But he had strolled about the town for too long. He should have been at work at the filter center. Often they were impatient with him when he wandered off from his work, and Colonel Peter Cooper was waiting for him when he came in now.
"Where have you been, Anthony?"
"Walking. I talked to four men. I mentioned no subject in the province of the filter center."
"Every subject is in the province of the filter center. And you know that our work here is confidential."
"Yes, sir, but I do not understand the import of my work here. I would not be able to give out information that I do not have."
"A popular misconception. There are others who might understand the import of it, and be able to reconstruct it from what you tell them. How do you feel?"
"Nervous, unwell, my tongue is furred, my kidneys—"
"Ah yes, there will be someone here this afternoon to fix your kidneys. I had not forgotten. Is there anything that you want to tell me?"
"No, sir."
Colonel Cooper had the habit of asking that of his workers in the manner of a mother asking a child if he wants to go to the bathroom. There was something embarrassing in his intonation.
Well, he did want to tell him something, but he didn't know how to phrase it. He wanted to tell the colonel that he had newly acquired the power of knowing everyone in the world, that he was worried how he could hold so much in his head that was not noteworthy for its capacity. But he feared ridicule more than he feared anything else and he was a tangle of fears.
But he thought he would try it a little bit on his co-workers.
"I know a man named Walter Walloroy in Galveston," he said to Adrian. "He drinks beer at the Gizmo bar, and is retired."
"What is the superlative of so what?"
"But I have never been there," said Anthony.
"And I have never been in Kalamazoo."
"I know a girl in Kalamazoo. Her name is Greta Harandash. She is home today with a cold. She is prone to colds."
But Adrian was a creature both uninterested and uninteresting. It is very hard to confide in one who is uninterested.
"Well, I will live with it a little while," said Anthony. "Or I may have to go to a doctor and see if he can give me something to make all these people go away. But if he thinks my story is a queer one, he may report me back to the center, and I might be reclassified again. It makes me nervous to be reclassified."
So he lived with it a while, the rest of the day and the night. He should have felt better. A man had come that afternoon and fixed his kidneys; but there was nobody to fix his nervousness and apprehensions. And his skittishness was increased when the children hooted at him as he walked in the morning. That hated epithet! But how could they know that his father had been a dealer in used metals in a town far away?