The flask was empty. Ira Methuen sprawled in his chair. Now and then he passed a hand across his forehead. He said: “I can’t believe it. I can’t believe that I felt that way half an hour ago. O Lord, what have I done?”
“Plenty,” said Inglehart.
Methuen was not acting at all drunk. He was full of sober remorse.
“I remember everything—those inventions that popped out of my mind, everything. But I didn’t care. How did you know alcohol would counteract the Methuen injection?”
“Johnny figured it out. He looked up its effects, and discovered that in massive doses it coagulates the proteins in the nerve cells. He guessed it would lower their conductivity to counteract the increased conductivity through the gaps between them that your treatment causes.”
“So,” said Methuen, “when I’m sober I’m drunk, and when I’m drunk I’m sober. But what’ll we do about the endowment—my new department and the laboratory and everything?”
“I don’t know. Dalrymple’s leaving tonight; he had to stay over a day on account of some trustee business. And they won’t let you out for a while yet, even when they know about the alcohol counter-treatment. Better think of something quick, because the visiting period is pretty near up.”
Methuen thought. He said: “I remember how all those inventions work, though I couldn’t possibly invent any more of them unless I went back to the other condition.” He shuddered. “There’s the soft-speaker, for instance—”
“What’s that?”
“It’s like a loud-speaker, only it doesn’t speak loudly. It throws a supersonic beam, modulated by the human voice to give the effect of audible sound-frequencies when it hits the human ear. Since you can throw a supersonic beam almost as accurately as you can throw a light beam, you can turn the soft-speaker on a person, who will then hear a still small voice in his ear apparently coming from nowhere. I tried it on Dugan one day. It worked. Could you do anything with that?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“I hope you can. This is terrible. I thought I was perfectly sane and rational. Maybe I was—Maybe nothing is important. But I don’t feel that way now, and I don’t want to feel that way again—”
The omnipresent ivy, of which Yale is so proud, affords splendid handholds for climbing. Bruce Inglehart, keeping an eye peeled for campus cops, swarmed up the big tower at the corner of Bingham Hall. Below, in the dark, Johnny waited.
Presently the end of a clothesline came dangling down. Johnny inserted the hook in the end of the rope ladder into the loop in the end of the line. Inglehart hauled the ladder up and secured it, wishing that he and Johnny could change bodies for a while. That climb up the ivy had scared him and winded him badly. But he could climb ivy and Johnny couldn’t.
The ladder creaked under Johnny’s five hundred pounds. A few minutes later it slid slowly, jerkily up the wall, like a giant centipede. Then Inglehart, Johnny, ladder, and all were on top of the tower.
Inglehart got out the soft-speaker and trained the telescopic sight on the window of Dalrymple’s room in the Taft, across the intersection of College and Chapel Streets. He found the yellow rectangle of light. He could see into about half the room. His heart skipped a few beats until a stocky figure moved into his field of vision. Dalrymple had not yet left. But he was packing a couple of suitcases.
Inglehart slipped the transmitter clip around his neck, so that the transmitter nestled against his larynx. The next time Dalrymple appeared, Inglehart focused the crosshairs on the steel man’s head. He spoke: “Hanscom Dalrymple!” He saw the man stop suddenly. He repeated: “Hanscom Dalrymple!”
“Huh?” said Dalrymple. “Who the hell are you? Where the hell are you?” Inglehart could not hear him, of course, but he could guess.
Inglehart said, in solemn tones: “I am your conscience.”
By now Dalrymple’s agitation was evident even at that distance. Inglehart continued: “Who squeezed out all the common stockholders of Hephaestus Steel in that phony reorganization?” Pause. “You did, Hanscom Dalrymple!
“Who bribed a United States senator to swing the vote for a higher steel tariff, with fifty thousand dollars and a promise of fifty thousand more, which was never paid?” Pause. “You did, Hanscom Dalrymple!
“Who promised Wendell Cook the money for a new biophysics building, and then let his greed get the better of him and backed out on the thin excuse that the man who was to have headed the new department had had a nervous breakdown?” Pause, while Inglehart reflected that “nervous breakdown” was merely a nice way of saying “gone nuts.” “You did, Hanscom Dalrymple!
“Do you know what’ll happen to you if you don’t atone, Dalrymple? You’ll be reincarnated as a spider, and probably caught by a wasp and used as live fodder for her larvæ. How will you like that, heh-heh?
“What can you do to atone? Don’t be a sap. Call up Cook. Tell him you’ve changed your mind, and are renewing your offer!” Pause. “Well, what are you waiting for? Tell him you’re not only renewing it, but doubling it!” Pause. “Tell him—”
But at this point Dalrymple moved swiftly to the telephone. Inglehart said, “Ah, that’s better, Dalrymple,” and shut off the machine.
Johnny asked: “How did you know awr zose sings about him?”
“I got his belief in reincarnation out of his obit down at the shop. And one of our rewrite men who used to work in Washington says everybody down there knows about the other things. Only you can’t print a thing like that unless you have evidence to back it up.”
They lowered the rope ladder and reversed the process by which they had come up. They gathered up their stuff and started for the Phelps mansion. But as they rounded the corner of Bingham they almost ran into a familiar storklike figure. Methuen was just setting up another contraption at the corner of Welch.
“Hello,” he said.
Man and bear gaped at him. Inglehart asked: “Did you escape again?”
“Uh-huh. When I sobered up and got my point of view back. It was easy, even though they’d taken my radio away. I invented a hypnotizer, using a light bulb and a rheostat made of wire from my mattress, and hypnotized the orderly into giving me his uniform and opening the doors for me. My, my, that was amusing.”
“What are you doing now?” Inglehart became aware that Johnny’s black pelt had melted off into the darkness.
“This? Oh, I dropped around home and knocked together an improved soft-speaker. This one’ll work through masonry walls. I’m going to put all the undergraduates to sleep and tell ‘em they’re monkeys. When they wake up, it will be most amusing to see them running around on all fours and scratching and climbing the chandeliers. They’re practically monkeys to begin with, so it shouldn’t be difficult.”
“But you can’t, professor! Johnny and I just went to a lot of trouble getting Dalrymple to renew his offer. You don’t want to let us down, do you?”
“What you and Johnny do doesn’t matter to me in the slightest. Nothing matters. I’m going to have my fun. And don’t try to interfere, Bruce.” Methuen pointed another glass rod at Inglehart’s middle. “You’re a nice young fellow, and it would be too bad if I had to let you have three hours’ accumulation of sun-ray energy all at once.”
“But this afternoon you said—”
“I know what I said this afternoon. I was drunk and back in my old state of mind, full of responsibility and conscientiousness and such bunk. I’ll never touch the stuff again if it has that effect on me. Only a man who has received the Methuen treatment can appreciate the futility of all human effort.”
Methuen shrank back into the shadows as a couple of undergraduates passed. Then he resumed work on his contraption, using one hand and keeping Inglehart covered with the other. Inglehart, not knowing what else to do, asked him questions about the machine. Methuen responded with a string of technical jargon. Inglehart wondered desperately what to do. He was not an outstandingly brave young man, especially in the face of a gun or its equivalent. Methuen’s bony hand never wavered. He made the adjustments on his machine mostly by feel.