I took two more steps, and stopped, and looked at him. "That was all he did?" I said.
"Sure."
"Well, then," I said with mounting exasperation, "in the name of—Oh. Wait a minute. You're wrong," I told him, calming down again. "There was the gong. He made that gong noise."
"Did he?" said Harry. One nervous hand went up and adjusted the hornrims.
I felt a little tugging at my shirt front, and looked down to see my necktie slithering out. I swatted at it instinctively, but it ducked away and hovered, swaying like a cobra.
Then it dropped. He showed me his open hand, and there was a wire running up out of his sleeve, with a clip on the end of it. For the first time, I noticed two rings of metal wired behind the lens frames of his eyeglasses.
He pulled his other hand out of his pocket, and there was a little haywire rig in its batteries and a couple of tubes and three tuning knobs.
Fans, I was thinking frozenly—sixteen or eighteen, maybe, with pimples and dandruff and black fingernails, and that wonderful, terrible eagerness boiling up inside them ... slaving away at backyard rocketry experiments, wiring up crazy gadgets that never worked, printing bad fiction and worse poetry in mimeographed magazines.... How could I have forgotten?
"I wasn't going to tell anybody," he said. "No matter what happened. If they'd looked at me, just once, they would have seen. But as long as you're worrying so much about it—" He blinked, and said humbly, "It scares me. What do you think I ought to do?"
My fingers twitched. I said, "Well, this will take some thinking about, Harry. Uh, can I—"