"And then I offered you a drink but you don't drink and I thought, he
doesn't drink, I thought. Is _that_ terrible? And I watched and watched
you all this time. Lantry holds his breath, he's fooling himself. But
now, yes, now, I understand it quite well. Now I know everything the
way it is. Do you know how I know? I do not hear breathing in the room. I wait and I hear nothing. There is no beat of heart or intake of lung. The room is so silent. Nonsense, one might say, but I know. At the
Incinerator I know. There is a difference. You enter a room where a
man is on a bed and you know immediately whether he will look up and
speak to you or whether he will not speak to you ever again. Laugh if
you will, but one can tell. It is a subliminal thing. It is the whistle
the dog hears when no human hears. It is the tick of a clock that has
ticked so long one no longer notices. Something is in a room when a man
lives in it. Something is not in the room when a man is dead in it." *       *       *       *       *

McClure shut his eyes a moment. He put down his sherry glass. He waited
a moment. He took up his cigarette and puffed it and then put it down
in a black tray. "I am alone in this room," he said. Lantry did not move. "You are dead," said McClure. "My mind does not know this. It is not a
thinking thing. It is a thing of the senses and the subconscious. At
first I thought, this man _thinks_ he is dead, risen from the dead,
a vampire. Is that not logical? Would not any man, buried as many
centuries, raised in a superstitious, ignorant culture, think likewise
of himself once risen from the tomb? Yes, that is logical. This man
has hypnotized himself and fitted his bodily functions so that they
would in no way interfere with his self-delusion, his great paranoia. He governs his breathing. He tells himself, I cannot hear my breathing,
therefore I am dead. His inner mind censors the sound of breathing. He does not allow himself to eat or drink. These things he probably
does in his sleep, with part of his mind, hiding the evidences of this
humanity from his deluded mind at other times." McClure finished it. "I was wrong. You are not insane. You are not
deluding yourself. Nor me. This is all very illogical and--I must
admit--almost frightening. Does that make you feel good, to think you
frighten me? I have no label for you. You're a very odd man, Lantry. I'm glad to have met you. This will make an interesting report indeed." "Is there anything wrong with me being dead?" said Lantry. "Is it a
crime?" "You must admit it's highly unusual." "But, still now, is it a crime?" asked Lantry. "We have no crime, no criminal court. We want to examine you,
naturally, to find out how you have happened. It is like that chemical
which, one minute is inert, the next is living cell. Who can say where
what happened to what. You are that impossibility. It is enough to
drive a man quite insane." "Will I be released when you are done fingering me?" "You will not be held. If you don't wish to be examined, you will not
be. But I am hoping you will help by offering us your services." "I might," said Lantry. "But tell me," said McClure. "What were you doing at the morgue?" "Nothing." "I heard you talking when I came in." "I was merely curious." "You're lying. That is very bad, Mr. Lantry. The truth is far better. The truth is, is it not, that you are dead and, being the only one of
your sort, were lonely. Therefore you killed people to have company." "How does that follow?" McClure laughed. "Logic, my dear fellow. Once I _knew_ you were really
dead, a moment ago, really a--what do you call it--a vampire (silly
word!) I tied you immediately to the Incinerator blasts. Before that
there was no reason to connect you. But once the one piece fell into
place, the fact that you were dead, then it was simple to guess your
loneliness, your hate, your envy, all of the tawdry motivations of a
walking corpse. It took only an instant then to see the Incinerators
blown to blazes, and then to think of you, among the bodies at the
morgue, seeking help, seeking friends and people like yourself to work
with--"

"You're too damned smart!" Lantry was out of the chair. He was half way
to the other man when McClure rolled over and scuttled away, flinging
the sherry decanter. With a great despair Lantry realized that, like
a damned idiot, he had thrown away his one chance to kill McClure. He should have done it earlier. It had been Lantry's one weapon, his
safety margin. If people in a society never _killed_ each other, they
never _suspected_ one another. You could walk up to any one of them and
kill him. "Come back here!" Lantry threw the knife. McClure got behind a chair. The idea of flight, of protection, of
fighting, was still new to him. He had part of the idea, but there was
still a bit of luck on Lantry's side if Lantry wanted to use it. "Oh, no," said McClure, holding the chair between himself and the
advancing man. "You want to kill me. It's odd, but true. I can't
understand it. You want to cut me with that knife or something like
that, and it's up to me to prevent you from doing such an odd thing." "I _will_ kill you!" Lantry let it slip out. He cursed himself. That
was the worst possible thing to say. Lantry lunged across the chair, clutching at McClure. McClure was very logical. "It won't do you any good to kill me. You
_know_ that." They wrestled and held each other in a wild, toppling
shuffle. Tables fell over, scattering articles. "You remember what
happened in the morgue?" "I don't care!" screamed Lantry. "You didn't raise _those_ dead, did you?" "I don't care!" cried Lantry. "Look here," said McClure, reasonably. "There will never be any more
like you, ever, there's no use." "Then I'll destroy all of you, all of you!" screamed Lantry. "And then what? You'll still be alone, with no more like you about." "I'll go to Mars. They have tombs there. I'll find more like myself!" "No," said McClure. "The executive order went through yesterday. All of
the tombs are being deprived of their bodies. They'll be burned in the
next week." They fell together to the floor. Lantry got his hands on McClure's
throat. "Please," said McClure. "Do you see, you'll _die_." "What do you mean?" cried Lantry. "Once you kill all of us, and you're alone, you'll die! The hate will
die. That hate is what moves you, _nothing else_! That envy moves you. Nothing else! You'll die, inevitably. You're not immortal. You're not
even alive, you're nothing but a moving hate." "I don't care!" screamed Lantry, and began choking the man, beating his
head with his fists, crouched on the defenseless body. McClure looked
up at him with dying eyes. The front door opened. Two men came in. "I say," said one of them. "What's going on? A new game?" Lantry jumped back and began to run. "Yes, a new game!" said McClure, struggling up. "Catch him and you win!" The two men caught Lantry. "We win," they said. "Let me go!"