"In these instances we were dealing with incidents of heightened strength or reflexes," Naomi went on in her best lecturer's voice. "Perhaps you've heard stories of ordinary people who become empowered with near-superhuman strength in times of stress. Like the mother who discovers her child trapped under a car. In her anxiousness, she upends the vehicle to rescue the child."
"I once did a story along those lines. ENRAGED GRANDMOTHER LOSES CAN OPENER, BITES BOTTLE TOP OFF WITH FALSE TEETH. Like that?"
"Not quite. And could you please stop interrupting? This is very important to me."
"If it were that important, you'd be talking to Scientific American, not me."
Naomi made a face. "They declined to publish my findings," she admitted in a morose tone. "So I went down the list of national magazines, then local newspapers. The Boston Globe actually sent out a reporter, but after twenty minutes he pretended he was late to an interview with a local television anchor. I went to the Herald next, and even they weren't interested. I thought I had hit bottom; then I remembered you people."
"Actually, we lead our field. You should see our competition. Some of them don't bother getting quotes. They make 'em up."
"I want my story to get out, Mr. . . ."
"Call me Mearle. 'Mister' makes me think I'm being lectured."
"As I was saying, I want my story to get out. It's important. For if my data are correct, mankind may be on the threshold of an important new era in its evolution." Her tone darkened. "Or, conversely, we may face the extinction of the human race."
"Oh, my God," Mearle said in genuine horror. "Are we facing a global sugar shortage? Will our brains shrivel?"
"Forget sugar!" Naomi snapped. "We're talking about superman."
"We are?"
"We are. You surely know something about evolution. How we as a species have evolved from a manlike ape ancestor."
"Darwin."
"Yes, Darwin. Mankind has come a long way on the evolutionary scale, but it's not over yet. Have you ever wondered about the next step?"
"No."
"No. No one wonders. It took millions of years for man to learn to walk erect, to develop the cranial capacity to house a manlike brain, to generate prehensile fingers and an opposable thumb. No one is quite certain how these developments occurred. They are still the subject of raging debate because they are not sudden occurrences. They happen over generations. Well, Mearle, I have discovered that the next stage in human evolution has already arrived. Now. Here in the U.S."
"I'll bet it's all that sugar we eat. It probably accelerates the process."
"Could I tell this? ... Thank you. At the Institute for Human Potential Awareness I went through literally tens of thousands of accounts of extraordinary human feats. I sorted them according to sex. Then within gender. I divided those accounts into incidents of accelerated reflex, heightened strength, and other like phenomena. Many of these incidents are easily explained with the parameters of known physiology. Adrenaline can convey great strength for short periods of time. High-speed mental calculations are possible by some brains-oddly, most of these are people who suffer from forms of retardation. Other traits are the product of a dominant gene that can disappear for generations."
"You're losing me."
"I'm just getting to my point," Naomi said quickly. "As I sorted these accounts, I was struck by certain commonalities among them. Do you remember the Yuma Emergency last Christmas?"
"Who doesn't? An American city taken over by a Japanese movie company. It was worse than the Chinese student massacres."
"The government hushed a lot of it up. But several eyewitness accounts made it into Arizona newspapers, and these came into my hands. During the height of the crisis, many people reported that the occupying army was attacked and virtually dismantled."
"By U.S. Rangers," Mearle said flatly.
"That's Washington's cover story," Naomi countered. "I personally flew to Yuma to interview some of the eyewitnesses, and they described to me a lone man who tore tanks apart, bested squads of heavily armed Japanese troops, and virtually lifted the siege of Yuma with his bare hands. Before the Rangers parachuted in."
"One man?" Mearle said skeptically.
"One unarmed man. A man who, by all accounts, was six feet tall and weighed no more than one hundred and sixty pounds. What we anthropologists call an ectomorph."
"I'll look it up."
"No need. An ectomorph is a thin person. An endomorph is a fat person. And a mesomorph is a normally muscled person."
"Which am I?"
"A biped. Barely."
"I'll look it up."
"Do." Naomi smiled fiercely. "This man was a casuasoid. Slim. Obviously not the weight-lifter type. Yet he bent gun barrels in his fingers. Bullets could not stop him."
"They're supposed to bounce off Superman."
"I have no reports of such a phenomenon. He evidently avoided them by pure reflex."
"Adrenaline or sugar?"
"Neither. This man sustained these impossible activities. Adrenaline is good for twenty-minute stretches. This man-this seemingly ordinary man-systematically dismantled the Japanese army in the course of a long day of hand-to-hand fighting. The reports described him as unremarkable except for two distinguishing features that stuck in the minds of the people who witnessed his destructive power. He had unusually thick wrists. And his eyes were dead."
Mearle gulped in spite of himself. "Dead?"
"Flat. Lifeless. Devoid of emotion. That kind of dead."
"I don't get it."
"There's more. Before I flew to Yuma to check out these reports firsthand, I collected all the Yuma reports and checked for similar reports elsewhere. I found them. Clipped from obscure newspapers and journals. Some of the sources were pretty disreputable. Fate magazine. The Fortean Journal. Publications that revel in ghosts and UFO's and Bigfeet."
"Foot. Bigfoot. Actually, I did a poll on UFO's. Do you know that over seventy-seven percent of Americans believe in flying saucers?"
"You people actually conducted a nationwide survey?"
"No," Mearle said casually. "We sampled an Akron neighborhood and extrapolated from there."
"That's statistically unsupportable!"
Mearle shrugged. "It sold papers."
"I'm sure that it did," Naomi said acidly. "In any case, I found other reports of incredible feats. All of them had one thing in common. The man who performed them had thick wrists and dark dead eyes. Sometimes he was not alone, but was accompanied by an enigmatic Asian. I don't understand that part myself. I doubt they could be related or even part of the same gene pool. Yet both performed similar extraordinary feats. And these reports come from all over America."
"This is great. This is wonderful," enthused Mearle, for the first time checking his tape recorder to see if it was running. It was.
"You see what I am leading up to?"