Linck nodded. "These swings in attitude are a very effective way of weeding out deviants," he said. "The door opens, people come out of the closet; then it shuts, and they are outside. What will your friend do now?"
"I don't know. He probably cannot get another job teaching. I have another friend who is gay, a philology professor; he was fired in November, and the last I heard he was tending a bar in Detroit."
"I don't think there has ever been an administration in this country that I have disliked so much," Linck said. "They are militarist; they are bigoted, and they are very ignorant. This adventurism in Central America and Africa -- that is only the beginning."
"How long would you say we've got before the world blows itself to hell?" Salomon asked.
Linck shrugged. "On days when I am optimistic, I think we may last as much as thirty years. By then I will be eighty-four, and it won't so much matter to me. But if there is any advance warning, I think I will try to get out of the northern hemisphere."
"Why the northern hemisphere?" said Wilcox.
"Because if the Soviets and the West bomb each other, they are capable of making the northern hemisphere uninhabitable. I will go to Bolivia, probably. My first choice would be Australia, but there are too many military installations there. Bolivia is an unimportant little country."
"I have heard people talk like this before," said Coomaraswami, "and it is really bizarre, because people are saying, well, the world is going to be destroyed by atomic war, and they all agree, yes, it is going to be destroyed, and then they talk about something else. It is like people going down a river on a raft, and they say, tomorrow morning we will all go over the falls and be killed, and then they play pinochle or something."
"What should they do instead?" Margaret asked.
"Well, I think they should at least talk about some ways of getting off the raft."
"Suppose you were the President -- what would you do?"
"Probably I could not do anything; the problem is global."
"If you were God, then?"
"Well, if I were God," said Coomaraswami, "I think I could make some very good improvements just by changing the rules a little bit. For instance, I could change the rate of radioactive decay so that an atomic explosion would not be possible. Or I could do something even simpler, I could change the rules in such a way that there would be no transparent solids in nature."
"How would that be an improvement?"
"Well, think about it. If there were no transparent solids, then you could not have windshields in cars or airplanes, and you would not be able to travel very fast. We could not have modern bombers or fighter planes. People would have to travel less and stay closer to home; then they would mind their own business more. Also we would not have cameras or telescopes, and that would keep us from killing each other at long distance."
"We wouldn't have eyeglasses, either, or windows."
Coomaraswami shrugged. "No, well, then it would be more of an advantage to have good eyesight, and therefore there would not be so much myopia and astigmatism. And people got along very well without glass in their windows for thousands of years."
Gene paused outside the dining room. His throat was dry, and that was absurd, because it was his house, his friends and companions, and yet he felt that he was about to attempt something ultimately perilous. That was where the excitement came from. It was one thing to solve a problem in a daydream, and it was another to translate it into reality. For that, he needed to persuade other people -- real, living people, the people he had never understood. Would they be indifferent? Incredulous? Would they laugh?
Their heads turned as he walked in and took his seat; he could tell by their expressions that they saw him as somehow changed, as a new enigma. That was good.
Mike Wilcox was sitting between Margaret and Nirmal; he raised his hand slightly in greeting.
"Hello, Mike. When did you get here?"
"Just this afternoon. I'm not sure I'm meant to be here actually -- I didn't know there was going to be a meeting."
Gene pulled his chair out and sat down. "It's all right, I want you to hear this. Has anyone told you that I healed a man named Cooley, Monday afternoon in Tampa?"
"Well, Irma did say something. I can't quite follow it."
"He had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis -- Lou Gehrig's disease. I healed him by touching him. I know how this sounds, but reserve your judgment. The doctor who looked at him afterward is named Montoya. I got hold of him Wednesday and talked him into taking me through the intensive-care unit at Tampa General; He didn't want to do it, but I put some pressure on through the head of the fund-raising committee; I'm one of their heavy donors. He took me in there Thursday morning. It was an awful place -- I had no idea. It's one big room partitioned off with portable screens -- people yelling in pain, blood on the nurses' uniforms, blood on the floor, just a madhouse. Anyhow, we went down the row. I healed an old man with a massively bleeding ulcer, and a woman dying of cancer, and a girl with a crushed larynx. I'm getting follow-up x-rays, but I know I did it. I healed them. Yesterday I went in and tried it again. I healed three patients; that seems to be about my limit -- after that I feel as if I'd been running uphill."
There was a silence.
"Had you ever done this before?" Salomon asked.
"I'm not sure. I remember once in Greece, a friend of mine hurt his toe. He was barefoot, and he tripped and hit the doorsill. He thought his big toe was broken, and I looked at it and touched it, and it was all right. I didn't think anything about it then -- just thought he'd made a fuss over nothing. The only time I ever tried to heal anybody was years before that, in New York, when my best friend was dying of a heart attack. I couldn't do it; I didn't know enough. If I had, I could have saved him. There were things I could have done -- open the airway, chest massage, mouth-to-mouth breathing. It wouldn't have taken a miracle, just somebody being there who knew the right thing to do. But I didn't know. After that, I never tried again, until Cooley."
Wilcox cleared his throat. "I'm not sure if this means anything," he said, "but you remember looking at Nan's leg, before we left? Well, when I got her home, she went down to start her physical therapy the next day, and when they took off the brace, the knee was completely mobile -- not a thing wrong with it. They told her to go home and not be a nuisance."
"So. Maybe I healed her too. If so, I wasn't aware of it." Gene folded his hands on the table and leaned forward. "Now I've got to demonstrate something, because I want you to believe me. Pongo and Irma have already seen this, the rest of you haven't. Nirmal, will you hand me something from your wallet -- something you think would be hard to duplicate?"
"Hard to duplicate?"
"Yes. Not a pack of cigarettes, not a coin. Something one-of-a-kind. Don't worry, I'll give it back,"
"I am not worried, but I am confused. Will this do?" Coomaraswami handed over a credit card with a broken corner.
"Sure. Now watch." Gene laid the card on the table, covered it with his big hand for a moment. His hand moved sideways across the table. When he lifted it, there were two credit cards. He handed them to Salomon, who stared at them a moment before passing them to Coomaraswami. Margaret and Cliff Guthrie got up to look over his shoulder. Both credit cards had the same embossed twelve-digit number, both said "N. K. COOMARASWAMI" on the front; both had the lower right-hand corner broken in the same way.
"May I see?" said Wilcox. He took the two credit cards and looked at them closely.
"Mike, could you do that?"
"Yes, with a little preparation."
"Could you do it the way I did -- not knowing in advance what Nirmal would give me?"
"Oh, yes. Not at all difficult."