Azazel - By Isaac Asimov Page 0,23

that? You stink up this whole section ... Well, well, I think it can be done."

It didn't take ten seconds. It took half an hour and a very uncomfortable half hour it was, too, with Azazel groaning part of the time and the rest of the time stopping to wonder whether the samini were going to wait for him.

He was done eventually and, of course, it meant I would have to test out the matter on Menander Block.

When I next saw Menander I said, "You're cured." He stared at me hostilely, "Do you know that you stuck me with the dinner check the other night?"

"Surely a minor point compared with the fact that you're cured."

"I don't feel cured."

"Well, come. Let's take a drive together. You take the wheel."

"It looks cloudy already. Some cure!"

"Drive! What have we to lose?"

He backed the car out of his garage. A man passing by on the other side of the street did not trip over an overloaded garbage can.

Menander drove down the street. The light did not turn red as he approached, and two cars skidding toward each other at the intersection next but one missed each other by a comfortable margin.

By the time he was at the bridge, the clouds had thinned out and a warm sun was shining down upon the car. It was not in his eyes.

When we finally got home he was weeping unashamedly, and I parked the car for him. I scraped it slightly, but it was not I that had had my teleklutzism cured. At that, it might have been worse. I might have scraped my own car.

For the next few days he was seeking me out constantly. I was the only one, after all, who could understand the miracle that had taken place.

He would say, "I went to a dance, and not one couple tripped over each other's feet and fell down and broke a collarbone or two. I could dance sylphlike with utter abandon and my partner never got sick to her stomach, even though she had eaten most unwisely."

Or, "At work they were installing a new air-conditioning unit and not once did it fall upon a workman's toes, breaking them permanently."

Or even, "I visited a friend in a hospital, something I once wouldn't have dreamed of doing, and in not one of the rooms that I passed did the intravenous needle pop out of a vein. Nor did a single hypodermic miss its appropriate target."

Sometimes he would ask me brokenly, "Are you sure that I will have a chance to save humanity?"

"Absolutely," I would say. "That's part of the cure."

But then one day he came to me and there was a frown on his face. "Listen," he said. "I just went to the bank to ask a question about my bank balance, which is a little lower than it should be because of the way you manage to get out of restaurants before the bill shows up, and I couldn't get an answer because the computer went down just as I walked in. Everyone was puzzled. Is the cure wearing off?"

"It can't do that," I said. "Maybe it had nothing to do with you. There might be some other teleklutz around who hasn't been cured. Maybe he happened to walk in just as you did."

But that wasn't it. The bank's computer went down on two other occasions when he tried to check his bank balance. (His nervousness over the paltry sums I had neglected to take care of was quite nauseating in a grown man.) Finally, when the computer at his firm went down when he walked past the room in which it was housed, he came to me in what I can only describe as panic.

"It's back, I tell you. It's back!" he screamed. "I can't take it this time. Now that I'm accustomed to normality, I can't go back to my old life. I'll have to kill myself."

"No, no, Menander. That's going too far."

He seemed to check himself at the edge of another scream and thought over my sensible remark. "You're right," he said. "That is going too far. Suppose I kill you instead. After all, no one will miss you, and it will make me feel a little better."

I saw his point, but only to a slight extent. I said, "Before you do anything at all, let me check this out. Be patient, Menander. After all, so far it's only happened with computers, and who cares about computers?"

I left quickly before he could