They didn't figure much.
"The best we can do," Black informed me, "is to get set up there on the
roof. The angle's bad--but we have two good men. If he shows signs of
definitely going, we'll take a chance and try to rope him."
They'd been out on the narrow terrace, talking to him. The young cop
was fascinated. "He told us that he was working out a personal problem
against a background germane to the problem and equivalent to the other
stresses of his life. Something like that. What the hell does 'germane'
mean?"
"Appropriate," I said. It was near enough.
"When those double-domes go nuts--they still keep talking in their
double-dome lingo."
"The nut," I said, "never realizes he's nutty. He thinks you are.
That's why there're so many of them."
The cop nodded. "I'd say--the majority of people, sometimes." He
shrugged. "I guess when you get into the atom-bomb class of brains, you
get pretty chinchy everywhere else."
I shook my head. "The fact is otherwise. The brighter they are--the
less likely they are to pull one like this. Only--they still do,
occasionally."
Captain Black absently tossed his smoking cigar butt into the
artificial fireplace and stepped over the windowsill. We could hear
him, down the terrace, talking to Paul--but not the words.
"He got a family we could send for? Anything like that?" the young cop
asked.
I shook my head. "His mother died--not by what's called suicide, but by
the psychological means that amounted to the same thing. He's a case of
a dame-starved kid growing up with too much emphasis on dames and too
little knowledge about what they're really like."