“Sorry I can’t entertain you inside,” said the young man, “but three of us would bug it out a bit. We’d better sit on the porch. Anybody like a drink? Bourbon? Scotch?” Without waiting for a reply Macgowan bent double and slithered into his house. Various liquid sounds followed.
“Laurel, why don’t they put the poor kid away?” whispered Ellery.
“You have to have grounds.”
“What do you call this?” cried Ellery. “Sanity?”
“Don’t blame you, Mr. Queen,” said the big fellow amiably, appearing with two chilled glasses. “Appearances are against me. But that’s because you people live in a world of fantasy.” He thrust a long arm into the house and it came out with another glass.
“Fantasy. We.” Ellery gulped a third of the contents of his glass. “You, of course, live in a world of reality?”
“Do we have to?” asked Laurel wearily. “If he gets started on this, Ellery, we’ll be here till sundown. That note―”
“I’m the only realist I know,” said the giant, lying down at the edge of his porch and kicking his powerful legs in space. “Because, look. What are you people doing? Living in the same old houses, reading the same old newspapers, going to the same old movies or looking at the same old television, walking on the same old sidewalks, riding in the same old new cars. That’s a dream world, don’t you realize it? What price business-as-usual? What price, well, sky-writing, Jacques Fath, Double-Crostics, murder? Do you get my point?”
“Can’t say it’s entirely clear, Mac,” said Ellery, swallowing the second third. He realized for the first time that his glass contained bourbon, which he loathed. However.
“We are living,” said young Mr. Macgowan, “in the crisis of the disease commonly called human history. You mess around with your piddling murders while mankind is being set up for the biggest homicide since the Flood. The atom bomb is already fuddy-duddy. Now it’s hydrogen bombs, guaranteed to make the nuclear chain reaction ― or whatever the hell it is ― look like a Fourth of July firecracker. Stuff that can poison all the drinking water on a continent. Nerve gases that paralyze and kill. Germs there’s no protection against. And only God knows what else. They won’t use it? My friend, those words constitute the epitaph of Man. Somebody’ll pull the cork in a place like Yugoslavia or Iran or Korea and, whoosh! that’ll be that.