One evening he called a taxi and went to see Al Jacobs. They talked a little about hunting; then Cooley brought up his problem in a casual way.
"What are you telling me -- you want to wire some guy's car? That's easy."
"No, not a car. I was thinking maybe under a chair."
"With a timer?"
"No, that's no good. I've got to be there when it happens."
"Right in the same room? You could do it with a shaped charge, if that's what you want. The explosion goes straight up. You could be sitting next to him, and it wouldn't knock your hat off."
"How would I fire it?"
Jacobs shrugged. "Dozens of ways. The simplest thing would be just a wire and a push-button. Or you could use a radio control -- no wires."
"What would it cost?"
Jacobs scratched his chin. "Tom, it wouldn't be easy for me to get this stuff. The radio control, if you decide to go that way, I'll have to make that myself. Say five thousand."
Gene Anderson stood at his window, looking down at the lights along the driveway and in the parking area. The gate was open; here came a car, black behind the cones of its headlamps. Another was turning off the highway behind it. He had just finished dressing, in a suit and tie; it was the first time he had worn such an outfit in more than a year.
Behind him, on his writing chair, were some penciled notes headed "Toward a New Religion." He had not shown these to anyone, even to Maggie. It was curious and a little unsettling to think how his attitudes had changed over the years, as if belief were a function of metabolism. In his teens, he had dismissed religion as a mental aberration; now, although he found the answers of organized religion full of absurdities, the questions absorbed him.
He had one advantage over all the others who speculated about the unseen world: he knew that it existed. Several times, by accident, he had managed to bring through from another world some object which was not merely a copy of something existing in this world. Among these was a little volume by Marco Pallis which did not appear in any catalog or index. In this world, Pallis had written many works on metaphysics and religion, but not "The Phenomenology of Mind."
Gene treasured this book, in its warped boards and faded green cloth, because it was itself evidence that the author's central postulate was true: the universe was an infinite manifold in which every possible thing existed: "God is free to do, and must do, everything that is possible." Somewhere in that vast flowering of creation, that n-dimensional dandelion globe of branching and rebranching realities, there were worlds in which Gene Anderson had never been born, others in which he was not a giant, others in which he had not killed Paul Cooley. . . .
He looked at his watch; it was time to go down.
The housewarming party, in his opinion, was an evil of doubtful necessity. "You can stand them for one evening," Irma had said, but he was not sure about that. They had invited all the local people who had had anything to do with the house, and their flowery wives. Little Larry Einarson, the architect, was there, and Russell Beck, the prime contractor, along with a crowd of subcontractors; then there was Dan Ankeny, the real estate broker; Sidney Webbet, of St. Petersburg Trust and Guaranty; and various friends and relatives whose names he had not quite caught. The men were red-faced, painfully close-shaven and recently barbered; one or two of them were already glassy-eyed.
When he stood up, Gene's head was on a level with the heads of people on the raised portion of the living room, and when he sat down he was about as tall as people standing beside him, and that should have been all right, but people were still uneasy in his presence; they came over one or two at a time and said a few words -- usually the same few words -- then looked embarrassed and went away.
Maggie, in a white dress that showed off her tan, was talking to the publisher of the "St. Petersburg Times" and his rotund wife; Pongo and Irma had been here earlier but had disappeared. Hired waiters came and went with trays of highballs; a few people had brought plates from the buffet into the living room and were dripping vinaigrette sauce on the rugs.
"Mr. Anderson, please tell me, where did you get that marvelous wood carving? Is it one of yours?" The art critic of the "Times," a pale young man with black-rimmed glasses, was pointing to a modern-looking piece that resembled the buttocks of a woman.
"No, I got it in the Seychelles," Anderson said. He did not add that the "sculpture" was the fruit of a Coconut palm.
"Well, it's simply marvelous. I'd like to do a column about it, and of course, about all the other wonderful things you have here. I know how you feel about publicity, but -- "
"I'd really rather not. You understand."
"Of course." The critic, whose name was Phelps or Phillips, shrugged with manly regret and drifted off, munching a canape.
A gray-haired man with a solemn expression was coming toward him. "Hello, Cliff," said Anderson. "Did you just get here?"
"Yes, my plane was late, but I've got that information you wanted. I could of phoned, but I thought you'd rather have me tell you in person."
"Yes, of course."
"Can we go someplace private?"
Anderson stood up and looked around. There were people on the balcony, in the dining room; there were even a few sitting on the benches in the garden. "Come on," he said, and led the way back through the hall to the infirmary, where he sat on the end of the examination chair and offered Cliff Guthrie a stool.
Guthrie said, "First off, I ought to tell you that I had to spend all the money you gave me. There was the guy in IRS, and then we had to find somebody in the Veterans Administration, so it was expensive."
"That's all right."
"Well, we located him. There are plenty of Thomas Cooleys, but this one was born in Portland, Oregon, and the dates match, and he gives his occupation as retired police officer, so it's got to be him. He's sixty-nine now. He's living in Amherst, Massachusetts, and he was in a veterans' hospital for a while last year. Sorry if that's bad news."
"No, it's okay," Anderson said. "Thanks, Cliff."
In the kitchen, the phone rang and Irma answered it. "Yes, it is," she said. "Who is this?" She listened a moment, then put the phone down.
"Who was it?" Pongo asked.
"I don't know. Some man asked if this was John Kimberley's residence, and I said yes, because that's the name Gene used in the carnival; then he hung up. That's funny."
"Maybe he'll call back."
Margaret found herself standing beside a large gray-haired man with mournful eyes. "My name is Cliff Guthrie," he said. "I haven't seen you around here before."
"No, I'm new. Margaret Morrow -- I'm Gene's secretary. Have you known him long, Cliff?"
"About a year. I was an examiner with IRS. We were auditing his returns, and I saw him several times. After I retired last March, I came around just to pay a social call. He was pretty cordial, considering what a rough time we gave him."
"And now he invites you to his parties?"
"That's right. I've done some work for him, too." He stared at the highball in his hand. "It isn't the work, though -- that isn't why. I just like to be around him."
"I know what you mean."
Anderson moved across the living room, past a group of men talking about fishing:" . . . thirty-five yards of hundred-pound test, and, man, I mean he snatched it . . . "At the end of the raised area Linck was holding forth to a little group: "Yes, even the pumpkin. Do you know that carriages and lanterns have essentially the same shape? If you look at a carriage with two lanterns, there it is three times, one big one and two little ones. And even in automobiles, up to about nineteen thirty. Well, it has been shown that this form is based on the seed-pod of a Chinese plant."