"The machine exploded," he announced. "Your boss is hurt, and the place is on fire." (The last statement was not strictly necessary, as the communications room was a roaring oven.)
The gang scattered with cries of alarm, yelling contradictory directions at each other to fetch water, fetch blankets, run for their lives.
Osborn and Guja strolled to the front door and out, through the courtyard, out the gate, and toward the truck-park before somebody yelled: "Hey, you, where do you theenk you are going with our boss?"
Guja dropped the corpse, and the two dashed to the nearest truck. The key was in the ignition-lock and the fuel-tank was full. With gunfire crashing behind them, they whirled the vehicle around on two wheels and streaked down the road toward Cuatro Cienegas.
At five P.M. they arrived at the San Antonio laboratories. Somebody spotted them, and before they reached the Administration Building Charley Kenny rushed out to greet them on the front steps.
"Where's Gladys?" gasped Osborn.
"She went home; when we didn't hear from you all day—"
"We've been driving like bats from hell—"
"Yes; how did you escape—"
"Did the repeal act pass?"
"Sure, by one vote. Hey—George! Run in and 'phone Mrs. Osborn that Homer's back—"
"I'll 'phone her myself—"
"But wait, you haven't told me—"
While this was going on, people began streaming gradually up as if drawn by a magnet. They paid little attention to anybody save Guja Singh. The tall patrolman became visibly uneasy under their regard. He muttered: "What is this, another lynching? I think I'd better go."
He started to walk dignifiedly off; the crowd closed in >n him and followed. He began to run, but the crowd, with one Texan roar, pounced on him.
"Hey!" cried Osborn.
"It's all right." said Kenny.
"The hell it's all right! Gimme a gun or something ..."
He broke off as he observed the action of the crowd, which, instead of tearing the Sikh to pieces, had hoisted him on their shoulders and were parading him down the street with deafening cheers. Guja Singh looked bewildered.
Kenny explained: "Our switchboard operator listened in on your conversation with that guy in India, and she got it sort of mixed up, but reckoned as how your patrolman friend was makin' his old man swing the repeal vote. Anyway that's her story, and all San Antone thinks he's responsible. Was he. or did you have a hand in it? Can't imagine Harmodio Dualler doin' it of his own accord."
Osborn explained what had happened.
"Then it was your doin'! We'll have to see that the credit goes to you, instead of that—"
"I don't want the credit!" said Osborn. "All I want is to call my wife and tell her the good news!"
"What good news?" but Osborn had broken away and run into the building. Kenny followed as fast as his bulk allowed. He reached the 'phone booth in time to hear Osborn shout: "... Gladys? I got the greatest news in the world! We're going back to Brooklyn!."
THE GNARLY MAN
Dr. Matilda Saddler first saw the gnarly man on the evening of June 14th, 1956, at Coney Island. The spring meeting of the Eastern Section of the American Anthropological Association had broken up, and Dr. Saddler had had dinner with two of her professional colleagues, Blue of Columbia and Jeffcott of Yale. She mentioned that she had never visited Coney, and meant to go there that evening. She urged Blue and Jeffcott to come along, but they begged off.
Watching Dr. Saddler's retreating back, Blue of Columbia crackled: "The Wild Woman from Wichita. Wonder if she's hunting another husband?" He was a thin man with a small gray beard and a who-the-Hell-are-you-Sir expression.
"How many has she had?" asked Jeffcott of Yale.
"Three to date. Don't know why anthropologists lead the most disorderly private lives of any scientists. Must be that they study the customs and morals of all these different peoples, and ask themselves, 'If the Eskimos can do it why can't we?' I'm old enough to be safe, thank God."
"I'm not afraid of her," said Jeffcott. He was in his early forties and looked like a farmer uneasy in store-clothes. "I'm so very thoroughly married."
"Yeah? Ought to have been at Stanford a few years ago, when she was there. It wasn't safe to walk across the campus, with Tuthill chasing all the females and Saddler all the males."
Dr. Saddler had to fight her way off the subway train, as the adolescents who infest the platform of the B.M.T.'s Stillwell Avenue Station are probably the worst-mannered people on earth, possibly excepting the Dobu Islanders of the Western Pacific. She didn't much mind. She was a tall, strongly-built woman in her late thirties, who had been kept in trim by the outdoor rigors of her profession. Besides, some of the inane remarks in Swift's paper on acculturation among the Arapaho Indians had gotten her fighting blood up.
Walking down Surf Avenue toward Brighton Beach, she looked at the concessions without trying them, preferring to watch the human types that did and the other human types that took their money. She did try a shooting-gallery, but found knocking tin owls off their perch with a .22 too easy to be much fun. Long-range work with an army rifle was her idea of shooting.
The concession next to the shooting-gallery would have been called a side-show if there had been a main show for it to be a side-show to. The usual lurid banner proclaimed the uniqueness of the two-headed calf, the bearded woman, Arachne the spider-girl, and other marvels. The piece de resistance was Ungo-Bungo the ferocious ape-man, captured in the Congo at a cost of 27 lives. The picture showed an enormous Ungo-Bungo squeezing a hapless Negro in each hand, while others sought to throw a net over him.
Although Dr. Saddler knew perfectly well that the ferocious ape-man would turn out to be an ordinary Caucasian with false hair on his chest, a streak of whimsicality impelled her to go in. Perhaps, she thought, she could have some fun with her colleagues about it.
The spieler went through his leather-lunged harangue. Dr. Saddler guessed from his expression that his feet hurt. The tattooed lady didn't interest her, as her decorations obviously had no cultural significance, as they have among the Polynesians. As for the ancient Mayan, Dr. Saddler thought it in questionable taste to exhibit a poor microcephalic idiot that way. Professor Yogi's legerdemain and fire-eating weren't bad.
A curtain hung in front of Ungo-Bungo's cage. At the appropriate moment there were growls and the sound of a length of chain being slapped against a metal plate. The spicier wound up on a high note: "... ladies and gentlemen, the one and only Ungo-Bungo!" The curtain dropped.
The ape-man was squatting at the back of his cage. He dropped his chain, got up, and shuffled forward. He grasped two of the bars and shook them. They were appropriately loose and rattled alarmingly. Ungo-Bungo snarled at the patrons, showing his even yellow teeth.
Dr. Saddler stared hard. This was something new in the ape-man line. Ungo-Bungo was about five feet three, but very massive, with enormous hunched shoulders. Above and below his blue swimming-trunks, thick grizzled hair covered him from crown to ankle. His short stout-muscled arms ended in big hands with thick gnarled fingers. His neck projected slightly forward, so that from the front he seemed to have but little neck at all.
His face—well, thought Dr. Saddler, she knew all the living races of men, and all the types of freak brought about by glandular maladjustment, and none of them had a face like that. It was deeply lined. The forehead between the short scalp-hair and the brows on the huge super-orbital ridges receded sharply. The nose, though wide, was not apelike; it was a shortened version of the thick hooked Armenoid or "Jewish" nose, The face ended in a long upper lip and a retreating chin. And the yellowish skin apparently belonged to Ungo-Bungo.