I was too dazed to shout. By the time my wits came back it had disappeared and the feeling of unreality it left behind made me doubt whether I had ever seen or felt it at all.
About ten minutes later I found my money was gone. So it wasn't a turning point in my life, after all. If things had worked out any differently I never would have met Ira De Kalb. I never would have got myself mixed up in that series of deaths which so far as I was concerned were only signposts pointing the way to De Kalb. Maybe it was a turning point, at that.
The mind as well as the senses can be awfully slow sometimes. The hand doesn't know it has been burned, the mind can't recognize the impossible when it confronts it. There are many little refuges for a mind that must not admit to itself the impossible has happened.
I went back to my hotel that night and got into bed. I had met a thief, I told myself drowsily, as I'd deserved – walking a city street that late at night, loaded down with cash. I had it coming. He'd got my money and that was that. (He – it – hadn't touched the money, or me, except in that one brief unbalanced instant. The thing was impossible. But since it had happened, then it was possible and the mind could dismiss it.) I went to sleep.
And woke at dawn to the most extraordinary experience I'd ever had in my life, up to then. Even that encounter on the Rua d'Ouvidor hadn't been like this.
The experience was pure sensation. And the sensation was somewhere inside me, vaguely in the solar plexus region – a soundless explosion of pure energy like a dazzling sun coming into sudden, radiant being. There aren't any accurate words to tell about it.
But I was aware of ring after ring of glowing vitality bursting outward from that nova in the deepest nerve-center of my body. For a timeless instant I lay there, bathed in it, feeling it pour like a new kind of blood through my veins. In that instant I knew what it was.
Then somebody turned off the power at its source.
I sat up abruptly, empty of the radiance, empty as if it had never happened, but filled terribly with the knowledge of what had caused it.
My head ached from the sudden motion. Dawn made the sky light outside and brimmed the room with a clear gray luminous pallor. I sat there holding my head in both hands and knowing – knowing – that somewhere in the city an instant ago a man had been killed.
There was no shadow of doubt in my mind. I was as sure as if I had had that strange sensation a hundred times before and each time seen a man die as it burst into a nova-glow inside me.
I wanted to go back to sleep and pretend it had been a dream. But I knew I couldn't. I dragged myself out of bed and into my clothes. I took my aching head and jangled nerves down into the street and found a yawning taxi-driver.
You see, I even knew where the dead man would be found. It was unthinkable that I should go there looking for him – but I went. And I found him. He was lying huddled against the rim of a fountain in a little square not far from the place where I'd last seen my – my thief – of the night before vanishing with that disquieting, smooth swiftness in the moonlight.
The dead man was an Indian, probably a beggar. I stood there in the deserted square, looking down at him, hearing the early morning traffic moving noisily past, knowing someone would find us here together at any moment. I had never seen a victim of the burn-death before but I knew I looked at one now. It wasn't a real burn, properly speaking. Friction, I though, had done it. The eroded skin made me think of something, and I looked at my own palm.
I was standing there, staring from my burned hand to the dead man and then back again, when – it happened again.
The bursting nova of pure radiance flared into, violence somewhere near the pit of my stomach. Vitality poured through my veins ...
I sold the series to AP as usual. There had been five of the murders in Rio before I got my idea about putting an end to them and by then the stories had begun to hit the States papers, some of them running my picture along with the sensational stuff about the deaths, and my uncanny ability at locating the bodies.
Looking back now, I suppose the only reason they didn't arrest me for murder was that they couldn't figure out how I'd done it. Luckily my hand had healed before the police and the papers began to connect me so tightly with the deaths.
After the fifth murder I got a reservation for New York. I had come to the conclusion that if I left Rio the murders would stop – in Rio. I thought they might begin again in New York. I had to find out, you see. By then I was in pretty bad shape, for the best of reasons – or the worst. Anyhow, I went back.
2. THE STAIN AND THE STONE
There was a message waiting for me at the airport. Robert J. Allister wanted to see me. I felt impressed. Allister runs a chain of news and picture magazines second only to Life and Time.
I phoned for an appointment, and they told me to come right up. I walked through a waiting-room full of people with prior appointments and they passed me right into the sanctum, with no preliminaries. I began to wonder if I'd been underestimating my own importance all these years. Allister himself rose behind his desk and offered me his hand. I waded forward, ankle-deep through Persian carpets, and took it. He told me to sit down. His voice was tired and he looked thinner and more haggard than his pictures.
"So you're Jerry Cortland," he said. "Been following your Rio stuff. Nice work. Care to drop it for awhile?" I gaped. He gave me a tired grin.
"I'd like you to work for me on contract," he said. "Let me explain. You know Ira De Kalb?"
"The poor man's Einstein?"
"In a way, maybe. He's a dilettante. He's a genius, really, I suppose. A mind like a grasshopper. He'll work out a whole new concept of mathematics and never bother to apply it. He – well, you'll understand better after you've met him. He's onto something very new, just now. Something very important. I want some pieces written on it and De Kalb made a point of asking for you."
"But why?"
"He has his reasons. He'll explain to you – maybe. I can't." He pushed the contract toward me. "How about it?"
"Well – " I hesitated. My ex-wife had just slapped another summons on me, alimony again, and I could certainly use some money. "I'll try it," I said. "But I'm irresponsible. Maybe I won't stick to it."
"You'll stick," Allister said grimly, "once you've talked to De Kalb. That I can guarantee. Sign here."
De Kalb's house blended into the hillside as if Frank Lloyd Wright had built it with his own hands. I was out of breath by the time I got to the top of the gray stone terraces linked together by gray stone steps. A maid let me in and showed me to a room where I could wait.
"Mr. De Kalb is expecting you," she said. "He'll be back in about ten minutes."
Half the room was glass, looking out upon miles and miles of Appalachians, tumbled brown and green, with a dazzling sky above. There was somebody already there, apparently waiting too. I saw the outlines of a woman's spare, straight figure rising almost apologetically from a desk as I entered. I knew her by that air of faint apology no less than by her outline against the light.
"Dr. Essen!" I said. And I was aware then of my first feeling of respect for this job, whatever it was. You don't get two people like Letta Essen and Ira De Kalb under the same roof for anything trivial.
I knew Dr. Essen. I'd interviewed her twice, right after Hiroshima, about the work she'd done with Meitner and Frisch in establishing the nuclear liquid-drop concept of atomic fission. I wanted very much to ask her what she was doing here but I didn't. I knew I'd get more out of her if I let it come her way.