He put his paws on Miss Prescott’s desk and asked: “Hey, good-rooking, wirr you cawr up Bruce Ingrehart at ze Courier?”
“Johnny,” said the president’s secretary, “you get fresher every day.”
“Ze bad infruence of ze undergraduates. Wirr you cawr Mr. Ingrehart, beautifur?” Miss Prescott, who was not, did so.
Bruce Inglehart arrived at the Phelps mansion to find Johnny taking a shower. Johnny was also making a horrible bawling noise. “Waaaaai” he howled. “Hoooooooo! Yrmrrr! Waaaaaaa!”
“Whatcha doing?” yelled Inglehart.
“Taking a bass,” replied Johnny. “Wuuummh!”
“Are you sick?”
“No. Jus’ singing in bass. People sing whire taking bass; why shouldn’t I? Yaaaaawaaa!”
“Well, for Pete’s sake don’t. It sounds like you were having your throat cut. What’s the idea of these bath towels spread all over the floor?”
“I show you.” Johnny came out of the shower, lay down on the bath towels and rolled. When he was more or less dry, he scooped the towels up in his forepaws and hove them into a corner. Neatness was not one of Johnny’s strong points.
He told Inglehart about the Methuen situation. “Rook here, Bruce,” he said, “I sink I can fix him, but you wirr have to he’p me.”
“O.K. Count me in.”
Pop!
The orderly looked up from his paper. But none of the buttons showed a light. So, presumably, none of the patients, wanted attention. He went back to his reading.
Pop!
It sounded a little like a breaking light bulb. The orderly sighed, put away his paper, and began prowling. As he approached the room of the mad professor, No. 14, he noticed a smell of limburger.
Pop!
There was no doubt that the noise came from No. 14. The orderly stuck his head in.
At one side of the room sat Ira Methuen. He held a contraption made of a length of glass rod and assorted wires. At the other side of the room, on the floor, lay a number of crumbs of cheese. A cockroach scuttled out of the shadows and made for the crumbs. Methuen sighted along his glass rod and pressed a button. Pop! A flash, and there was no more cockroach.
Methuen swung the rod toward the orderly. “Stand back, sir! I’m Buck Rogers, and this is my disintegrator!”
“Hey,” said the orderly feebly. The old goof might be crazy, but after what happened to the roach—He ducked out and summoned a squad of interns.
But the interns had no trouble with Methuen. He tossed the contraption on the bed, saying: “If I thought it mattered, I’d raise a hell of a stink about cockroaches in a supposedly sanitary hospital.”
One of the interns protested: “But I’m sure there aren’t any here.”
“What do you call that?” asked Methuen dryly, pointing at the shattered remains of one of his victims.
“It must have been attracted in from the outside by the smell of that cheese. Phew! Judson, clean up the floor. What is this, professor?” He picked up the rod and the flashlight battery attached to it.
Methuen waved a deprecating hand. “Nothing important. Just a little gadget I thought up. By applying the right e.m.f. to pure crown glass, it’s possible to raise its index of refraction to a remarkable degree. The result is that light striking the glass is so slowed up that it takes weeks to pass through it in the ordinary manner. The light that is thus trapped can be released by making a small spark near the glass. So I simply lay the rod on the window sill all afternoon to soak up sunlight, a part of which is released by making a spark with that button. Thus I can shoot an hour’s accumulated light-energy out the front end of the rod in a very small fraction of a second. Naturally when this beam hits an opaque object, it raises its temperature. So I’ve been amusing myself by luring the roaches in here and exploding them. You may have the thing; its charge is about exhausted.”
The intern was stern. “That’s a dangerous weapon. We can’t let you play with things like that.”
“Oh, can’t you? Not that it matters, but I’m only staying here because I’m taken care of. I can walk out any time I like.”
“No you can’t, professor. You’re under a temporary commitment for observation.”
“That’s all right, son. I still say I can walk out whenever I feel like it. I just don’t care much whether I do or not.” With which Methuen began tuning the radio by his bed, ignoring the interns.
Exactly twelve hours later, at 10 a.m., Ira Methuen’s room in the hospital was found to be vacant. A search of the hospital failed to locate him. The only clue to his disappearance was the fact that his radio had been disemboweled. Tubes, wires, and condensers lay in untidy heaps on the floor.
The New Haven police cars received instructions to look for a tall, thin man with gray hair and goatee, probably armed with death rays, disintegrators, and all the other advanced weapons of fact and fiction.
For hours they scoured the city with screaming sirens. They finally located the menacing madman, sitting placidly on a park bench three blocks from the hospital and reading a newspaper. Far from resisting, he grinned at them and looked at his watch. “Three hours and forty-eight minutes. Not bad, boys, not bad, considering how carefully I hid myself.”
One of the cops pounced on a bulge in Methuen’s pocket. The bulge was made by another wire contraption. Methuen shrugged. “My hyperbolic solenoid. Gives you a conical magnetic field, and enables you to manipulate ferrous objects at a distance. I picked the lock of the door to the elevators with it.”
When Bruce Inglehart arrived at the hospital about four, he was told Methuen was asleep. That was amended to the statement that Methuen was getting up, and could see a visitor in a few minutes. He found Methuen in a dressing gown.
Methuen said: “Hello, Bruce. They had me wrapped up in a wet sheet, like a mummy. It’s swell for naps; relaxes you. I told ‘em they could do it whenever they liked. I think they were annoyed about my getting out.”
Inglehart was slightly embarrassed.
Methuen said: “Don’t worry; I’m not mad at you. I realize that nothing matters, including resentments. And I’ve had a most amusing time here. Just watch them fizz the next time I escape.”
“But don’t you care about your future?” said Inglehart. “They’ll transfer you to a padded cell at Middletown—”
Methuen waved a hand. “That doesn’t bother me. I’ll have fun there, too.”
“But how about Johnny Black, and Dalrymple’s endowment?”
“I don’t give a damn what happens to them.”
Here the orderly stuck his head in the door briefly to check up on this unpredictable patient. The hospital, being short-handed, was unable to keep a continuous watch on him.
Methuen continued: “Not that I don’t like Johnny. But when you get a real sense of proportion, like mine, you realize that humanity is nothing but a sort of skin disease on a ball of dirt, and that no effort beyond subsistence, shelter, and casual amusement is worth while. The State of Connecticut is willing to provide the first two for me, so I shall devote myself to the third. What’s that you have there?”
Inglehart thought, “They’re right; he’s become a childishly irresponsible scientific genius.” Keeping his back to the door, the reporter brought out his family heirloom: a big silver pocket flask dating back to the fabulous prohibition period. His aunt Martha had left it to him, and he himself expected to will it to a museum.
“Apricot brandy,” he murmured. Johnny had tipped him off to Methuen’s tastes.
“Now, Bruce, that’s something sensible. Why didn’t you bring it out sooner, instead of making futile appeals to my sense of duty?”