The Fredric Brown Megapack (32 page)

Charlie grabbed the band off my head. He put it on and tried it himself.

I said, “Yehudi’s dead. He shot himself. That thing’s no good anymore. So I’ll make the coffee.”

I put the kettle on the hot plate. “Charlie,” I said, “look, suppose it
was
Yehudi doing that stuff. Well, how do you know what his limitations were? Look, maybe he
could
have brought us Lili—”

“Shut up,” said Charlie. “I’m trying to think.”

I shut up and let him think.

And by the time I had the coffee made, I realized how silly I’d been talking.

I brought the coffee. By that time, Charlie had the lid off the pillbox affair and was examining its innards. I could see the little pendulum that worked the switch, and a lot of wires.

He said, “I don’t understand it. There’s nothing broken.”

“Maybe the battery,” I suggested.

I got out my flashlight and we used its bulb to test the little dry cell. The bulb burned brightly.

“I don’t understand it,” Charlie said.

Then I suggested, “Let’s start from the beginning, Charlie. It
did
work. It got us stuff for drinks. It mixed one pair of drinks. It— Say—”

“I was just thinking of that,” Charlie said. “When you said, ‘Blow me down,’ and bent over to pick up the drink, what happened?”

“A current of air. It blew me down, Charlie, literally. How
could
I have done that myself? And notice the difference in pronouns. I said, ‘Blow me down,’ then but later I said, ‘Shoot yourself.’ If I’d said, ‘Shoot me,’ why maybe—”

There was that prickle down my spine again.

Charlie looked dazed. He said, “But I worked it out on scientific principles, Hank. It wasn’t just an accident. I couldn’t be wrong. You mean you think that— It’s utterly silly!”

I’d been thinking just that, again. But differently. “Look,” I said, “let’s concede that your apparatus set up a field that had an effect upon the brain, but just for argument let’s assume you misunderstood the nature of the field. Suppose it enabled you to
project a thought.
And you were thinking about Yehudi; you must have been because you jokingly called it the Yehudi principle, and so Yehudi—”

“That’s silly,” said Charlie.

“Give me a better one.

He went over to the hot plate for another cup of coffee.

And I remembered something then, and went over to the typewriter table. I picked up the story, shuffling the pages as I picked them up so the first page would come out on top, and I started to read.

I heard Charlie’s voice say, “Is it a good story, Hank?” I said, “G-g-g-g-g-g—”

Charlie took a look at my face and sprinted across the room to read over my shoulder. I handed him the first page. The title on it was

THE YEHUDI PRINCIPLE.

The story started:

“I am going crazy.

“Charlie Swann is going crazy, too. Maybe more than I am, because it was his dingbat. I mean, he made it and he thought he knew what it was and how it worked.”

As I read page after page I handed them to Charlie and he read them too. Yes, it was
this
story. The story you’re reading right now, including this part of it that I’m telling right now. Written before the last part of it happened.

Charlie was sitting down when he finished, and so was I. He looked at me and I looked at him.

He opened his mouth a few times and closed it again twice before he could get anything out. Finally he said, “
T-time,
Hank. It had something to do with
time
too. It wrote in advance just what—Hank, I’ll make it work again. I
got
to. It’s something big. It’s—”

“It’s colossal,” I said. “But it’ll never work again. Yehudi’s dead. He shot himself upon the stair.”

“You’re crazy,” said Charlie.

“Not yet,” I told him. I looked down at the manuscript he’d handed back to me and read:

“I am going crazy.”

I
am
going crazy.

COME AND GO MAD

I

He had known it, somehow, when he had awakened that morning. I too knew it more surely now, staring out of the editorial room window into the early afternoon sunlight slanting down among the buildings to cast a pattern of light and shadow. He knew that soon, perhaps even today, something important was going to happen. Whether good or bad he did not know, but he darkly suspected. And with reason; there are few good things that may unexpectedly happen to a man, things, that is, of lasting importance. Disaster can strike from innumerable directions, in amazingly diverse ways.

A voice said, “Hey, Mr. Vine,” and he turned away from the window, slowly. That in itself was strange for it was not his manner to move slowly; he was a small, volatile man, almost catlike in the quickness of his reactions and his movements.

But this time something made him turn slowly from the window, almost as though he never again expected to see that chiaroscuro of an early afternoon.

He said, “Hi, Red.”

The freckled copy boy said, “His Nibs wants to see ya.”

“Now?”

“Naw. Atcher convenience. Sometime next week, maybe. If yer busy, give him an apperntment.” He put his fist against Red’s chin and shoved, and the copy boy staggered back in assumed distress.

He got up out of his chair and went over to the water cooler. He pressed his thumb on the button and water gurgled into the paper cup.

Harry Wheeler sauntered over and said, “Hiya, Nappy. What’s up? Going on the carpet?”

He said, “Sure, for a raise.”

He drank and crumpled the cup, tossing it into the waste basket. He went over to the door marked “Private” and went through it.

Walter J. Candler, the managing editor, looked up from the work on his desk and said affably, “Sit down, Vine. Be with you in a moment,” and then looked down again.

He slid into the chair opposite Candler, worried a cigarette out of his shirt pocket and lighted it. He studied the back of the sheet of paper of which the managing editor was reading the front. There wasn’t anything on the back of it.

The M.E. put the paper down and looked at him. “Vine, I’ve got a screwy one. You’re good on screwy ones.”

He grinned slowly at the M.E. He said, “If that’s a compliment, thanks.”

“It’s a compliment, all right. You’ve done some pretty tough things for us. This one’s different. I’ve never yet asked a reporter to do anything I wouldn’t do myself. I wouldn’t do this, so I’m not asking you to.”

The M.E. picked up the paper he’d been reading and then put it down again without even looking at it. “Ever hear of Ellsworth Joyce Randolph?”

“Head of the asylum? Hell yes, I’ve met him. Casually.”

“How’d he impress you?”

He was aware that the managing editor was staring at him intently, that it wasn’t too casual a question. He parried. “What do you mean: In what way? You mean is he a good Joe, is he a good politician, has he got a good bedside manner for a psychiatrist, or what?”

“I mean, how sane do you think he is?”

He looked at Candler and Candler wasn’t kidding. Candler was strictly deadpan.

He began to laugh, and then he stopped laughing. He leaned forward across Candler’s desk. “Ellsworth Joyce Randolph,” he said. “You’re talking about Ellsworth Joyce Randolph?”

Candler nodded. “Dr. Randolph was in here this morning. He told a rather strange story. He didn’t want me to print it. He did want me to check on it, to send our best man to check on it. He said if we found it was true we could print it in hundred and twenty line type in red ink.” Candler grinned wryly. “We could, at that.”

He stumped out his cigarette and studied Candler’s face. “But the story itself is so screwy you’re not sure whether Dr. Randolph himself might be insane?”

“Exactly.”

“And what’s tough about the assignment?”

“The doc says a reporter could get the story only from the inside.”

“You mean, go in as a guard or something?”

Candler said, “Something.”

“Oh.”

He got up out of the chair and walked over to the window, stood with his back to the managing editor, looking out. The sun had moved hardly at all. Yet the shadow pattern in the streets looked different, obscurely different. The shadow pattern inside himself was different, too. This, he knew, was what had been going to happen. He turned around. He said, “No, Hell no.”

Candler shrugged imperceptibly. “Don’t blame you. I haven’t even asked you to. I wouldn’t do it myself.”

He asked, “What does Ellsworth Joyce Randolph think is going on inside his nuthouse? It must be something pretty screwy if it made you wonder whether Randolph himself is sane.”

“I can’t tell you that, Vine. Promised him I wouldn’t, whether or not you took the assignment.”

“You mean—even if I took the job I still wouldn’t know what I was looking for?”

“That’s right. You’d be prejudiced. You wouldn’t be objective. You’d be looking for something, and you might think you found it whether it was there or not. Or you might be so prejudiced against finding it that you’d refuse to recognize it if it bit you in the leg.”

He strode from the window over to the desk and banged his fist down on it.

He said, “God damn it, Candler, why
me?
You know what happened to me three years ago.”

“Sure. Amnesia.”

“Sure, amnesia. Just like that. But I haven’t kept it any secret that I never got
over
that amnesia. I’m thirty years old—or am I? My memory goes back three years. Do you know what it feels like to have a blank wall in your memory only three years back?

“Oh sure, I know what’s on the other side of that wall. I know because everybody tells me. I know I started here as a copy boy ten years ago. I know where I was born and when and I know my parents are both dead. I know what they look like—because I’ve seen their pictures. I know I didn’t have a wife and kids, because everybody who knew me told me I didn’t. Get that part everybody who knew me, not everybody I knew. I didn’t know anybody.

“Sure, I’ve done all right since then. After I got out of the hospital—and I don’t even remember the accident that put me there—I did all right back here because I still knew how to write news stories, even though I had to learn everybody’s name all over again. I wasn’t any worse off than a new reporter starting cold on a paper in a strange city. And everybody was as helpful as hell.”

Candler raised a placating hand to stem the tide. He said, “Okay, Nappy. You said no, and that’s enough. I don’t see what all that’s got to do with this story, but all you had to do was say no. So forget about it.”

The tenseness hadn’t gone out of him. He said, “You don’t see what
that’s
got to do with the story? You ask—or, all right, you don’t ask, you suggest—that I get myself certified as a madman, go into an asylum as a patient.

“When—how much confidence does anyone have in his own mind when he can’t remember going to school, can’t remember the first time he met any of the people he works with every day, can’t remember starting on the job he works at, can’t remember anything back of three years before?”

Abruptly he struck the desk again with his fist, and then looked foolish about it. He said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to get wound up about it like that.”

Candler said, “Sit down.”

“The answer’s still no.”

“Sit down, anyway.”

He sat down and fumbled a cigarette out of his pocket, got it lighted.

Candler said, “I didn’t even mean to mention it, but I’ve got to now. Now that you talked that way. I didn’t know you felt like that about your amnesia. I thought that was water under the bridge.

“Listen, when Dr. Randolph asked me what reporter we had that could best cover it, I told him about you. What your background was. He remembered meeting you, too, incidentally. But he hadn’t known you’d had amnesia.”

“Is that why you suggested me?”

“Skip that till I make my point. He said that while you were there, he’d be glad to try one of the newer, milder forms of shock treatment on you, and that it might restore your lost memories. He said it would be worth trying.”

“He didn’t say it would work.”

“He said it might; that it wouldn’t do any harm.”

He stubbed out the cigarette from which he’d taken only three drags. He glared at Candler. He didn’t have to say what was in his mind; the managing editor could read it.

Candler said, “Calm down, boy. Remember I didn’t bring it up until you yourself started in on how much that memory-wall bothered you. I wasn’t saving it for ammunition. I mentioned it only out of fairness to you, after the way you talked.”

“Fairness!”

Candler shrugged. “You said no. I accepted it. Then you started raving at me and put me in a spot where I had to mention something I’d hardly thought of at the time. Forget it. How’s that graft story coming? Any new leads?”

“You going to put someone else on the asylum story?”

“No. You’re the logical one for it.”

“What is the story? It must be pretty woolly if it makes you wonder if Dr. Randolph is sane. Does he think his patients ought to trade places with his doctors, or what?”

He laughed. “Sure, you can’t tell me. That’s really beautiful double bait. Curiosity—and hope of knocking down that wall. So what’s the rest of it? If I say yes instead of no, how long will I be there, under what circumstances? What chance have I got of getting out again? How do I get in?”

Candler said slowly, “Vine, I’m not sure anymore I want you to try it. Let’s skip the whole thing.”

“Let’s not. Not until you answer my questions, anyway.”

“All right. You’d go in anonymously, so there wouldn’t be any stigma attached if the story wouldn’t work out. If it does, you can tell the whole truth—including Dr. Randolph’s collusion in getting you in and out again. The cat will be out of the bag, then.

“You might get what you want in a few days—and you wouldn’t stay on it more than a couple of weeks in any case.”

“How many at the asylum would know who I was and what I was there for, besides Randolph?”

“No one.” Candler leaned forward and held up four fingers of his left hand. He pointed to the first. “Four people would have to be in on it. You.” He pointed to one finger. “Me.” A second. “Dr. Randolph.” The third finger. “And one other reporter from here.”

“Not that I’d object, but why the other reporter?”

“Intermediary. In two ways. First, he’ll go with you to some psychiatrist; Randolph will recommend one you can fool comparatively easily. He’ll be your brother and request that you be examined and certified. You convince the psychiatrist you’re nuts and he’ll certify you. Of course it takes two doctors to put you away, but Randolph will be the second. Your alleged brother will want Randolph for the second one.”

“All this under an assumed name?”

“If you prefer. Of course there’s no real reason why it should be.”

“That’s the way I feel about it. Keep it out of the papers, of course. Tell everybody around here—except my—hey, in that case we couldn’t make up a brother. But Charlie Doerr, in Circulation, is my first cousin and my nearest living relative. He’d do, wouldn’t he?”

“Sure. And he’d have to be intermediary the rest of the way, then. Visit you at the asylum and bring back anything you have to send back.”

“And if, in a couple of weeks, I’ve found nothing, you’ll spring me?”