THE LOCUS FOCUS, by Richard Wilson

Originally published in Science Fiction Quarterly, August 1957.

Had I been working, I’d have taken a cab and put it on the client’s expense account but I was between jobs, so I rode the bus. That’s where I noticed the thin old fellow with the sunken eyes on the uptown Broadway bus.

I was sitting up front. It was evening, well past the rush hour, and I was on my way home from my office south of Times Square to my hotel on 78th Street.

The thin old man got on near the Trans-Lux newsreel theater. “Fare still fifteen cents?” he asked the bus driver.

“That’s right, mister. Till midnight.”

I half watched, taking my eyes off my copy of Time. I’d read all of the magazine’s authoritative week-old rehash of the news in the office except the science section, so I was looking at that something about a new comet.

The old man chuckled and dropped a dime and a nickel into the fare box. “Then I’ll save my pennies,” he said, giving the driver a sly look. “My name’s Radin,” he said. “Lionel Radin.”

“Welcome aboard, Mr. Radin,” the driver replied cheerfully. “Watch the doors and step to the rear.”

“I know all about it, young man,” Mr. Radin said, “it’s going the same way as the front of the bus.”

“Right you are, Pop,” the driver said. “You got it made.” He swung expertly around a double-parked taxi and out-bluffed a DeSoto.

Radin took the empty seat behind mine. He had glanced at me as he went by and I looked quickly down to my magazine, afraid he was going to sit next to me. I’d lost my place and so I reread Time’s National Affairs piece about that neo-blackshirt, General Stacy Tranquen. I read it doggedly because if there’s anything I can do without it’s garrulous old men—unless, or course, they’re clients willing to pay me thirty dollars a day plus expenses.

I’m a confidential investigator, name of John Smith. The name usually gets a laugh but it’s good for business, too. It’s the anonymous kind of name that goes with the one-with-the-crowd personality a private shadow should have.

Maybe my job makes me more sensitive than most but after a while—it was near the Coliseum at Columbus Circle—I began to feel somebody’s eyes boring into the back of my neck.

I felt that, then I thought: haircut. Need a trim. Have to maintain appearances between jobs. I turned around fast, and there was old Lionel Radin looking at me, bold as brass.

The eyes sunk deep in their sockets were gray. They weren’t watery or vague, like some old men’s, but—well, they were piercing. They looked right into me. “You need a haircut, Mr.—?” the old boy said.

It was the kind of half-senile, busybody remark any old gaffer might make, except that I had been thinking the same thing. I didn’t show that anything had registered and supplied the name his question-marked “Mr.” had asked for.

“Smith,” I said. “John Smith.”

It didn’t get the usual laugh. “Radin’s my name, Mr. Smith,” he said. “Make a mental note. Everything fits. You’ll see.”

A crackpot. I turned back in time to catch the eye of the bus driver in his rear-view mirror. He winked. I grinned, tossed an “If you say so, Mr. Radin,” over my shoulder, then ostentatiously found my original place in Time and went back to reading about the comet.

“That, too,” the old man said, looking over my shoulder. “A certain sense of concinnity will manifest itself.”

“Sure,” I said; when the bus reached 78th Street, I got off without a glance at him.

There’s a newsstand near my hotel where I generally pick up a copy of the morning paper. I fished out a handful of change and separated four pennies from the rest. Andy, the newsboy—he was about 55—held out a copy of the Daily News, as usual. But when I gave him the money he said, “Its a nickel now, Smitty.”

“The hell it is,” I said. Ordinarily, I guess, I’d have paid the extra cent. I’m old enough to remember when the News was two cents and I’d never balked at a price increase before. But tonight I did. “The Mirror, too?”

“No; that’s still four cents.”

“Give me the Mirror, then.”

Andy shrugged and handed me the other tabloid. “You ain’t the first, Smitty.”

* * * *

I didn’t know what he meant by that until the next day. I was going into my office, this time with a copy of Newsweek, but I never had a chance to read it. The phone was ringing when I walked in the door.

I answered it and I had a client. It was the bus company. I’d done work for them in the past, mostly checking up on cheating drivers. This time it was something else.

The company wasn’t being cheated, as far as it knew. It was collecting its new eighteen-cent fare—I remembered the bus driver had said it was going into effect at midnight and I’d read about it in the Mirror—but every single bit of that eighteen cents was in pennies.

I listened, made notes, and agreed to take the investigation. In my current circumstances I’d have agreed to find Judge Crater. When I hung up I turned on the office radio.

That’s where I first heard about the boycott of the Daily News.

The one-star final had come out, as usual, a little before eight p.m. The presses printed the myriads of copies and the delivery trucks, piloted by that crazy crew of would-be fire engine drivers, roared around Manhattan, tossing bundles off at the newsstands.

And there they lay—fifty here, seventy-five here, a hundred and twenty there. Like me, everybody bought the Daily Mirror instead.

The obvious explanation—that everybody had switched because the News had raised its price and the Mirror hadn’t was incredible. Would that make 2,109,601 addicted readers (guaranteed A.B.C. circulation) switch overnight from Dick Tracy to Joe Palooka? From Jimmy Powers to Dan Parker? From Ed Sullivan to Walter Winchell? As one of the brains that wrote letters to Vox Pop might say, not hardly.

Understandably, there was consternation in the Daily News skyscraper on East 42nd Street. Contrariwise, there was jubilation three blocks away on 45th Street, where the Mirror made do in its less pretentious quarters. The Mirror doubled its press run, then tripled it.

The adaptable street vendors caught on quickly. They changed their chant from “News a’ Mirror” to “Getcha Mirror.”

The Daily News, after consulting with that other victim of the public whim, the bus company, became my second client.

A bus company official, who seemed to be on the verge of sobs, filled me in on how its troubles had begun. At exactly one minute after midnight the penny deluge started. For once in the history of riderdom nobody, but nobody, needed change. Everybody had the exact fare, in pennies—eighteen of them.

The fare boxes, re-geared to sort and count pennies, nickels and dimes, jammed; they couldn’t digest the copper flood fast enough.

The bus drivers, human beings themselves for the most part, grinned at first at the riders’ revenge. But with the jamming of the fare boxes they were forced to accept the coins by hand. All over town, buses halted at crazy angles while the drivers counted the pennies and cursingly tried to find room for them in their change-makers, their pockets, their upside down hats.

Driver Ralph Costerlocker of the Broadway line was one of many who just gave up. Ralph accepted, uncounted, whatever the riders gave him and threw the handfuls of pennies on the floor under his feet.

“I know,” he said to one grinning passenger, “pennies is legal tender up to twenny-fi’ cents. Okay, get in and move to the rear; this is a bus, not a vaudeville show.”

But Ralph’s valiant try came to an end in the middle of Columbus Circle. The pile of pennies was so deep by then that he could no longer work the brake and gas pedals.

Ralph—with whom the bus company started its dossier—cut the ignition, set the airbrakes and lit a cigarette. He turned to his passengers, and said: “This is as far as I go. Anybody wants their money back they can help theirselves. All I got to say is, the kids are sure gonna raise hell tomorrow about the great piggy bank robbery.”

Ralph shook his feet loose from the pennies, propped them up on the jammed fare box and opened his Daily Mirror.

* * * *

The thing spread from there.

The Mirror had a full-page ad by a chewing gum manufacturer. (The News had the ad, too, but of course nobody read it there.) An old established firm was marketing a new brand of gum—Supertang; it promised a tantalizing taste thrill. If you didn’t agree—double your money back.

The advertising agency was confident that millions would try Supertang at a mere nickel a pack; it was cynical enough to believe that the number of people so dissatisfied that they’d trouble to mail back the unchewed four sticks for a lousy dime would be negligible.

But something was getting into people. What happened, of course, was that nobody—but nobody—was satisfied with Supertang. Millions bought five sticks, chewed one, spat it out and spent three cents to mail back the four sticks and demand ten cents.

Three million dimes came to three hundred thousand dollars, and the cost of addressing and mailing was just enough more to topple Supertang into bankruptcy.

* * * *

I had to get out of the office; the phone rang all the time. But it wasn’t anybody new wanting to hire me; it was the same old clients demanding results. Yakking with them wasn’t solving anything; it was wasting time.

I took one more call, hoping it was Supertang anxious to swell my clients to a trio; it was only the Daily News again, hysterically giving me the latest on the number of advertisers who had cancelled.

I fled to Bryant Park and sat down on a backless bench to recapitulate. This was Thursday. The boycott of the Daily News had begun on Tuesday night, about eight o’clock, with Wednesday’s one-star final. It had continued all day and that night nobody bought the Thursday edition either. The fat Sunday News was only three days off—Saturday night would tell the story there. The Sunday edition was also boosting its price, from a dime to fifteen cents. They normally sold nearly four million copies of the Sunday paper—twice as many as on a weekday; no wonder they were getting panicky.

A young man sat down on my bench and said “Nice day.” He looked like a clerk on his lunch hour. At first, I planned to ignore him and get on with my thinking, such as it was. Then I decided he might be a ready-made cross-section of the public, so I turned on a smile. I asked him if he read the Daily News.

“Funny thing,” he said. “I used to, every day; but I just switched to the Mirror.”

“How come?”

“Just got fed up. Every time you turn around, something else costs more. I just decided not to go along with it.”

“I should think it’d be easier to hand over a nickel all in one piece instead of bothering with four pennies, or getting change.”

“It’s no bother.” He grinned. “What is a bother is getting together thirty-six pennies every day for the bus.”

Aha, I thought. Now we’d find out about the penny conspiracy, as the bus company was convinced it had to be.

“Who told you to do that?” I asked.

“Nobody; I just thought I’d get even with them. Remember when the fare was a nickel?”

“I do, but I shouldn’t think you would.”

“I had a childhood. Anyhow, like I said, it’s just gone far enough, so I make sure I have enough pennies—eighteen in the morning and eighteen for at night. I take the Sixth Avenue bus up from the Village and the drivers are going crazy, poor guys. But it’s the principle of the thing—nothing personal. Just like I tell them, pennies are legal tender up to a quarter.”

I’d heard that before, and I was beginning to think every bus driver in town had, too. “Where do you get all the pennies?”

“You get them in change. You know. Then I work in a store—Vim’s, down the street—and if I don’t have enough I just ring up No Sale and make change for myself out of the cash register.”

“Then it’s just a game with you?” I was picking up his favorite adverb.

“Well, yeah, but it’s a protest, too. You’d be surprised how many customers ask for pennies in change, for the same reason.”

“Doesn’t Vim run short of pennies that way?”

“We did at first; now we just get a couple thousand extra from the bank.”

He reached in his pocket and took out a pack of gum. It was Supertang. He scowled at the four remaining sticks. “That lousy stuff,” he said. “That reminds me, I was going to the post office and send it back to them.”

“Double your money back, eh?”

“Why not? They make a promise, they ought to keep it.” He put the Supertang away and brought out a pack of Spearmint. I took the stick he offered and watched him head for the post office, just a purposeful citizen armed with moral indignation and thirty-six pennies. If he was a conspirator I’d—well, I’d eat a whole pack of Supertang.

* * * *

I had bought a pack of Marlboros at United Cigar and gave the clerk a fifty-cent piece. My change included nineteen pennies. I hadn’t asked for them, and I looked at the clerk in surprise. He was grinning; he said: “They’re handy to have. And why not try a pack of Supertang, sir? You can’t lose.”

I shrugged and pushed the odd nickel across the counter. I hadn’t tasted Supertang and there was no reason to suppose I wouldn’t like it. But I had the feeling that if I didn’t, I’d be mailing back the four sticks and demanding a dime. They weren’t going to push me around.

Outside the store I stopped to analyze this thought. They weren’t going to push me around. Who was they? And what made me think anyone was trying to? Up to now, I’d never felt particularly put upon by unnamed theys, but now I was almost indignant, before I had even tasted the damn chewing gum.

So I tasted it. It was terrible.

I spat it into the gutter—a powerful spit, clear across the width of the sidewalk.

In my business, it’s useful to carry a batch of stamped envelopes. I took one out on the spot and addressed it, using United Cigar’s plate glass window for a desk. I enclosed the four sticks of Supertang, and a choice one-sentence note describing their product, and demanding a dime. Not until I’d dropped the envelope in the mail box on the corner did I stop to think why I’d done it.

I’m not normally an impulsive man; blindly obeying an impulse could be fatal in my trade. Therefore something external had got me riled up. But what? Or, to put it another way, who?

Who was influencing normally equable, acquiescent, put-upon, uncomplaining, suggestible people and turning them into good-humored but determined, grinning but implacable guardians of the extra pennies and nickels that they normally were separated from by the billions, year after inflationary year?

Having got to the who—and I was convinced there must be a who, now that it happened to me—I wondered how. Telepathy? Pseudo-scientific bull. Mass suggestion through control of the human mind? I’d lived in the atomic age long enough not to dismiss this as completely improbable. Almost every time I read the science pages of Time or Newsweek, there was some hint of an experiment on the brink of being refined to the point where it could lead to a whole new way of life. What was it I’d read just the other day? I couldn’t remember.

Methodically, I was about to consider the question of why anyone would want to control mass thinking, when somebody said: “I beg your pardon, sir, but would you mind answering a few questions? I’m with the Roper poll.”

* * * *

I was going to brush him off and get on with earning my pay when I saw who it was—Ed Rappoport, my old Air Force buddy. “Ed, you old son of a gun!” We banged each other on the back.

“Good to see you again, Smitty,” he said when we’d hashed over the New Guinea campaign for a while. Needless to say, we’d zeroed in on a bar in the process. “Would you help me out on this quiz of mine? It’d help me meet my quota.”

“Sure. What is it? The Daily News boycott?”

“No; that’d be too ephemeral for us. But it’s amazing how everybody wants to talk about it. That and the bus pennies and the Supertang thing.”

“What are they saying? You must be in one of the best spots in New York to get a peep into the mass mind.”

“I’ll say. Well, the general theme of it seems to be that we’re getting back at them.”

“Who’s them?”

“Nobody in particular. Whoever happens to be trying to push us around, as they put it; making us do things we don’t want to.”

“This us, Ed. Do you feel that you’re a part of it?”

“As a matter of fact, I do. It’s nothing I’d thought out, mind you, but something got my dander up before I left the house this morning. I went through my various suits till I had eighteen pennies for the bus. I was kind of amazed at myself later and I resisted.”

“Resisted? How do you mean?”

He laughed. “Well, I was standing at the bus stop. Three or four other people were there waiting and every one of them had a handful of pennies, just like me. They were sort of grinning at each other, and at me. We’ll-show-’em grins, like. Nobody’s gonna shove me around. That kind of thing.”

“I know. Getting some of their own back, as the British say.”

“Exactly,” Ed went on. “Resisting. Only I found myself resisting the resistance. I wondered how many hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions, here in this one geographical area, were acting in exactly the same way. It isn’t normal, Smitty; it’s highly unstatistical behavior. I know something about averages, from working in this opinion-sampling business, and people just don’t act the way they’ve been acting for the last couple of days. And they never act unanimously—not unless they’re being pushed.”

“Hmm. You mean like in Hitler Germany or Soviet Russia. That any ninety-nine plus percent ja or da election is a phony.”

“That’s what I mean. There’s some outside force at work; there has to be.”

“What makes you so sure?” I asked.

“Because my resistance failed. I was resisting this influence—the one that at this particular moment was making people give the bus driver eighteen pennies. I wasn’t going to be part of the mob. I was going to give the driver two dimes and get two cents change. I even had the two dimes in my hand.”

“And then what?”

“As soon as I was in the bus, with the driver looking at me resignedly, I put the dimes back in my pocket and counted out eighteen pennies, one at a time, into the driver’s hand.”

* * * *

While I didn’t believe Ed Rappoport had made any of it up, I was sure nobody could make me pay my fare with eighteen pennies if I wanted to hand over two dimes. “Try it,” Ed had said, and that’s what I was about to do.

In addition to the fact that I was too much of an individualist to let myself conform to the mass norm, I had my loyalty to my bus company client to consider. I also had my surrender to the Supertang impulse to bolster me.

The bus pulled up to my corner. The first thing I noticed was the new sign next to the door: Fare 18¢. This insulting information was repeated on the fare box. As I went up the two steps the hand holding the dimes went involuntarily back into my pocket and came out with a fistful of change.

Raise the fare on me, would they? I’d show them. I deliberately counted out eighteen pennies, taking my time, then counted them out again into the driver’s hand. He waited patiently, a half smile on his face, then dropped the coins into a nearly overflowing canvas sack next to his seat.

I sat down, my self-righteousness fading fast, and wondered what had got into me. Something or somebody, somewhere, had made me act directly contrary to my wishes. Not even a hypnotist could do that. This could be dangerous, if it was leading anywhere beyond annoyance to the bus company and possible bankruptcy of the Daily News and Supertang.

I was musing thus ominously when the bus pulled in at a corner behind an armored van of the United States Trucking Corporation. Two gray-uniformed UST men got out of the back of the van, loosened the flaps of their holsters and entered the bus.

“There’ll be the usual delay,” the driver announced to his passengers. “Smoke if you like.” He lit up himself.

The uniformed men, straining, lifted the canvas sack full of pennies to the sidewalk where a third UST man waited next to a scale. With the fare boxes useless under the penny flood, there obviously had to be some other method of accounting. I’d wondered what it would be. The UST men eased the sack onto the scale. One of them noted the weight on a form, signed it and handed it to the bus driver, together with a fresh sack.

I decided to get off. The bus driver called after me, “That wasn’t no eighteen cents worth.” I smiled mechanically at him and headed west toward Broadway.

Ed Rappoport had been right. The average man—that cussed, unpredictable fellow—had been acting with a highly untypical degree of conformity. He was having fun doing it, at the moment, but I had a hunch something coming up on the program would be less fun. And with this kind of control over him he’d have to do it. It might just happen to be something pretty unpleasant, like violent overthrow of the government.

But then I realized it wouldn’t have to be violent. There’d be nobody to oppose the overthrow if everyone were of the same mind. All of a sudden, before you could say, or think, Jack Robinson, there’d be a dictator in the United States.

And there wouldn’t be a whisper, not a thought, of opposition. Love that man, the telepathic control would transmit, and everyone would. And if there were another election the vote would be not ninety-nine but one hundred percent yes.

Somebody was trying it out on a small scale first, I thought. Testing this thing that was big past belief. Seeing how far it would go.

Don’t buy the Daily News.

Pay your bus fare in pennies.

Get double your money back from Supertang.

Love that man.

* * * *

What man? General Stacy Tranquen, by any chance? Suddenly I felt scared. This was no job for a lousy private investigator; this was a case for the FBI. But would the FBI listen to a theory as wild as that, without a shred of proof?

Sure they would. They listened to anybody. They might even be working on it already, in their quiet, self-effacing, devastating way. I’d attended a few trials in Federal Court where FBI agents were government witnesses, and my professional envy of their efficiency was monumental.

The thought that the Federal boys might be on the job cheered me up so much that I considered resting my tired feet for an hour in a newsreel theater. I was at Broadway and 49th Street by then, in front of the Rivoli. The Trans-Lux was only a block south but I thought, what the hell? I’d rest a couple of hours in the Rivoli and work later into the evening. Mine was no nine-to-five job. That was one reason I was in it.

The Rivoli’s picture was that big new one, “The Passionate Pride.” I’d read the advance publicity. It starred Mallory Trayne, the great Broadway actor, in his first movie. Four years to produce. Five million dollars. As a result the nut was a big one, as they said in their trade, and the picture was being premiered at road show prices.

Oh-oh.

I took a look at the discreet little sign in the box office. $2.75.

My gorge, generally fairly stable, was rising. Two seventy-five for a lousy movie! And in the afternoon, besides. Who did they think they were? And Mallory Trayne, that ham. Why, I wouldn’t pay two seventy-five to see Gina Lollobrigida.

The cashier was looking at me without expression. I said to her through the little round hole in the glass: “I’m not buying a ticket. I’d just like to know how many suckers did.”

She was grinning now. “If you bought, mister, you’d be number one.”

Here it was again. That impossible hundred percent boycott. My gorge subsiding to its accustomed place, I headed downtown again, but not toward the Trans-Lux.

* * * *

The FBI agent I spoke to at 290 Broadway didn’t laugh in my face. In fact, he was as grim-looking as any of these clean-cut, courteous, neatly-dressed young men ever allowed themselves to be—which wasn’t very.

“We appreciate your bringing this matter to our attention, Mr. Smith.” He’s examined my credentials and even the John Smith didn’t get a smile out of him.

I told my story a second time with a stenographer taking it all down, waited while it was transcribed, and then signed it. I was politely rebuffed in my efforts to learn whether they planned to do anything, or were already doing something, or whether anybody else had come to them in alarm.

They took my home and office addresses and telephone numbers, made a note of my present and some of my past clients, and assured me they’d be delighted to receive any new information I might come upon, and politely showed me out.

Somebody started to tail me as I left the building. I was annoyed. Here I’d gone to the Federal boys of my own free will with a case I had every right to handle myself, especially since no laws had been broken, and they immediately slapped a shadow on me. Or instituted surveillance, as they would put it in their refined way. And a clumsy one, at that.

Then I realized this couldn’t be the FBI; they weren’t clumsy. Who was it?

I doubled back suddenly and caught him flat-footed. It was the thin old busybody with the sunken gray eyes who’d been on the bus with me the night people stopped buying the Daily News.

He gave me a big smile. “Hello, Mr. Smith.”

For a moment I couldn’t think of his name. Then the image of a toy train flashed into my mind. “Lionel,” I said. “Lionel Radin.”

“You remember me. I’m flattered.”

“What are you following me for? What do you want?”

“I told you it would all fit, if you recall. I think you’ve begun to see that it is fitting. Alarmingly so, or you wouldn’t have gone to see the G-Men.”

“What’s it got to do with you?”

“You’d be interested to know, Mr. Smith. Indeed you would. You and your clients.” He was still smiling.

* * * *

He seemed to know something about me. True, I’d given him my name, but telling somebody you were John Smith was as close as you get to giving no information at all. Why had he mentioned my clients? If he had anything to do with this wave of nonconformity that was sweeping New York—and I doubted that—why had he come to me? I certainly hadn’t been able to stop it; I’d been swept up in it like everybody else.

But maybe he was just trying to cash in on the phenomenon. That’s where my clients would come in; the word for what I was thinking was blackmail.

“An interesting train of thought, Mr. Smith,” he said. “But it’s not blackmail.”

The old man was reading my thoughts. I’d had that feeling the night on the bus, too, but I’d dismissed it. I gave him a hard look and his sunken eyes gave it right back to me. His mouth still smiled but his eyes didn’t.

“We can’t stand here in the middle of Broadway discussing it,” he said. “You might offer to buy me a cup of coffee. It’d be a legitimate expense account item.”

It was while we were sitting in the Chock Full o’ Nuts on the corner of Worth street, having coffee and cream cheese on date-nut bread, that he told me he was an empathist.

“An empathist,” I said. “Is that a fancy word for mind reader?”

“On the contrary. A so-called ‘mind reader’ absorbs the thoughts of others; an empathist projects thoughts or emotions into others’ minds.”

“You mean you’re like a broadcasting station, and anybody who has a receiver can tune in on your thoughts?”

“Everybody is a receiver, at the moment. And they don’t have to tune in; they receive willy-nilly, you might say.”

I didn’t want to believe a word of it. “Assuming that’s so, you’ve been mighty busy these past few days.”

“Yes, haven’t I?” he said, pleased. “I’ve never had such success. I’d experimented for years without being able to influence more than one person at a time, and then only at close range. Now my suggestions go to thousands—hundreds of thousands—simultaneously. It’s quite exciting.”

“It must give you a tremendous sense of power,” I said casually, watching him, “to be able to make people do what you want them to.”

The old man frowned. “No,” he said earnestly. “It’s purely a scientific experiment. Not power, I don’t want that—but that’s the frightening thing. That’s why I wanted to see you. My work has always been sociological. But now a political element is being injected. I don’t like it at all.”

“Injected? By whom?”

“I don’t know; that’s what scares me. I can’t project back to the source. It reaches me but I can’t reach it. Fortunately I’ve been able to resist it so far.”

“What sort of thing have you been resisting?” Maybe I was being empathized again, but the old man’s story was beginning to sound convincing. At least I was sure he believed what he was saying.

“Come up to my place tonight and watch television,” he said with seeming irrelevance.

“Why should I?” Then I had a hunch. “Not the Spookie Masters Spectacular?”

Lionel Radin nodded. “Yes. One demonstration is worth any number of explanations.”

* * * *

I felt sorry for Spookie Masters, though I didn’t know him personally. Masters had had an up-and-down career as a comic in night clubs and hotels.

I’d seen him once on the borscht circuit. It had been a Saturday night at Grossinger’s, and the place was jammed. Spookie was the hardest working comedian I’d ever seen, and one of the funniest; but for some reason he’d never clicked in the really big time. I didn’t know what it was—liquor, politics or just the breaks—but all his life he’d been trailing the star without catching it.

Spookie Masters was in his forties now. He’d always been fat; now he was going bald, and his feet seemed to be hurting him all the time. Somehow he’d been picked to m.c. Max Liebman’s latest ninety-minute, girl-laden, talent-packed, color Spectacular on NBC. This had to be it for poor old Spookie. Either he made it tonight—with his audience of forty million, coast-to-coast and Canada—or he’d never make it.

I was pretty sure he wasn’t going to make it—not with Lionel Radin, Empathist, about to use him for a demonstration.

Radin had a duplex in one of those narrow private houses that he had managed to hold out against the apartment buildings pre-empting almost every foot of Riverside Drive. He met me at the private elevator that came right into his study. Crackpot he might be, but he was no poor crackpot.

The Spectacular was to start at 9. I got there about quarter to. Radin showed me to an armchair next to an end table on which were a seltzer bottle—I hadn’t seen one since I was a kid—and an unopened bottle of Dewar’s. There was also a fresh packet of oversized export-only Russian cigarettes.

Radin wore an elegant smoking jacket, what the French call le smoking, over a dinner jacket, which I would have called a tuxedo in less impressive surroundings. He didn’t smoke or drink, apparently; on the table next to his chair was a little tin of Jamaica ginger.

I was taking in all this, and more, with what I imagined to be one of my unobtrusive once-overs when he said, “Oh, I came by it all quite honestly, you may be sure.” He was reading my mind again. I felt an unprofessional flush on my face. “That’s all right,” he said. “Have a whiskey. Or if you prefer brandy—?”

“Scotch is fine,” I said and busied myself getting it open. “I have an idea what you plan to do,” I told him as I poured myself a good-sized starter and squirted in a trace of soda, “and I wish you wouldn’t. I hate to see it happen to poor old Spookie.”

* * * *

He leaned forward, interested, nibbling on a piece of ginger. “Just what do you imagine will happen?”

I took a sip of my drink. “Somewhere in the middle of the first commercial,” I guessed, “you’re going to empathize everybody watching into thinking this is a lousy show and they’ll all switch over to CBS. It’s a dirty trick, Mr. Radin.”

“You’re clairvoyant, Mr. Smith,” he said with a chuckle. “That’s exactly what will happen, at least I hope it will. You must remember I’ve never tried empathy on a nationwide scale before. Then, too, the conditions have to be right.”

“What conditions?”

“Well, it has to be a lousy show, as you phrased it so colorfully. At least enough people have to think so to give me a locus to focus on empathically.”

I think that’s what he said. “Maybe it won’t work,” I said.

“It’s a possibility, of course. But if it does, imagine the consternation at NBC when they get the ratings from Nielsen and Trendex and find that not a solitary set has been tuned to the last hour of Spookie Masters. That the rating isn’t 59 or even 18.3, but zero. Radio City will be a shambles.”

He tittered, that’s the only word for it. Still tittering, he went over to the 24-inch TV and turned it on. It was a color set, I saw.

Channel 4 came in. Poor Max Liebman, I thought. Poor Spookie Masters. Poor General Sarnoff.

The opening commercial was brief. Spookie came on. He was sweating already, I noticed. He went into one of his monologues.

I recognized it as the one about the critical woman in the butcher shop. She was disparaging the chicken the butcher had offered. As Spookie told it, she smelled it under one wing, smelled it under the other, turned it upside down and smelled between its legs, then told the butcher: “This chicken stinks!” The butcher shrugged. “Madam,” he said, “could you pass such a test?”

I howled at that one, as I always did, but old Lionel Radin was sitting there stony-faced.

“Give the guy a break,” I said. “Don’t.”

“Quiet!” Radin said. “It’s beginning.”

“What’s beginning?”

But he shushed me into silence. I poured myself a quiet drink and watched him watching Spookie. Only now he didn’t seem to be looking quite that far. His eyes were out of focus. He was sweating.

“Mr. Radin!” I said sharply, but he didn’t seem to hear.

Spookie Masters, who had been going through some crazy kind of sight gag with his necktie and the sleeve of his coat, abruptly dropped the act and became utterly straight-faced.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “there’s a time for buffoonery and a time to be serious. This is a time to be serious.” (Shade of Eddie Cantor, I thought.) “I hope you will indulge me if I talk to you for just a moment about something vital to us all. We all know of the campaign of slander and innuendo that has been directed against that great American, General Stacy Tranquen, now that he has retired with valor from the battles and become chairman of American Plus…”

Oh, no, I thought. Not coast-to-coast. Was this what had kept Spookie Masters from making it? Was he so stupid that he’d let his politics ruin his act? So he was an apologist for that would-be blackshirt, Stacy Tranquen. All right; it takes all kinds. But not on a show. Funny, though, he hadn’t done it at Grossinger’s…

* * * *

Then I looked back at Lionel Radin. He still had that non-focused stare. He was empathizing like mad—not at me, but at Spookie. This must be the frightening thing he had mentioned to me in the Chock Full o’ Nuts, the political element he said was being injected. The thing he had been able to resist—up to now.

“Radin!” I said. He was oblivious to me.

I grabbed the seltzer bottle and squirted him full in the face. The soda poured down his chin and unstarched his shirt front. I squirted the whole bottle at him.

It was enough. He gasped and reached for a handkerchief. I looked back at Spookie, in the TV. He seemed to be coming out of a trance. He had that where-was-I look. He tried to retrieve it. “Madam,” he said, off the pace and fumbling, “could you pass such a test?”

“Radin!” I said. “Come out of it, do something. Save Spookie!”

I didn’t know how he could, or if he could, but he was the only one who could possibly do anything.

“What?” Radin said vaguely. “Who?” But in a tick he was back with me. He threw down his soggy handkerchief and concentrated on Spookie’s electronic image.

The studio audience roared with laughter. Spookie, reassured, picked up the pace. The orchestra backed him up. He flipped out his necktie and caressed it with his coat sleeve. He went into a crazy dance and the audience roared again. “When I was a boy in Rivington Street,” Spookie sang. He had them back in the palm of his hand.

Lionel Radin got up with some effort and clicked off the television set. “They nearly had me,” he said. “I want to thank you, Mr. Smith, you and the seltzer bottle.”

“It was the seltzer,” I said. “I don’t think Canada Dry would have done it.”

Then the FBI was with us. There must have been ten or a dozen of them, smooth-faced, well-tailored, efficient young men, pouring out of the private elevator.

* * * *

I read later that Spookie Masters had been a smash. Not only Nielsen and Trendex and American Research and Pulse and Videodex agreed, but so did Variety and Jack Gould in the Times and John Crosby in the Herald Trib. Spookie’s lapse into electioneering for America Plus seemed to have gone unnoticed, a phenomena I attributed to my seltzer bottle and Lionel Radin’s quick empathy job.

What the FBI boys offered in explanation was the item I had never digested from the accounts in Time and Newsweek, about the comet. Not the comet so much as the comet’s tail.

The special agents smoothly quoted pronouncements of the National Science Foundation about the intensification of sentience the aura of the tail provoked. They knew how long the Earth had been in the aura (since Tuesday, it was) and what effect this had on men of psience like Duke’s Professor Rhine, my Lionel Radin, and General Stacy Tranquen’s Doctor X.

They took Mr. Radin down to Foley Square for questioning, and I went along to sort of run interference. I must have run well, because questioning was all they did—whereas another batch of agents brought in Dr. X and arraigned him on charges of sedition and a few other things, some of them pertaining to the Federal Communications Act.

They even told me who Dr. X was. The name didn’t mean anything to me, but his connection did; he’d been one of the brains at one of the big electric corporations before senility and hero-worship set in and America Plus snapped him up.

I asked the Federal boys what they were doing about Tranquen himself but it seemed he couldn’t be touched; he’d been too careful—so far. Nevertheless, I got the impression that the dossiers were piling up and that the surveillance was intense.

* * * *

I took Lionel Radin home in a cab on my ebbing expense account and he sorted out a few loose ends for me.

He said a bit smugly that Dr. X’s was a limited kind of empathy—that it had to be souped up through Radin’s to be effective.

Nevertheless, I opined, proud of my seltzer squirting, it had been a narrow squeak. America Plus almost had us all under its heel.

“Not so narrow,” Radin said. “Their try with Spookie Masters was only a dry run; besides, time was running out on them.”

“You mean the G-Men were all set to swoop.”

“No,” he smiled. “Even if they hadn’t swooped there’d have been no danger. You see—” he looked at his watch “—the Earth passed out of the comet’s tail half an hour ago. I’m afraid my influence is at an end.”

“You can’t empathize any more?”

“Only on the limited scale I practiced before the special conditions prevailed. They were quite special, you must realize…” He went on to say something about the cosmicized tail of the comet having energized the electrical quotient of the atmosphere and the brain cells and the coincident increase in solar activity. He even gave me the bit about the locus focus again.

I panted along behind his explanation for a while, steadily losing ground. “Skip it, Mr. Radin,” I said at last. “I’ll read about it in next week’s Time. That’s as deep as I can go without getting the bends.”

I dropped him off at his door and took the cab home. Bye-bye expense account, I thought. When I write up my reports tomorrow I’ll be clientless again.

I wasn’t entirely convinced that the case was finished, though, until I stopped at my corner newsstand. Andy looked at me quizzically.

“Daily News?” I said doubtfully.

Andy thrust it at me. “Why not?”