While Dan ate, a considerable crowd of people went out the front door, and two couples came in. The restaurant, however, remained very nearly full.
"Something tells me," Dan thought, "that there must be a lot more to this planet than meets the eye."
He got up and walked toward the back of the restaurant. What he had taken for the rear wall turned out to be merely a wall that divided one section of the restaurant from another equally large, where waitresses served individual tables.
A flight of carpeted steps led down to men's and women's rest rooms and a gently sloping, softly lighted hallway. People were coming up the hall in considerably greater numbers than they went down, and Dan was startled to see that they reacted to him exactly as the crowd outside had, before he had gone into the bookstore to watch them unnoticed.
Dan went to the men's rest room, washed, and inconspicuously studied himself in the mirror. He looked very much different than he had before. Why, then, did the people react in the same way?
Dan concealed a mataform unit in the dimly lit lounge outside the washroom, then went out and down the hall. He had gone perhaps thirty steps when a lithe man coming the other way saw him, whipped out a gun, and shouted, "Death!"
One instant Dan was walking down the right side of the hall. A split fraction of an instant later, he had thrown himself to the other side of the hall.
There was a swift, bright flash.
Someone screamed.
The gun went spinning and Dan had the man on the floor, both hands locked at his throat. It was a severe struggle for Dan to loosen his hands.