The Yehudi Principle
by Fredric Brown
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.
You see, Charlie was just kidding me when he told me it worked on the Yehudi principle. Or he thought he was. “The Yehudi principle?” I said.
“The Yehudi principle,” he repeated. “The principle of the little man who wasn’t there. He does it.”
“Does what?” I wanted to know.
The dingbat, I might interrupt myself to explain, was a head-band. It fitted neatly around Charlie’s noggin and there was a round black box not much bigger than a pillbox over his forehead. Also there was a round flat copper disk on each side of the band that fitted over each of Charlie’s temples, and a strand of wire that ran down behind his ear into the breast pocket of his coat, where there was a little dry cell battery.
It didn’t look as if it would do anything, except maybe either cure a headache or make it worse. But from the excited look on Charlie’s face, I didn’t think it was anything as commonplace as that.
“Does what?” I wanted to know.
“Whatever you want,” said Charlie. “Within reason, of course. Not like moving a building or bringing you a locomotive. But any little thing you want done, he does it.”
“Who does?”
“Yehudi.”
I closed my eyes and counted to five, by ones. I wasn’t going to ask, “Who’s Yehudi?”
I shoved aside a pile of papers on the bed—I’d been going through some old clunker manuscripts seeing if I could find something good enough to rewrite from a new angle—and sat down.
“O.K.,” I said. “Tell him to being me a drink.”
“What kind?”
I looked at Charlie, and he didn’t look like he was kidding. He had to be, of course, but—
“Gin buck,” I told him. “A gin buck, with gin in it, if Yehudi knows what I mean.”
“Hold out your hand,” Charles said.
I held out my hand. Charlie, not talking to me, said, “Bring Hank a gin buck, strong.” And then he nodded his head.
Something happened either to Charlie or to my eyes, I didn’t know which. For just a second, he got sort of misty. And then he looked normal again.
And I let out a kind of a yip and pulled my hand back, because my hand was wet with something cold. And there was a splashing noise and a wet puddle on the carpet right at my feet. Right under where my hand had been.
Charlie said, “We should have asked for it in a glass.”
I looked at Charlie and then I looked at the puddle on the floor and then I looked at my hand. I stuck my index finger gingerly into my mouth and tasted.
Gin buck. With gin in it. I looked at Charlie again. He asked, “Did I blur?”
“Listen, Charlie,” I said. “I’ve known you for ten years, and we went to Tech together and— But if you pull another gag like that I’ll blur you, all right. I’ll—”
“Watch closer this time,” Charlie said. And again, looking off into space and not talking to me at all, he started talking. “Bring us a fifth of gin, in a bottle. Half a dozen lemons, sliced, on a plate. Two quart bottles of soda and a dish of ice cubes. Put it all on the table over there.”
He nodded his head, just like he had before, and darned if he didn’t blur. Blur was the best word for it.
“You blurred,” I said. I was getting a slight headache.
“I thought so,” he said. “But I was using a mirror when I tried it alone, and I thought maybe it was my eyes. That’s why I came over. You want to mix the drinks or shall I?”
I looked over at the table, and there was all the stuff he’d ordered. I swallowed a couple of times.
“It’s real,” Charlie said. He was breathing a little hard, with suppressed excitement. “It works, Hank. It works. We’ll be rich! We can—”
Charlie kept on talking, but I got up slowly and went over to the table. The bottles and lemons and ice were really there. The bottles gurgled when shaken and the ice was cold.
In a minute I was going to worry about how they got there. Meanwhile and right now, I needed a drink. I got a couple of glasses out of the medicine cabinet and the bottle opener out of the file cabinet, and I made two drinks, about half gin.
Then I thought of something. I asked Charlie, “Does Yehudi want a drink, too?”
Charlie grinned. “Two’ll be enough,” he told me.
“To start with, maybe,” I said grimly. I handed him a drink—in a glass—and said, “To Yehudi.” I downed mine at a gulp and started mixing another.
Charlie said, “Me, too. Hey, wait a minute.”
“Under present circumstances,” I said, “a minute is a minute too long between drinks. In a minute I shall wait a minute, but—Hey, why don’t we let Yehudi mix ’em for us?”
“Just what I was going to suggest. Look, I want to try something. You put this headband on and tell him to. I want to watch you.”
“Me?”
“You,” he said. “It can’t do any harm, and I want to be sure it works for everybody and not just for me. It may be that it’s attuned merely to my brain. You try it.”
“Me?” I said.
“You,” he told me.
He’d taken it off and was holding it out to me, with the little flat dry cell dangling from it at the end of the wire. I took it and looked it over. It didn’t look dangerous. There couldn’t possibly be enough juice in so tiny a battery to do any harm.
I put it on.
“Mix us some drinks,” I said, and looked over at the table, but nothing happened.
“You got to nod just as you finish,” Charlie said. “There’s a little pendulum affair in the box over your forehead that works the switch.”
I said, “Mix us two gin bucks. In glasses, please.” And nodded. When my head came up again, there were the drinks, mixed. “Blow me down,” I said. And bent over to pick up my drink.
And there I was on the floor.
Charlie said, “Be careful, Hank., If you lean over forward, that’s the same as nodding. And don’t nod or lean just as you say something you don’t mean as an order.”
I sat up. “Fan me with a blowtorch,” I said.
But I didn’t nod. In fact, I didn’t move. When I realized what I’d said, I held my neck so rigid that it hurt, and didn’t quite breathe for fear I’d swing that pendulum.
Very gingerly, so as not to tilt it, I reached up and took off the headband and put it down on the floor.
Then I got up and felt myself all over. There were probably bruises, but no broken bones. I picked up the drink and drank it. It was a good drink, but I mixed the next one myself. With three-quarters gin.
With it in my hand, I circled around the headband, not coming within a yard of it, and sat down on the bed.
“Charlie,” I said, “you’ve got something there. I don’t know what it is, but what are we waiting for?”
“Meaning?” said Charlie.
“Meaning what any sensible man would mean. If that darned thing brings anything we ask for, well, let’ s make it a party. Which would you rather have, Lili St. Cyr or Esther Williams? I’ll take the other.”
He shook his head sadly. “There are limitations, Hank. Maybe I’d better explain.”
“Personally,” I said, “I would prefer Lili to an explanation, but go ahead. Let’s start with Yehudi. The only two Yehudis I know are Yehudi Menuhin, the violinist, and Yehudi, the little man who wasn’t there. Somehow I don’t think Menuhin brought us that gin, so—”
“He didn’t. For that matter, neither did the little man who wasn’t there. I was kidding you, Hank. There isn’t any little man who wasn’t there.”