"You two, say nothing of this," he warned us. "And if it goes on, you can announce it, Bob." He shrugged again, and tried to laugh lugubriously. "I feel like an idiot, talking about the end of the world with a couple of news-hounds. And yet, somehow, I also feel that maybe everyone of us on Earth is in more deadly danger than he ever was before!"
And we certainly were!
That was the general gist of our talk that night with Dr. Johns. I never found out more from him—I had no time. The thing struck at me four days later. During those four days, it happened that quite by chance I met the three other people who were destined to be plunged with Shorty and myself into adventure. The first was Peter Mack. I was walking at night in Washington Square, in New York City—small remaining tradition of little old New York. To me it's like a Monks' Garden, flowered, tree-lined rectangle enclosed by the massive building walls with the canyon of Fifth Avenue running into it.
The night was hot and clear. The little tent of blue over the Square was star-filled. I chanced to sit down for a moment on a bench.
"Got a light?" There was a young fellow on the bench with me. He shifted toward me. He was a thin, lanky fellow about my own age, hatless, with the starlight on his sparse, rumpled sandy hair. A slack-jawed fellow, with shabby clothes. He had a grimy cigarette butt between his fingers.
"I can do better than that," I smiled. I gave him a cigarette and lighted it for him.
"Thanks." He would have turned away, but I stopped him. I don't know why, but there seemed something about him that was likable. He needed a shave badly; his clothes were torn. I had a look at his eyes, red-rimmed, bloodshot. Just a down-and-outer on a park bench. But you don't see many of them these days.
"Maybe you haven't got a job," I said. "I can tell you a dozen places—easy work too—in case you're a stranger in town."
"I'm not," he said. "Thanks for the cigarette. I'm just minding my own business."
I shrugged; and as he gave me a resentful look and shifted back to his own end of the bench, I let him alone.