The uproar died out before the drinks arrived. Only the blaring music machines and the blood-roar of the telescreen remained, and a suddenly placid bartender turned both down to a murmur.
The rest was routine to Philip Alcorn's experience. Men at the bar turned to each other like old friends, forgetting submerged frustrations as readily as they forgot the vicious slash-and-parry on the screen. The place drowsed in a slow and comfortable silence.
The Jaffers man tossed off his drink and dialed another. Alcorn, raising his own, remembered Janice Wynn's letter in his pocket and set the glass down, untasted.
The clippings, she had said, would give him an idea of what he was up against.
His hands shook so violently when he ripped open the envelope that he almost dropped it.
Eight clippings were inside, small teleprinted scissorings from digest newssheets that were available at any street-corner dispenser. He read them quickly, and was more puzzled than before until he realized that they fell into two general groups of interlocking similarities.
Four were accounts of unexplained disappearances. A moderately successful research chemist named Ellis had vanished from the offices of his New York chemical firm; a neighborhood pharmacist in Minneapolis, a spinster tea-shop proprietress in Atlanta and a female social worker in Los Angeles had disappeared with equal thoroughness, completely baffling the efforts of police to find them.
None of these people had been of more than minor importance, even in his own immediate circle. Alcorn felt that these events had been reported only because the efficiency of missing-persons bureaus made permanent disappearance next to impossible. Even so, only one clipping—that on Ellis, the New York chemist—bothered to run a photograph.
The other four accounts dealt with violent deaths, all rising from sudden outbreaks of mob hysteria. Two of the victims had been small-town clergymen, a profession which made their lynchings as startling as they were inexplicable; both had been respected members of their little communities until the day—the date was less than a week old—their congregations rose up en masse and tore them limb from limb.