“Now,” he said, “that ought to be about right. This contains a tonic metronome that will send them a note of frequency of 349 cycles a second, with 68.4 pulses of sound a minute. This, for various technical reasons, has the maximum hypnotic effect. From here I can rake the colleges along College Street—” He made a final adjustment. “This will be the most amusing joke yet. And the cream of it is that, since Connecticut is determined to consider me insane, they can’t do anything to me for it! Here goes, Bruce—Phew, has somebody started a still here, or what? I’ve been smelling and tasting alcohol for the last five minutes—ouch!”
The glass rod gave one dazzling flash, and then Johnny’s hairy black body catapulted out of the darkness. Down went Ira Methuen, all the wind knocked out of him.
“Quick, Bruce!” barked Johnny. “Pick up zat needre sprayer I dropped. Unscrew ze container on ze bottom. Don’t spirr it. Zen come here and pour it down his sroat!”
This was done, with Johnny holding Methuen’s jaws apart with his claws, like Sampson slaying the lion, only conversely.
They waited a few minutes for the alcohol to take effect, listening for sounds that they had been discovered. But the colleges were silent save for the occasional tick of a typewriter.
Johnny explained: “I ran home and got ze needre sprayer from his room. Zen I got Webb, ze research assistant in biophysics, to ret me in ze raboratory for ze arcohor. Zen I try to sneak up and squirf a spray in his mouse whire he talks. I get some in, but I don’t get ze sprayer adjusted right, and ze spray hit him before it breaks up, and stings him. I don’t have fingers, you know. So we have to use what ze books cawr brute force.”
Methuen began to show signs of normalcy. As without his glass rod he was just a harmless old professor, Johnny let him up. His words tumbled out: “I’m so glad you did, Johnny—you saved my reputation, maybe my life. Those fatheads at the hospital wouldn’t believe I had to be kept full of alcohol, so, of course, I sobered up and went crazy again—maybe they’ll believe now. Come on; let’s get back there quickly. If they haven’t discovered my absence, they might be willing to keep this last escape quiet. When they let me out, I’ll work on a permanent cure for the Methuen treatment. I’ll find it, if I don’t die of stomach ulcers from all the alcohol I’ll have to drink.”
Johnny waddled up Temple Street to his home, feeling rather smug about his ability as a fixer. Maybe Methuen, sober, was right about the futility of it all. But if such a philosophy led to the upsetting of Johnny’s pleasant existence, Johnny preferred Methuen drunk.
He was glad Methuen would soon be well and coming home. Methuen was the only man he had any sentimental regard for. But as long as Methuen was shut up, Johnny was going to take advantage of that fact. When he reached the Phelps mansion, instead of going directly in, he thrust a foreleg around behind the hedge next to the wall. It came out with a huge slab of chewing tobacco. Johnny bit off about half the slab, thrust the rest back in its cache, and went in, drooling happily a little at each step. Why not?