Free The Nail and the Oracle by Theodore Sturgeon Page A

listening to nothing-at-all out there. But she knew that someone could be out there, holding his breath too, also listening. A roaring began in her ears and listening was useless. She breathed again, gasping open-throated to be silent. When she could, she sat up. She could pant more quietly that way.
    And now she could see out and down through the single panel of gauze which covered the lower half of her window. Dim in the moonlight, the not-quite adjoining roof shone in the summer night like an acre of ice. Last summer it had shone too, aching, baking around
him
, hotly holding his flesh, flat as it was, as if it would cup up around him.
    She shuddered and rose, and padded on bare feet to the window. The roof outside, a warehouse, was not completely flat, nor altogether unobstructed. The edges rose slightly all around, not by bulwarks, but banked. And not far from Little Sister’s window, to the right, jutted a small angular housing or kiosk, to shelter the stairs to the roof.
    From inside her room it might seem that the roof was a larger, slightly lower extension of her own floor, but from the window itself she could look down—she seldom did—a dizzy sixty feet to the alley below. Due to the overhang of the warehouse roof, its edge was no more than four and a half feet from her building. Yet the sheer drop between had always been, for her, a magic barrier, an invisible wall between herself and the city and all that near part of the sky which combed itself through the city’s stumpy teeth. There was such a lot of it out there, and none of it could see her. Behind her alley-chasm, and her panel of gauze, none of it could see her!
    Seen by moonlight, it was as detailed as it had been last summer in the blaze of afternoon. But only to the eye of memory. In actuality, when something moved in the shadows of the kiosk, she couldn’t be sure what it was, or even
if
it was. She knew every pebble and crease of the roofing, but pebbles and creases were only what should be there. What should
not
be there, movement or memory, was something she could not be sure of, and memory or movement, it filled her with terror.
    Last summer she had stood here speechless, watching the flesh, the tanned flesh, the hard flesh pulsing with life, the unabashedly bare, the sweat-sheened. And there came the moment when her eyes and his had met … when in the locking of their gaze she was no longer invisible and he, no longer unseen.
    The telephone was next, and the voice of Poteen. That was the first time she heard his voice, the noncommittal, too-understanding Detective Peter Poteen, who said
yes-mam
like the polite cop on a television series, and perhaps was amused at himself for doing it, and, very likely at her, too, for calling. He was immune to the infection of her outrage; he patiently had interrupted her, over and over again, until he had written down her name and her address and hadmade sure he had them all spelled right—all that, before she could even tell her story.
    And then it was yes mam, yes mam, yes mam, to all of it, and his silly question. Was the fellow still out there on the roof? Well of
course
not, she had blurted angrily. He was two hours gone. That was when Poteen’s voice got a bit quieter, in that special way he had when he was interested, and also in that special way of his, the amusement showed a bit more. He asked her if she meant she had waited two whole hours to report the man to the police?
    She supposed she had, though to this day she could not remember what she had done with the two hours. “I was upset, that’s all!” she had shouted into the phone; and “Sure,” he had said, “Sure,” and he had promised to check on it. Check on it! With the papers full of it, every day, two, three times a day sometimes, the headlines, what happened in parks, alleys, stairways, even in the rooms of women alone. The whole city was aroused, and all the people in it except the police, except Detective Poteen.
    Hanging up,