I looked him over very carefully. He had been sampling something or other, that was clear enough. But no whiskey breath; no dilated pupils; no shakes; no nothing. He was relaxed and cheerful, and that was all you could say.
"Try a little old bit," he invited, gesturing at the test tubes.
Well, there are times when you have to pay your dues in the club. V.B. & S. had been mighty good to me, and if I had to swallow something unfamiliar to justify the confidence the Chief had in me, why I just had to go ahead and do it. Still, I hesitated for a moment.
"Aw," said Leslie Clary Cloud, "don't be scared. Look, I just had a shot but I'll take another one." He fumbled one of the test tubes out of the rack and, humming to himself, slopped a little of the colorless stuff into a beaker of some other colorless stuff—water, I suppose. He drank it down and smacked his lips. "Tastes awful," he observed cheerfully, "but we'll fix that. Wheel"
I looked him over again, and he looked back at me, giggling. "Too strong," he said happily. "Got it too strong. We'll fix that, too." He rattled beakers and test tubes aimlessly while I took a deep breath and nerved myself up to it.
"All right," I said, and took the fresh beaker out of his hand. I swallowed it down almost in one gulp. It tasted terrible, just as he said, tasted like the lower floors had smelled, but that was all I noticed right away. Nothing happened for a moment except that Cloud looked at me thoughtfully and frowned.
"Say," he said, "I guess I should have diluted that."
I guess he should have. Wham.
But a couple of hours later I was all right again.
Cloud was plenty apologetic. "Still," he said consolingly, standing over me as I lay on the lab bench, "it proves one thing. You had a dose about the equivalent of ten thousand normal shots, and you have to admit it hasn't hurt you."
"I do?" I asked, and looked at the doctor. He swung his stethoscope by the earpieces and shrugged.
"Nothing organically wrong with you, Mr. McGorv—not that I can find, anyway. Euphoria, yes. Temporarily high pulse, yes. Delirium there for a little while, yes—though it was pretty mild. But I don't think you even have a headache now."
"I don't," I admitted. I swung my feet down and sat up, apprehensively. But no hammers started in my head. I had to confess it: I felt wonderful.
Well, between us we tinkered it into what Cloud decided would be a "normal" dosage—just enough to make you feel good—and he saturated some sort of powder and rolled it into pellets and clamped them in a press and came out with what looked as much like aspirins as anything else. "They'd probably work that way, too," he said. "A psychogenic headache would melt away in five minutes with one of those."
"We'll bear that in mind," I said.
What with one thing and another, I couldn't get to the old man that day before he left, and the next day was the weekend and you don't disturb the Chief s weekends, and it was Monday evening before I could get him alone for long enough to give him the whole pitch. He was delighted.
"Dear, dear," he twinkled. "So much out of so little. Why, they hardly look like anything at all."
"Try one, Chief," I suggested.
"Perhaps I will. You checked the legal angle?"
"On the quiet. It's absolutely clean."
He nodded and poked at the little pills with his finger. I scratched the back of my neck, trying to be politely inconspicuous, but the Chief doesn't miss much. He looked at me inquiringly.
"Hives," I explained, embarrassed. "I, uh, got an overdose the first time, like I said. I don't know much about these things, but what they told me at the clinic was I set up an allergy."
"Allergy?" Mr. VandenBlumer looked at me thoughtfully. "We don't want to spread allergies with this stuff, do we?"
"Oh, no danger of that, Chief. It's Cloud's fault, in a way; he handed me an undiluted dose of the stuff, and I drank it down. The clinic was very positive about that: Even twenty or thirty times the normal dose won't do you any harm."
"Um." He rolled one of the pills in his finger and thumb and sniffed it thoughtfully. "How long are you going to have your hives?"
"They'll go away. I just have to keep away from the stuff. I wouldn't have them now, but—well, I liked it so much I tried another shot yesterday." I coughed, and added, 'It works out pretty well, though. You see the advantages, of course, Chief. I have to give it up, and I can swear that there's no craving, no shakes, no kick-off symptoms, no nothing. I, well, I wish I could enjoy it like anyone else, sure. But I'm here to testify that Cloud told the simple truth: It isn't habit-forming."
"Um," he said again; and that was the end of the discussion.
Oh, the Chief is a cagey man. He gave me my orders: Keep my mouth shut about it. I have an idea that he was waiting to see what happened to my hives, and whether any craving would develop, and what the test series on animals and Cloud's Bowery-derelict volunteers would show. But even more, I think he was waiting until the time was exactly, climactically right.
Like at the Plans meeting, the day after the doctors' report and the panic at Mason-Dixon.
And that's how Cheeiy-Gum was born.
Hazel just came in with the cardboard container from the drugstore, and I could tell by looking at it—no steam coming out from under the lid, beads of moisture clinging to the sides — that it wasn't the coffee I ordered. "Hey!" I yelled after her as she was dreamily waltzing through the door. "Come back here!"
"Sure 'nough, Massa," she said cheerfully, and two-stepped back. "S'matter?"
I took a grip on my temper. "Open that up," I ordered. "Take a look at what's in it."
She smiled at me and plopped the lid off the container. Half the contents spilled across my desk. "Oh, dear," said Hazel, "excuse me while I get a cloth."
"Never mind the cloth," I said, mopping at the mess with my handkerchief. "What's in there?"
She gazed wonderingly into the container for a moment; then she said, "Oh, honestly, boss! I see what you mean. Those idiots in the drugstore, they're gummed up higher than a kite, morning, noon, and night. I always say, if you can't handle it, you shouldn't touch it during working hours. I'm sorry about this, boss. No lemon! How can they call it a lemon Coke when they forget the—"
"Hazel," I said, "what I wanted was coffee. Coffee."
She looked at me. "You mean I got it wrong? Oh, I'm sorry, Mr. McGory. Ill go right down and get it now." She smiled repentantly and hummed her way toward the door. With her hand on the knob, she stopped and turned to look at me. "All the same, boss," she said, "that's a funny combination. Coffee and Coke. But I'll see what I can do."
And she was gone, to bring me heaven knows what incredible concoction. But what are you going to do?
No, that's no answer. I know it's what tjou would do. But it makes me break out in hives.
The first week we were delighted, the second week we were triumphant, the third week we were millionaires.
The sixth week I skulked along the sidewalks all the way across town and down, to see Leslie Clary Cloud. Even so, I almost got it when a truckdriver dreamily piled into the glass front of a saloon a yard or two behind me.
When I saw Cloud sitting at his workbench feet propped up, hands clasped behind his head, eyes half-closed, I could almost have kissed him. For his jaws were not moving. Alone in New York, except for me, he wasn't chewing Cheery-Gum.
"Thank heaven!" I said sincerely.
He blinked and smiled at me. "Mr. McGory," he said in a pleasant drawl. "Nice of you."
His manner disturbed me, and I looked more closely. "You're not—you're not gummed up, are you?"
He said gently, "Do I look gummed up? I never chew the stuff."