The elevator starter at my office gave me a lot of trouble, but I finally got the thing into a freight elevator and for another five bucks to the porter in the private door to my office. Phoebe heard me moving around and came trotting in with a face like cataclysm. “Mr. Barclay,” she cried, “they’re here! They’ve been waiting ever since you left with Mr. Wapshot.”
“God rest him,” I said. “Who are yon talking about?”
“Why, the men from the Bar Association,” she explained. It had completely slipped my mind.
I patted her hand. “There,” I said. “Show them in, my dear.”
The two men from the Bar Association came in like corpse robbers. “Mr. Barclay,” the fat one said, “speaking for the Committee, we cannot accept your explanation that $11,577.16 of the Hoskins Estate was expended for ‘miscellany.’ Lacking a more detailed accounting, we have no choice but to”
“I understand perfectly,” I told him, bowing. “You wish me to pay back to make up the deficit out of my own pocket.”
He scowled at me. “Why yes, that for a starter,” he said sternly. “But there is also the matter of the Annie Sprayragen Trust Fund, where the item of $9,754.08 for ‘general expense’ has been challenged by”
“That too,” I said. “Gentlemen, I shall pauperize myself to make good these sums. My whole fortune will go to it, if necessary.”
“Fortune!” squawked the short, thin one. “That’s the trouble, Barclay! We’ve talked to your bank, and they say you haven’t two dimes to rub together!”
“Disbarment!” snarled the fat one. “That’s why we’re here, Barclay!”
It was time to make an end. I gave up the pretense of politeness. “Gentlemen,” I said crisply, “I think not.”
They stared. “Barclay,” snapped the fat one, “bluff will get you”
“There’s no bluff.” I walked over to my desk, patting the crate of the Semantic Polarizer on the way. I pretended to consult my calendar. “Be good enough to return on Monday next,” I told them. “I shall have certified checks for the full amounts ready at that time.”
The short, thin one said uncertainly, “Why should we let you stall?”
“What else can you do? The money’s gone, gentlemen.
If you want it back, be here on Monday. And now, good-day.”
Phoebe appeared to show them out.
And I got down to work.
Busy, busy, busy.
Phoebe was busier than I, at that after the first day.
I spent the rest of that day printing out yes-or-no questions on little squares of paper, microfilming them and bouncing them through the hopper of the Semantic Polarizer. While the drum of the machine spun and bounced, I stood and gloated.
Wapshot’s Demon! And all he could think to use it for was a simple mail-order business, drudgery instead of wealth beyond dreaming. With a brain that could create the Semantic Polarizer, he was unable to see beyond the cash value of a fortune-telling service. Well, it was an easy way to pay his bills, and obviously he wasn’t much interested in wealth.
But I, however, was.
And that was why I ran poor Phoebe ragged. To the bookmakers; to the bank; to the stockbrokers; to the track; to the numbers runners; back to the office. I loaned her my pigskin case, and when that wasn’t big enough the numbers bank, for instance, paid off in fives and tens she took a hundred dollars out of the bottom file drawer and bought a suitcase. Because it was, after all, simple enough to get rich in a hurry. Take a race at Aqueduct; there are eight horses entered, maybe; write a slip for each one: Will win the first at Aqueduct today? Repeat for the second race, the third race, all the races to the end of the day; run them through the Polarizer, pick out the cards that come through the “yes”
hopper
And place your bets.
Numbers? You need thirty slips. Will the first digit of the winning number be 1, 2, 3, 4 etc. Ten slips for the first digit, ten for the second, ten for the third; pick out the three that come out “yes,” put them together, and A bet on the numbers pays odds of 600 to one.
It took me thirty-six hours to work out the winners of the next three weeks’ races, fights, ball games and tennis matches; the stock quotations of a hundred selected issues, and the numbers that would come up on the policy wheel.
And, I say this, they were the happiest thirty-six hours of my life.
Of all my life.
It was a perfectly marvelous time, and too bad that it couldn’t go on. I had everything ready: My suitcase of currency, my lists of the bets to place in the immediate future, my felt-lined wardrobe trunk for transporting the Polarizer, my anonymous letter to the manager of the late Cleon Wapshot’s hotel, directing his attention to the airshaft; even my insulting note to the Committee on Disbarments of the Bar Association. My passport was in order, my reservation by Air France to New Guinea was confirmed, and I was only waiting for Phoebe to come back with the tickets. I had time to kill.
And Curiosity is a famed killer. Of cats. Of time. And of other things.
When Phoebe came back she pounded on the door for nearly an hour, knowing I was in there, knowing I would miss my plane, begging me to come out, to answer, to speak to her. But what was the use? I took my list of bets and tore it in shreds. I took the Polarizer and smashed it to jangling bits. And then I waited.
Good-by, Wall Street! good-by, Kentucky Derby. Good-by, a million dollars a month. I suppose they’ll find Wapshot’s body sooner or later, and there isn’t a doubt that they’ll trace it back to me the bellboy, the postal inspector, even Phoebe might provide the link. Say, a week to find the body; another week, at the most, to put the finger on me. Two months for the trial, and sentence of execution a month or two after. Call it four months from date until they would put me in the chair.
I wish I hadn’t asked the Polarizer one certain question.
I wish I were going still to be alive, four months from date.
My Lady Green Sleeves
His NAME WAS LIAM O’ LEARY and there was something stinking in his nostrils. It was the smell of trouble. He hadn’t found what the trouble was yet, but he would. That was his business. He was a captain of guards in Estates-General Correctional Institution better known to its inmates as the Jug and if he hadn’t been able to detect the scent of trouble brewing a cellblock away he would never have survived to reach his captaincy.
And her name, he saw, was Sue-Ann Bradley, Detainee No. WFA-656R.
He frowned at the rap sheet, trying to figure out what got a girl like her into a place like this. And, what was more important, why she couldn’t adjust herself to it, now that she was in.
He demanded, “Why wouldn’t you mop out your cell?”
The girl lifted her head angrily and took a step forward.
The block guard, Sodaro, growled warningly, “Watch it, auntie!”
O’Leary shook his head. “Let her talk, Sodaro.” It said in the Civil Service Guide to Prison Administration: “Detainees will be permitted to speak in their own behalf in disciplinary proceedings.” And O’Leary was a man who lived by the book.
She burst out, “I never got a chance! That old witch Mathias never told me I was supposed to mop up. She banged on the door and said, ‘Slush up, sister!’ And then ten minutes later she called the guards and told them I refused to mop.”
The block guard guffawed. “Wipe talk! That’s what she was telling you to do. Cap’n, you know what’s funny about this? This Bradley is”
“Shut up, Sodaro.” Captain O’Leary put down his pencil and looked at the girl. She was attractive and young not beyond hope, surely. Maybe she had got off to a wrong start, but the question was, would putting her in the disciplinary block help straighten her out? He nibbed his ear and looked past her at the line of prisoners on the rap detail, waiting for him to judge their cases. He said patiently, “Bradley, the rules are you have to mop out your cell. If you didn’t understand what Mathias was talking about you should have asked her. Now, I’m warning you, the next time”