Two days, three hours, ten minutes.
And whatever the answer was, it was not malevolent. It was impersonal. If it had wanted to kill him, it had a chance last night; it need merely have affected something else other than the lye in that package. There’d been lye in the package when he’d picked it up; he could tell that by the weight. And then it had been five minutes after nine and instead of lye there’d been the small copper coin.
It wasn’t friendly, either; or it wouldn’t have subjected him to heat and anesthesia. But it must be something impersonal.
A coin instead of lye.
Were they all substitutions of one thing for another?
Hm-m-m. Lei for a golf ball. A coin for lye. A duck for a coin. But the heat? The ether? The angleworm?
He went to the window and looked out for a while into the warm sunlight falling on the green lawn, and he realized that life was very sweet. And that if he took this thing calmly and didn’t let it get him down again, he might yet lick it.
The first clue was already his.
Periodicity.
Take it calmly; think about other things. Keep your mind off the merry-go-round and maybe the answer will come.
He sat down on the edge of the bed and felt in his pocket for the pencil and notebook and they were still there, and the paper on which he’d made his calculations of timing. He studied those calculations carefully.
Calmly.
And at the end of the list he put down “9:05” and added the word “lye” and a dash. Lye had turned to-what? He drew a bracket and began to fill in words that could be used to describe the coin: coin-copper-disk. But those were general. There must be a specific name for the thing.
Maybe—
He pressed the button that would light a bulb outside his door and a moment later heard a key turn in the lock and the door opened. It was a male attendant this time.
Charlie smiled at him. “Morning,” he said. “Serve breakfast here, or do I eat the mattress?”
The attendant grinned, and looked a bit relieved. “Sure. Breakfast’s ready; I’ll bring you some.”
“And…uh-“
“Yes?”
“There’s something I want to look up,” Charlie told him. “Would there be an unabridged dictionary anywhere handy? And if there is, would it be asking too much for you to let me see it a few minutes?”
“Why—I guess it will he all right. There’s one down in the office and they don’t use it very often.”
“That’s swell. Thanks.”
But the key still turned in the lock when he left.
Breakfast came half an hour later, but the dictionary didn’t arrive until the middle of the morning. Charlie wondered if there had been a staff meeting to discuss its lethal possibilities. But anyway, it came.
He waited until the attendant had left and then put the big volume on the bed and opened it to the color plate that showed coins of the world. He took the copper coin out of his pocket and put it alongside the plate and began to compare it with the illustrations, particularly those of coins of the Balkan countries. No, nothing just like it among the copper coins. Try the silver-yes, there was a silver coin with the same mug on it. Rumanian. The lettering-yes, it was identically the same lettering except for the denomination.
Charlie turned to the coinage table. Under Rumania—He gasped.
It couldn’t be.
But it was.
It was impossible that the six things that had happened to him could have been—
He was breathing hard with excitement as he turned to the illustrations at the back of the dictionary, found the pages of birds, and began to look among the ducks. Speckled breast and short neck and darker stripe starting just above the eye—
And he knew he’d found the answer.
He’d found the factor, besides periodicity, that connected the things that had happened. If it fitted the others, he could be sure. The angleworm? Why-sure-and he grinned at that one. The heat wave? Obvious. And the affair on the golf course? That was harder, but a bit of thought gave it to him.
The matter of the ether stumped him for a while. It took a lot of pacing up and down to solve that one, but finally he managed to do it.
And then? Well, what could he do about it? Periodicity? Yes, that fitted in. If—
Next time would be-hm-m-m-12:15 Saturday morning.
He sat down to think it over. The whole thing was completely incredible. The answer was harder to swallow than the problem.
But-they all fitted. Six coincidences, spaced an exact length of time apart?
All right then, forget how incredible it is, and what are you going to do about it? How are you going to get there to let them know?
Well-maybe take advantage of the phenomenon itself?
The dictionary was still there and Charlie went back to it and began to look in the gazcteer. Under “H—”
Whem! There was one that gave him a double chance. And within a hundred miles.
If he could get out of here—
He rang the bell, and the attendant came. “Through with the dictionary,” Charlie told him. “And listen, could I talk to the doctor in charge of my case?”
It proved that the doctor in charge was still Doc Palmer, and that he was coming up anyway.
He shook hands with Charlie and smiled at him. That was a good sign, or was it?
Well, now if he could lie convincingly enough
“Doe, I feel swell this morning,” said Charlie. “And listen—I remembered something I want to tell you about. Something that happened to me Sunday, couple of days before that first time I was taken to the hospital.”
“What was it, Charles?”
“I did go swimming, and that accounts for the sunburn that was showing up on Tuesday morning, and maybe for some other things. I’d borrowed Pete Johnson’s car—” Would they check up on that? Maybe not. “—and I got lost off the road and found a swell pool and stripped off the bank and I think I must have grazed my head on a rock because the next thing I remember I was back in town.”
“Hm-m-m,” said Doc Palmer. “So that accounts for the sunburn, and maybe it can account for—”
“Funny that it just came back to me this morning when I woke up,” said Charlie. “I guess—”
“I told those fools,” said Doc Palmer, “that there couldn’t be any connection between the third-degree burn and your fainting. Of course there was, in a way. I mean your hitting your head while you were swimming would account—Charles, I’m sure glad this came back to you. At least we now know the cause of the way you’ve acted, and we can treat it. In fact, maybe you’re cured already.”
“I think so, doc. I sure feel swell now. Like I was just waking up from a nightmare. I guess I made a fool of myself a couple of times. I have a vague recollection of buying some ether once, and something about some lye—but those are like things that happened in a dream, and now my mind’s as clear as a bell. Something seemed to pop this morning, and I was all right again.”
Doc Palmer sighed. “I’m relieved, Charles. Frankly, you had us quite worried. Of course, I’ll have to talk this over with the staff and we’ll have to examine you pretty thoroughly, but I think—”
There were the other doctors, and they asked questions and they examined his skull—but whatever lesion had been made by the rock seemed to have healed. Anyway, they couldn’t find it.
If it hadn’t been for his suicide attempt of the evening before, he could have walked out of the hospital then and there. But because of that, they insisted on his remaining, under observation for twenty-four hours. And Charlie agreed; that would let him out some time Friday afternoon, and it wasn’t until twelve-fifteen Saturday morning that it would happen.