"That was pretty funny, what happened in the lobby."
"I didn't see it."
"He came tearing through there on all fours. Right into the middle of
all those women. They probably thought he was a mad dog or something."
I took two more steps, and stopped, and looked at him. "That was _all_
he did?" I said.
"Sure."
"Well, then," I said with mounting exasperation, "in the name of--Oh.
Wait a minute. You're wrong," I told him, calming down again. "There
was the gong. He made that gong noise."
"Did he?" said Harry. One nervous hand went up and adjusted the
hornrims.
I felt a little tugging at my shirt front, and looked down to see my
necktie slithering out. I swatted at it instinctively, but it ducked
away and hovered, swaying like a cobra.
Then it dropped. He showed me his open hand, and there was a wire
running up out of his sleeve, with a clip on the end of it. For the
first time, I noticed two rings of metal wired behind the lens frames
of his eyeglasses.
He pulled his other hand out of his pocket, and there was a little
haywire rig in its batteries and a couple of tubes and three tuning
knobs.
Fans, I was thinking frozenly--sixteen or eighteen, maybe, with pimples
and dandruff and black fingernails, and that wonderful, terrible
eagerness boiling up inside them ... slaving away at backyard rocketry
experiments, wiring up crazy gadgets that never worked, printing bad
fiction and worse poetry in mimeographed magazines.... How could I have
forgotten?
"I wasn't going to tell anybody," he said. "No matter what happened. If
they'd _looked_ at me, just once, they would have seen. But as long as
you're worrying so much about it--" He blinked, and said humbly, "It
scares me. What do you think I ought to do?"
My fingers twitched. I said, "Well, this will take some thinking about,
Harry. Uh, can I--"
He backed off absent-mindedly as I stepped toward him. "I've been
thinking about it," he said. "As a matter of fact, I haven't been to
bed since yesterday morning. I worked on it straight through from four
o'clock yesterday. Twenty hours. I took caffeine tablets. But go ahead,
tell me. What would you do if you--" he said it apologetically--"were
me?"
I swallowed. "I'd go at it slowly," I said. "You can make a lot of
mistakes by--"
He interrupted me, with a sudden fiendish glint in his eye. "The man
that has this is pretty important, don't you think?" And he grinned.
"How would you like to see my face on all the stamps?"