“I wish this one hadn’t worked out. I sat in the car and smiled about little McGee becoming the scientific hero in order to impress a babe like Katherine. Anyway, a few minutes after eight, as I am watching the main building which McGee has told me is the lab, there is one devil of an explosion.
“The flat roof goes flying off, and the sides bust out and a great white column rises up toward the sky. Poor McGee, I am thinking, when I notice that there is something pretty solid about this white column. I squint at it and suddenly my heart is going poom, poom, poom!
“The white thing is Joe McGee and he is about two hundred feet tall. I squint into the sun and see that he is shaking his head, as though dazed. The only answer I can think of is that when Partridge jolted the area with his electricity — field of force, I think McGee called it — maybe he knocked McGee back a day or two, but he knocked him out of balance with the rest of the world. McGee expanding like that was sort of like blowing up a life raft in your vest pocket. Something had to give quickly.
“I glance down at the buildings that are left and I see McGee’s feet planted among them and people running like crazy to get away from the place. Each of his feet is maybe thirty feet long and they take up a lot of room. McGee sways a little, then I see him look down. On a face that big you can’t read expression. He picks up his feet, one at a time, and gingerly steps out of the area, out into the open desert. The steps he takes are about a hundred feet long.
“I have seen enough to last me forever. I am suddenly filled with a great desire to be back here in New York. It is the first time I ever forget I work for a newspaper. My hands are shaking so bad I can’t get the car started. I have stopped only a hundred yards or so from the main gate. I got a big U turn on my mind when I see Katherine coming down the road. In front of her by a good ten feet, is the fellow I know from McGee’s description as being the lab technician with muscles. The eyes of both of them are like marbles glued to white plaster walls. Before I can get the car rolling, the technician claws the back door open and the two of them pile into my car.
“We don’t need words at that point, and who could have said any? I yank the bus around in a screaming turn and hunch over the wheel with the gas pedal flat on the floor. The dish looks out the back and screams. A few minutes later the gas pedal is still on the floor and the scenery isn’t going by. It stands still. But not for long. All of a sudden it drops away and the car goes up so fast that I am pushed down into the seat like I hear happens when airplane drivers pull out of dives.
“Katherine has no more breath for screaming and her boy friend is trying to eat the fingers off both hands. When we stop I look out my window and see nothing but space. I look out the other side and see the big white expanse which is the chest of our boy McGee. You notice funny things at such a time. I notice that he has three hairs on his chest, each about the diameter of a good fly rod.
“What I figure is the tip of his little finger comes in through the window and when it goes out, it takes the door with it. The same procedure goes on in the back and we have no doors on one side of the car. It tips up and I hang onto the wheel. It makes one little shake and the wheel is torn out of my hands. I slide out and land on this wide pink wrinkled thing which is, of course, the palm of his hand. Katherine and her boy friend and I land all in a heap. She has passed out cold.
“I look up at his huge face and see that he holds the car up to his eye level and peers in. When he sees that he has emptied it, he throws it away like a guy throws away a butt. I giggle now when I try to think of what I put on the insurance questionnaire. McGee apparently sees that Katherine is out like a light so he blows on her, gently like. Her boy friend and I drop flat or else the wind would have blown us off into space.
“There is a noise like thunder, and for a moment I can’t figure it. I look up and see his lips moving. By watching them and listening, I can make out that he is telling me to revive the lady. I crawl over to her and start rubbing her wrists, and patting her cheeks, while McGee picks the boy friend up between thumb and finger and holds him in the other hand.
“When Katherine begins to moan, I look over and notice that the boy friend has taken out a little pocket knife, opened the blade and is about to stab McGee in the thumb with all his strength. I look over and yell at him, but he ignores me. McGee is watching Katherine. When the blow lands, McGee gives a grunt that sounds like a cliff being blasted. He jerks so bad that Katherine and I go about three feet in the air. McGee gives a little flicking motion with his hand and the boy friend sails off toward town. I find out later that he lands flat against the front of the bank on the main drag. The later publicity does McGee no good at all.
“Katherine is quite a kid. She turns white when she sees the boy friend sail away, but she looks up into McGee’s face and smiles. It is the same kind of a smile you give out when you break your leg. McGee lifts us up close to his lips and tries to kiss Katherine. Luckily he only catches her on the shoulder. The suction rips the shoulder out of her blouse. With Katherine in one hand and me in the other, he walks toward town.
“The way he holds me. I can see behind us. With every step he takes his heels go down into the asphalt like a baby walking across a pie crust. He is smart enough to hold us loosely, but there is no way I can make him hear me so I can tell him to stop swinging his arms. Each swing spins my stomach into an outside loop and leaves it hanging behind us in space.
“At the edge of town he stops and looks down. People disappear off the street as though they are rubbed out with an eraser. McGee squats on his heels and giggles. The giggle sounds like a field howitzer with a rapid fire attachment. He dumps me back into the same hand with Katherine, reaches out and lifts the flat roof off a store. The people race out into the street and disappear into other buildings. He scales the roof off into the desert and giggles again. He reaches out and pulls down all the phone lines and electric cables.
“I begin to understand why he does all these things. Here he is a fellow who hasn’t ever made anybody look at him twice and all of a sudden he has become pretty important to everybody in the vicinity. He is just about the most important thing there is. He’s got his gal in the palm of his hand. Naturally he has expanded out of his clothes, but the sort of cosmic nakedness McGee possessed was actually not nakedness at all.
“After picking up some empty trucks and putting them upside down in the main drag and putting a few others on top of the buildings and pulling the freight train that was standing in the station out into the main drag, he tired of the whole thing. I was yelling at him to put me down but apparently he couldn’t hear me.
“Just as he set me down of his own accord, there was a rattle of rifle fire and McGee jumped back about fifty feet. I looked up and saw the scowl on his face and the spots of blood on his cheek and rolled into a shallow ditch. McGee stamped once at the town with his foot, turned and headed off into the desert, staring at Katherine.
“I wandered into town. It was a mess. All communications with the outside world were gone. Only two people had been killed when McGee had stamped a building flat but that was enough to take him out of the joke category. We stood in the main drag and stared until at last his head and shoulders went out of sight around a high slope in the hills. Then at last it was as though the entire town had taken a deep breath.
“In fifteen minutes, after a wild ride to the next town, Washington knew about what had happened and had clapped a lid of censorship over the entire area. Technicians were flown out, and a motorized detachment of the Army, complete with bazookas and mountain howitzers arrived by noon. By then, of course, the fighter-bombers were looking for him.