"You've let me waste half the day?" His voice broke.
"Not waste it. Thought the rest would do you good. Bring you back to
your senses a little. Seems not."
"God damn you--you should have waked me up. I feel horrible."
"Snap out of it! Try to remember what the poet says about rags, bones,
hanks of hair--and a good cigar is a smoke." His eyes were so wild that
I took pity on him. "Jump in the shower. I've got Dave Berne--an old
pal of mine--working on your Marcia. He probably has detectives on the
hunt this minute."
Paul heavily rubbed the stubble on his face. "I _thought_ you'd take
charge."
While he used my shower and my razor I had his clothes pressed and
ordered some breakfast for him.
But he ate the food only because he had to wait for the valet. I
couldn't remember having seen anybody in such a tizzy about a girl
since the days of my youth--since my own tizzies. And tizzy wasn't the
right word for Paul's condition. It was pretty nearly psychopathic.
He ate and ran from my rooms, after I'd made him promise to report back
later in the day.
I got into the serial again and the sun moved across the blue-hot sky,
driving from Manhattan everybody with the fare.
Ambulances were collecting prostration cases.
Cops were going around shutting off the fire hydrants which wilted
citizens were opening with wrenches. Cops trying to save the water
supply against fall drought, against fires, against winter snow that
could be flushed into the sewers, and in behalf of the thirst, cookery,
and cleanliness of the millions.
The heat wave had become big headlines in the papers.
Sometimes I looked out the window at the glaring roofs of the
metropolis and tried archmeasures of cortical autohypnosis, imagining
the sky gray, snow falling in hushed and steady spirals, shop windows
green and red for Christmas, and Salvation Army Santa Clauses ringing
handbells beside their tripods and kettles on the main intersections.
It wasn't any good. My personal limits of trained tolerance had been
exceeded by a great, tormented gob of atomic fire ninety-three million
miles away and right here on my windowsill.
Still--I made fair progress.
The light was losing its intensity, though the air was no less fevered,
when I got a call.
"Is this Phil Wylie?" It was a man's voice--bland, on the booster side.
"Yo." I was not very enthusiastic about being Phil Wylie.
"This is Socker Melton. Friend of your father. He told me to look you
up, here--and I've tried a time or two before now. Glad to catch you
in. May I come up?"
What do you do? I told him I was working hard--on a rush operation--but
to come up anyhow.
Then I raged around the sitting room for a bit.
Christ badger every old friend of the family!
The oaf's knock was pompous. Bonk and pause, bonk and pause, bonk.
Like the pass-signal to a kid's shanty.