I think I was still wearing a self-satisfied smile when I got into the office next morning and began to tidy up some routine business matters. Hard work is a good way to pass the time. The race we were interested in was at noon, and within seconds of its completion the result was flashed up on my Cathodata screen. A horse called Lamplighter had won by two lengths. Trev’s selection, Foreign Exchange, had come in last, but all that did was prove that his previous record of success had been what I always knew it to be – pure dumb luck. Whistling cheerfully, I isolated the list of 1,250 people who had been tipped Lamplighter and went into the shop to send them the offers they wouldn’t be able to refuse. Visions of a promised land of dollar green pastures were shimmering before my eyes.
So intent was I on the good work that I almost keeled over with shock when, a few minutes later, a crash of breaking glass followed by a tremulous and unearthly moan drowned out the faint whir of the machinery.
I spun round, dry-mouthed, and saw Trev standing in the doorway of my office. To be more precise, his great bulbous form was slumped against the jamb and one hand was pressed to the narrow margin between his eyebrows and hairline that he regards as a forehead. His face was pale as he lurched away from the door and crunched towards me through the fragments of the Blissfizz bottle he had dropped. I backed off from him, fearful that his mind had finally snapped.
“It’s all over, Des,” he said in a hollow voice. I’m undone. The Supreme Nizam has abandoned me.”
“He’d never do a thing like that,” I soothed, wondering what in hell had happened. “Not to you.”
He rolled his eyes, horribly. “I must have transgressed, Des. That’s the only explanation.”
I was still trying to figure out what explained what when my gaze was drawn to a point behind Trev, to the electronic glow emanating from my office which told me I had forgotten to switch off the Cathodata set. That explained everything. It was obvious that Trev had wandered in there and somehow had concentrated on the screen long enough to discover his prediction for that day’s race had been wrong – and, to say the least of it, he was reacting badly. He was swaying around like a balloon man anchored only by his shoes and there was a real danger of some of my best equipment being toppled and damaged. Cursing my carelessness, I fought to steady him up, but it was like trying to wrestle a zeppelin full of water.
“I’m unworthy, Des,” he groaned. “I’m going to be cast into the outer darkness. Woe is me.”
Staggering around under each surge of his weight, I strove desperately for some way out of the jam and almost sobbed with relief when inspiration came. “Why are you saying these things, Trev? Would the Supreme Nizam keep giving you winners if he thought you were unworthy?”
He steadied up slightly. “But I got it wrong. I saw it on the screen.”
“Saw what?” I queried. “Lamplighter came in first – just like you predicted.”
“Huh?” A flicker of hope appeared in his eyes. “I… I was nearly sure I marked a different horse. Foreign something or other.”
“Perhaps that’s what you meant to do, Trev, but you’re forgetting that Another was guiding your hand.” I groped around in the inside pocket of my jacket, carefully counting sample letters from the last mailing, and whipped out one I knew to bear Lamplighter’s name. “I mean, it’s down here in black and white. You can’t argue with that, can you?”
“You’re right,” he whispered, a look of joy appearing in his eyes. He let go of me and hurried away, but not before I saw that he was on the verge of tears.
I felt a twinge of guilt over having conned him and made up my mind to give him a bonus, maybe fifty or a hundred bucks, when the big money came in. The first thing I did, however, was to search out and destroy all the racing sheets he had marked, then I unplugged the Cathodata and removed its fuse to forestall any further trouble. After that I completed the mailing and, having made sure that Trev wasn’t within earshot, telephoned Wynter to let him know that the gravy train was about to arrive.
Actually, I saw very little of Trev during the next few days – he seemed to have taken up permanent residence in his thought projector – and that was just as well because the flood of mail which began to arrive was, of course, addressed to him. And it’s no exaggeration to describe it as a flood!
I have to confess that right up to the moment it happened I didn’t really believe the scheme would pay off according to plan. Deep down inside me there had lingered a fragment of scepticism which sneered that it was all too good to be true – but I was wrong. The loot came winging from all over the continent. Well over 200,000 dollars arrived in the space of three days, all of it in the form of cash or open postal drafts as we had specified in the letter. Among the bills there was a surprising number of sincere little thank-you notes from people who were moved by Trev’s apparent philanthropy, but when we had separated those out and burned them Wynter and I were left with great heaps of beautiful, glorious, untraceable money. We felt like lying down and rolling in it.
After a hectic bout of celebrations we sent the usual spread of tips on a five-horse race to almost 1,250 paid-up clients, and I took a little time off to buy a new car and restock my wardrobe with the classiest gear I could find. When the race had been run we then had close on 250 people who were convinced that their benefactor – Trevor Q. Botley – was the greatest thing since silent cornflakes, and to them was sent the letter which revealed that the syndicate bosses were turning nasty and that in view of the huge risks involved the only way inside information inc. could stay in business was by upping the ante to two grand a throw. To the thousand disappointed clients who had been tipped the losing horses we sent an entirely different letter which apologized for the mistake, hinting that powerful enemies had been the cause, and offering the next guaranteed winner for a mere hundred dollars.
Once again I began to experience sneaking doubts – after all, two thousand dollars is a lot of money – but I needn’t have worried. Nearly half-a-million promptly arrived in registered envelopes, most of which also contained embarrassingly fervent letters of gratitude. Even Ralph Wynter was surprised by the response we got to the auxiliary missive. It seemed that many of our clients were quite prepared to forgive Trev for one little slip, and to prove it they coughed up to the tune of an extra 70,000 bucks. For days as we went through the lucrative final phase of the operation I wandered around in a dreamy euphoria, giggling aloud every now and then, and trying to understand why I had ever bothered to work when making real money was so ridiculously easy.
During that period Trev went on signing letters without reading them, and making predictions about horse races without even bothering to check the results. Apparently his traumatic moment of doubt and subsequent renewal of belief had attuned him more closely than ever to his ethereal friends in the residential section of Betelgeuse. It made him less aware of what was going on in real life. I was glad about that because his success rate continued to be abysmal and it would have been awkward for us had he found out what a rotten prophet he actually was.