jones's. He could usually argue such
ideas away, but they kept coming back. And yet he did no more bathroom
testing.
Of course the car still ran. He even fueled it once again with the
garden hose, sniffing the nozzle to make sure it hadn't somehow got
connected to the basement furnace oil-tank. He picked three o'clock in
the morning for the act, but nevertheless as he was returning indoors
he heard a window in Mr. Jones's house slam loudly. It unsettled him.
Coming home the next day, he caught his sister and Mr. Jones consulting
about something on the latter's doorsteps, which unsettled him further.
He couldn't decide on a safe place to keep the box and took to carrying
it around with him day and night. Bill spotted it once down at the
office and by an unhappy coincidence needed some bicarb just then for a
troubled stomach. Ernie explained on the spur of the moment that he was
using the box to carry plaster of Paris, which involved him in further
lies that he felt were quite unconvincing as well as making him appear
decidedly eccentric, even butter-brained. Bill took to calling him "the
sculptor."
Meanwhile, besides the problem of the white powder, Ernie was having
other unsettling experiences, stemming (though of course he didn't
know that) from the other Gifts--and not just the Big Gift of
Page-at-a-Glance Reading, though that still returned from time to time
to shock his consciousness and send him hurrying for a few quick shots.
* * * * *
Like many another car-owning commuter, Ernie found the traffic and
parking problems a bit too much for comfort and so used the fast
electric train to carry him five times a week to the heart of the city.
During those brief, swift, crowded trips Ernie, generally looking
steadily out the window at the brown buildings and black stanchions
whipping past, enjoyed a kind of anonymity and privacy more refreshing
to his spirit than he realized. But now all that had been suddenly
changed. People had started to talk to him; total strangers struck up
conversations almost every morning and afternoon.
Ernie couldn't figure out the reason and wasn't at all sure he liked
it--except for Vivian.
She was the sort of girl Ernie dreamed about, improperly. Tall, blonde
and knowing, excitedly curved but armored in a black suit, friendly and
funny but given to making almost cruelly deflating remarks, as if the
neatly furled short umbrella dangling from her wrist might better be a
black dog whip.
She worked in an office too, a fancier one than Ernie's, as he found
out from their morning conversations. He hadn't got to the point of
asking her to lunch, but he was prodding himself.
Why such a girl should ever have asked him for a match in the first
place and then put up with his clumsy babblings on subsequent mornings
was a mystery to him. He finally asked her about it in what he hoped
was a joking way, though she seemed to know a lot more about joking
than he did.
"Don't you know?" she countered. "I mean what makes you attractive to
people?"
"Me attractive? No."
"Well, I'll tell you then, Ernie, and I've got to admit it's something
quite out of the ordinary. _I've_ never noticed it in anyone else.
Ernie, I'm sure your knowledge of romantic novels is shamefully
deficient, it's clear from your manners, but in the earlier ones--not
in style now--the hero is described as tall, manly, broad-shouldered,
Anglo-Saxon features, etcetera, etcetera, but there's one thing he
always has, something that sounds like poetic over-enthusiasm if you
stop to analyze it, a physical impossibility, but that I have to admit
you, Ernie, actually have. Flashing eyes."
"Flashing eyes? Me?"
She nodded solemnly. He thought her long straight lips trembled on
the verge of a grin, but he couldn't be sure.
"How do you mean, flashing eyes?" he protested. "How _can_ eyes flash,
except by reflecting light? In that case, I guess they'd seem to
'flash' more if a person opened them wide but kept blinking them a lot.
Is that what I do?"
"No, Ernie, though you're doing it now," she told him, shaking her
head. "No, Ernie, your eyes just give a tiny flash of their own about
every five seconds, like a lighthouse, but barely, _barely_ bright
enough for another person to notice. It makes you irresistible. Of
course I've never seen you in the dark; maybe they wouldn't flash in
the dark."
"You're joking."
Vivian frowned a little at that remark, as if she were puzzled herself.
"Well, maybe I am and maybe I'm not," she said. "In any case, don't get
conceited about your Flashing Eyes, because I'm sure you'll never know
how to take advantage of them."
When he parted from her downtown, pausing a moment to watch her walk
away with feline majesty, he muttered "Flashing Eyes!" with a shrug of
the shoulders and a skeptical growl. Just the same, he ducked his head
as he moved off and he pulled the brim of his hat down sharply.
* * * * *
Afternoons, hurtling home in the five o'clock rush, it was not Vivian
but Verna who frequently occupied the seat beside him, taking up rather
more space in it than the Panther Princess. Verna was another of his
newly acquired and not altogether welcome conversation-pals, along with
Jacob the barber, Mr. Willis the druggist and Herman the health-food
manufacturer, inventor of Soybean Mush--conquests of his Flashing Eyes
or whatever it was.
Verna was stocky, pasty-faced, voluble (with him), coy, and had bad
breath--he could see the tiny triangles of pale food between her
incisors and canines whenever her conversations became particularly
vehement and confidential, which was often. She always had a stack of
books hugged to her stomach. She worked in a fur-storage vault, she
said, and could snatch quite a bit of time for reading--rather heavy
reading, it seemed.
It wasn't very long before Verna was head-over-heels (fearful picture!)
infatuated with him. Somehow his friendliness had touched a hidden
spring in this ugly, friendless, clumsy girl and for once she had
lost her fear of the world's ridicule and opened her hulking heart
to another human being. It was touching but rather overpowering,
especially since she always opened her mouth too. He learned a great
deal about herself, her invalid father, Elizabethan and Restoration
poetry, paleontology, an organization known as the Working Girls'
Front, Mr. Abrusian, and a brassy Miss Minkin who sounded like a
fiendish caricature of Vivian.
He felt that deliberately avoiding Verna would be a dirtier trick
than he liked to think himself capable of. Nevertheless there were
times when he seriously wished he'd never acquired whatever power it
was--except for Vivian, of course. What the devil, he asked himself for
the _n_th time, could that power be?
That night, in the bathroom, the question came back to him and he
impulsively switched off the light and looked into the mirror. He
gasped and seemed on the point of shrieking out something, but he only
grasped the washbowl more tightly and stared into the mirror more
intently.
After about a minute, he tugged on the light again. He was pale. He had
convinced himself of the actual existence of the phenomenon that was in
reality the third of the Little Gifts: Flashing Eyes.
He couldn't notice anything in the light, but in the dark his eyes gave
off a faint blue flash about every five seconds, just as Vivian had
said, lighting up his cheeks and eyebrows like some comic-book vampire!
It might be attractive by day, when it just registered as an
impalpable hint, but it was damn sinister in the dark! It wasn't much,
but it was _there_--unless the flashes were inside his head and he was
projecting them ... blue ... something called the Purkinje effect? ...
but then Vivian had actually seen ... oh, damn!
* * * * *
Suddenly he wildly looked around, a little like a trapped animal. Why
did it always have to happen in the _bathroom_, he asked himself--the
bicarb, the flame, the blade (if that counted), and now this? Could
there be something wrong about the bathroom, something either in the
room itself or in his childhood associations?
But neither the bathroom walls nor his minutely searched memory
returned an answer.
It was dark in the hall outside and he almost bumped into his sister.
He recoiled, stared at her a moment, then threw his hand over his eyes,
darted into his bedroom and shut the door.
"Is there something wrong, Ernie?" she called after him.
"Wrong?"