"The impossible?" I said, trying to sound no more than mildly interested, because I didn't want him to suspect what a jolt his mention of Wendel Atomics had given me.
"Oh, yes," he went on. "That's what it boils down to. Every one of those men will be as human as you or I. They'll react in highly individual ways to every problem that comes up, every frustration, every serious interference with their private lives. You've got to remember that a man's private life is the most important thing in the world—to him personally. Every one of those fifty or a hundred men will have health worries, money worries, love life worries, every kind of worry you can think of. And on Mars worries can pile up."
"So I've heard," I said.
"Well, that's all. That sums it up. I'm simply citing Wendel as an example of what the New Chicago Transportation System is up against. I'd say, in general, that most of the directors are doing their best, when the Old Adam in them isn't in the driver's seat, to keep the trains running on schedule."
He stopped talking abruptly. I didn't think anything of it for a moment, for a loquacious man will often pause in the middle of a conversation to wonder what kind of dent he's been making on the party who's doing most of the listening. But when a full minute passed and the darkness held, and he didn't say a word, when I couldn't even hear him breathing, I began to grow uneasy.
Reach out and touch him? Well, why not? It was the simplest, quickest way of finding out whether he was still at my side and he could hardly be offended if my hand grazed his elbow in a jostling motion that would seem accidental.
It was very strange. I didn't think he was the man I'd feared he might be any longer, because of what he'd said, because he had brought Wendel Atomics into the conversation. If he'd had designs on my life giving his hand away like that would have been the height of folly. It would have been like giving me cards and spades, and a detailed history of his activities for the past five years.
It didn't take any gifted reasoning to figure that out and I didn't pride myself on it. Even a child could have done it. What disturbed me and kept me from feeling relieved was something quite different. The alarm bells were still ringing. They were still ringing.
Louder now and with a dirgelike persistence, as if I was already dead and buried. And neither a child nor a grown man could have figured that one out.
That's why I felt I had to reach out and touch him, had to start him talking again ... had to be sure he was still there at my side.