You remember the story, I suppose. There were only three of them, two
with guns, one with a hand grenade. The pistol men managed to wound two
Senators and a guard. I was right there, talking to Connaught. I spotted
the little fellow with the hand grenade and tackled him. I knocked him
down, but the grenade went flying, pin pulled, seconds ticking away. I
lunged for it. Larry Connaught was ahead of me.
The newspaper stories made heroes out of both of us. They said it was
miraculous that Larry, who had fallen right on top of the grenade, had
managed to get it away from himself and so placed that when it exploded
no one was hurt.
For it did go off--and the flying steel touched nobody. The papers
mentioned that Larry had been knocked unconscious by the blast. He was
unconscious, all right.
He didn't come to for six hours and when he woke up, he spent the next
whole day in a stupor.
I called on him the next night. He was glad to see me.
"That was a close one, Dick," he said. "Take me back to Tarawa."
I said, "I guess you saved my life, Larry."
"Nonsense, Dick! I just jumped. Lucky, that's all."
"The papers said you were terrific. They said you moved so fast, nobody
could see exactly what happened."
He made a deprecating gesture, but his wet little eyes were wary.
"Nobody was really watching, I suppose."
"I was watching," I told him flatly.
He looked at me silently for a moment.
"I was between you and the grenade," I said. "You didn't go past me,
over me, or through me. But you were on top of the grenade."
He started to shake his head.
I said, "Also, Larry, you fell _on_ the grenade. It exploded underneath
you. I know, because I was almost on top of you, and it blew you clear
off the floor of the gallery. Did you have a bulletproof vest on?"
* * * * *
He cleared his throat. "Well, as a matter of--"
"Cut it out, Larry! What's the answer?"
He took off his glasses and rubbed his watery eyes. He grumbled, "Don't
you read the papers? It went off a yard away."
"Larry," I said gently, "I was there."
He slumped back in his chair, staring at me. Larry Connaught was a small
man, but he never looked smaller than he did in that big chair, looking
at me as though I were Mr. Nemesis himself.
Then he laughed. He surprised me; he sounded almost happy. He said,
"Well, hell, Dick--I had to tell somebody about it sooner or later. Why
not you?"
I can't tell you all of what he said. I'll tell most of it--but not the
part that matters.
I'll never tell _that_ part to _anybody_.
Larry said, "I should have known you'd remember." He smiled at me
ruefully, affectionately. "Those bull sessions in the cafeterias, eh?
Talking all night about everything. But you remembered."
"You claimed that the human mind possessed powers of psychokinesis," I
said. "You argued that just by the mind, without moving a finger or
using a machine, a man could move his body anywhere, instantly. You said
that nothing was impossible to the mind."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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