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“Hated?” Smith’s brows went up. “Me? Why?”
“Here. This is why!” Hartley thrust his fingers out. “Your damned radiations. Night after night sitting by you in your laboratory. What can I do about it?”
“Hartley,” warned Rockwell. “Sit down. Be quiet.”
“I won’t sit down and I won’t be quiet! Are you both fooled by this imitation of a man, this pink fellow who’s carrying on the greatest hoax in history? If you had any sense you’d destroy Smith before he escapes!”
Rockwell apologized for Hartley’s outburst.
Smith shook his head. “No, let him talk. What’s this about?”
“You know already!” shouted Hartley, angrily. “You’ve lain there for months, listening, planning. You can’t fool me. You’ve got Rockwell bluffed, disappointed. He expected you to be a superman. Maybe you are. But whatever you are, you’re not Smith any more. Not any more. It’s just another of your misdirections. We weren’t supposed to know all about you, and the world shouldn’t know about you. You could kill us, easily, but you’d prefer to stay and convince us that you’re normal. That’s the best way. You could have escaped a few minutes ago, but that would have left the seeds of suspicion behind. Instead, you waited, to convince us that you’re normal.”
“He is normal,” complained McGuire.
“No he’s not. His mind’s different. He’s clever.”
“Give him word association tests then,” said McGuire.
“He’s too clever for that, too.”
“It’s very simple, then. We take blood tests, listen to his heart, and inject serums into him.”
Smith looked dubious. “I feel like an experiment, but if you really want to. This is silly.”
That shocked Hartley. He looked at Rockwell. “Get the hypos,” he said.
Rockwell got the hypos, thinking. Now, maybe after all, Smith was a superman. His blood. That superblood. Its ability to kill germs. His heartbeat. His breathing. Maybe Smith was a superman and didn’t know it. Yes. Yes, maybe—
Rockwell drew blood from Smith and slid it under a microscope. His shoulders sagged. It was normal blood. When you dropped germs into it the germs took a normal length of time to die. The blood was no longer super germicidal. The x-liquid, too, was gone. Rockwell sighed miserably. Smith’s temperature was normal. So was his pulse. His sensory and nervous system responded according to rule.
“Well, that takes care of that,” said Rockwell, softly.
Hartley sank into a chair, eyes widened, holding his he
ad between bony fingers. He exhaled. “I’m sorry. I guess my—mind—it just imagined things. The months were so long. Night after night. I got obsessed, and afraid. I’ve made a fool out of myself. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” He stared at his green fingers. “But what about myself?”
Smith said, “I recovered. You’ll recover, too, I guess. I can sympathize with you. But it wasn’t bad … I don’t really recall anything.”
Hartley relaxed. “But—yes I guess you’re right. I don’t like the idea of my body getting hard, but it can’t be helped. I’ll be all right.”
Rockwell was sick. The tremendous letdown was too much for him. The intense drive, the eagerness, the hunger and curiosity, the fire, had all sunk within him. So this was the man from the chrysalis? The same man who had gone in. All this waiting and wondering for nothing.
He gulped a breath of air, tried to steady his innermost, racing thoughts. Turmoil. This pink-cheeked, fresh-voiced man who sat before him smoking calmly, was more than a man who had suffered some partial skin petrification, and whose glands had gone wild from radiation, but, nevertheless, just a man now and nothing more. Rockwell’s mind, his overimaginative, fantastic mind had seized upon each facet of the illness and built it into a perfect organism of wishful thinking. Rockwell was deeply shocked, deeply stirred and disappointed.
The question of Smith’s living without food, his pure blood, low temperature, and the other evidences of superiority were now fragments of a strange illness. An illness and nothing more. Something that was over, done and gone, and left nothing behind but brittle scraps on a sunlit tabletop. There’d be a chance to watch Hartley now, if his illness progressed, and report the new sickness to the medical world.
But Rockwell didn’t care about illness. He cared about perfection. And that perfection had been split and ripped and torn and it was gone. His dream was gone. His supercreature was gone. He didn’t care if the whole world went hard, green, brittle-mad now.
Smith was shaking hands all around. “I’d better get back to Los Angeles. Important work for me to do at the plant. I have my old job waiting for me. Sorry I can’t stay on. You understand.”
“You should stay on and rest a few days, at least,” said Rockwell. He hated to see the last wisp of his dream vanish.
“No thanks. I’ll drop by your office in a week or so for another checkup, though, Doctor, if you like? I’ll drop in every few weeks for the next year or so so you can check me, yes?”
“Yes. Yes, Smith. Do that, will you please? I’d like to talk your illness over with you. You’re lucky to be alive.”
McGuire said, happily. “I’ll drive you to L.A.”
