The reporter, telling the thing humorously, suggested that probably the duck had mistaken the coin for a doughnut because of the hole, and had eaten it. And that the curator’s best revenge would be to eat the duck.
The police had been called in, but had taken the attitude that the whole affair must have been a practical joke. By whom or how accomplished, they didn’t know. Charlie put down the paper and stared moodily across the room.
Then it definitely hadn’t been a double hallucination, a case of his imagining both duck and attendant. And until now that the bottom had fallen out of that idea, Charlie hadn’t realized how strongly he’d counted on the possibility.
Now he was back where he’d started.
Unless—
But that was absurd. Of course, theoretically, the newspaper item he had just read could be an hallucination too, but—No, that was too much to swallow. According to that line of reasoning, if he went around to the museum and talked to the curator, the curator himself would be an hallucin—
“Your duck, sir.”
Charlie jumped halfway out of his chair.
Then he saw it was the waitress standing at the side of the table with his entree, and that she had spoken because he had the newspaper spread out and there wasn’t room for her to put it down.
“Didn’t you order roast duck, sir? I—”
Charlie stood up hastily, averting his eyes from the dish.
He said, “Sorry-gotta-make-a-phone-call,” and hastily handed the astonished waitress a dollar bill and strode out. Had he really ordered—Not exactly; he’d told her to bring him the special.
But eat duck? He’d rather eat… no, not fried angle-worms either. He shuddered.
He hurried back to the office, despite the fact that he was half an hour early, and felt better once he was within the safe four walls of the Hapworth Printing Co. Nothing out of the way had happened to him there.
As yet.
BASICALLY, Charlie Wills was quite a healthy young man. By two o’clock in the afternoon, he was so hungry that he sent one of the office boys downstairs to buy him a couple of sandwiches.
And he ate them. True, he lifted up the top slice of bread on each and looked inside. He didn’t know what he expected to find there, aside from boiled ham and butter and a piece of lettuce, but if he had found-in lieu of one of those ingredients-say, a Chinese silver coin with a hole in the middle, he would not have been more than ordinarily surprised.
It was a dull afternoon at the plant, and Charlie had time to do quite a bit of thinking. Even a bit of research. He remembered that the plant had printed, several years before, a textbook on entomology. He found the file copy and industriously paged through it looking for a winged worm. He found a few winged things that might be called worms, but none that even remotely resembled the angleworm with the halo. Not even, for that matter, if he disregarded the golden circle, and tried to make identification solely on the basis of body and wings.
No flying angleworms.
There weren’t any medical books in which he could look up-or try to look up-how one could get sun-burned without a sun.
But he looked up “tael” in the dictionary, and found that it was equivalent to a Jiang, which was one-sixteenth of a catty. And that one official hang is equivalent to a hectogram.
None of which seemed particularly helpful.
Shortly before five o’clock he went around saying good-by to everyone, because this was the last day at the office before his two weeks’ vacation, and the good-byes were naturally complicated by good wishes on his impending wedding-which would take place in the first week of his vacation.
He had to shake hands with everybody but the Pest, whom, of course, he’d be seeing frequently during the first few days of his vacation. In fact, he went home with her from work to have dinner with the Pembertons.
And it was a quiet, restful, pleasant dinner that left him feeling better than he’d felt since last Sunday morning. Here in the calm harbor of the Pemberton household, the absurd things that had happened to him seemed so far away and so utterly fantastic that he almost doubted if they had happened at all.
And he felt utterly, completely certain that it was all over. Things happened in threes, didn’t they? If any thing else happened—But it wouldn’t.
It didn’t, that night.
Jane solicitously sent him home at nine o’clock to get to bed early. But she kissed him good night so tenderly, and withal so effectively, that he walked down the street with his head in rosy clouds.
Then, suddenly—out of nothing, as it were—Charlie remembered that the museum attendant had been suspended, and was losing three days’ pay, because of the episode of the duck in the showcase. And if that duck business was Charlie’s fault-even indirectly-didn’t he owe it to the guy to step forward and explain to the museum directors that the attendant had been in no way to blame, and that he should not be penalized?
After all, he, Charlie, had probably scared the poor attendant half out of his wits by suggesting that he could repeat the performance with a sarcophagus instead of a showcase, and the attendant had told such a disconnected story that he hadn’t been believed.
But-had the thing been his fault? Did he owe—
And there he was butting his head against that brick wall of impossibility again. Trying to solve the insoluble.
And he knew, suddenly, that he had been weak in not breaking his engagement to Jane. That what had happened three times within the short space of a week might all too easily happen again.
Gosh! Even at the ceremony. Suppose he reached for the wedding ring and pulled out a—
From the rosy clouds of bliss to the black mire of despair had proved to be a walk of less than a block.
Almost he turned back toward the Pemberton home to tell them tonight, then decided not to. Instead, he’d stop by and talk with Pete Johnson.
Maybe Pete—
What he really hoped was that Pete would talk him out of his decision.
PETE JOHNSON had a gallon jug, almost full, of wine. Mellow sherry. And Pete had sampled it, and was mellow, too.
He refused even to listen to Charlie, until his guest had drunk one glass and had a second on the table in front of him. Then he said, “You got something on your mind. O. K., shoot.”
“Lookit, Pete. I told you about that angleworm business. In fact, you were practically there when it happened. And you know about what happened Tuesday morning on my way to work. But yesterday-well, what happened was worse, I guess. Because another guy saw it. It was a duck.”
“What was a duck?”
“In a showcase at-Wait, I’ll start at the beginning.” And he did, and Pete listened.
“Well,” he said thoughtfully, “the fact that it was in the newspaper quashes one line of thought. Uh… fortunately. Listen, I don’t see what you got to worry about. Aren’t you making a mountain out of a few molehills?”
Charlie took another sip of the sherry and lighted a cigarette and said, “How?” quite hopefully.
“Well, three screwy things have happened. But you take any one by itself and it doesn’t amount to a hill of beans, does it? Any one of them can be explained. Where you bog down is in sitting there insisting on a blanket explanation for all of them.
“How do you know there is any connection at all? Now, take them separately-“
“You take them,” suggested Charlie. “How would you explain them so easy as all that?”