Fredric Brown - The Fredric Brown Megapack

Charlie said, “We should have asked for it in a glass.”

I looked at Charlie and then I looked at the puddle on the floor and then I looked at my hand. I stuck my index finger gingerly into my mouth and tasted.

Gin buck. With gin in it. I looked at Charlie again. He asked, “Did I blur?”

“Listen, Charlie,” I said. “I’ve known you for ten years, and we went to Tech together and— But if you pull another gag like that I’ll blur you, all right. I’ll—”

“Watch closer this time,” Charlie said. And again, looking off into space and not talking to me at all, he started talking. “Bring us a fifth of gin, in a bottle. Half a dozen lemons, sliced, on a plate. Two quart bottles of soda and a dish of ice cubes. Put it all on the table over there.”

He nodded his head, just like he had before, and darned if he didn’t blur. Blur was the best word for it.

“You blurred,” I said. I was getting a slight headache.

“I thought so,” he said. “But I was using a mirror when I tried it alone, and I thought maybe it was my eyes. That’s why I came over. You want to mix the drinks or shall I?”

I looked over at the table, and there was all the stuff he’d ordered. I swallowed a couple of times. “It’s real,” Charlie said. He was breathing a little hard, with suppressed excitement. “It works, Hank. It works . We’ll be rich! We can—”

Charlie kept on talking, but I got up slowly and went over to the table. The bottles and lemons and ice were really there. The bottles gurgled when shaken and the ice was cold.

In a minute I was going to worry about how they got there. Meanwhile and right now, I needed a drink. I got a couple of glasses out of the medicine cabinet and the bottle opener out of the file cabinet, and I made two drinks, about half gin.

Then I thought of something. I asked Charlie, “Does Yehudi want a drink, too?”

Charlie grinned. “Two’ll be enough,” he told me.

“To start with, maybe,” I said grimly. I handed him a drink—in a glass—and said, “To Yehudi.” I downed mine at a gulp and started mixing another.

Charlie said, “Me, too. Hey, wait a minute.”

“Under present circumstances,” I said, “a minute is a minute too long between drinks. In a minute I shall wait a minute, but—Hey, why don’t we let Yehudi mix ’em for us?”

“Just what I was going to suggest. Look, I want to try something. You put this headband on and tell him to. I want to watch you.”

“Me?”

“You,” he said. “It can’t do any harm, and I want to be sure it works for everybody and not just for me. It may be that it’s attuned merely to my brain. You try it.”

“Me?” I said.

“You,” he told me.

He’d taken it off and was holding it out to me, with the little flat dry cell dangling from it at the end of the wire. I took it and looked it over. It didn’t look dangerous. There couldn’t possibly be enough juice in so tiny a battery to do any harm.

I put it on.

“Mix us some drinks,” I said, and looked over at the table, but nothing happened.

“You got to nod just as you finish,” Charlie said. “There’s a little pendulum affair in the box over your forehead that works the switch.”

I said, “Mix us two gin bucks. In glasses, please.” And nodded. When my head came up again, there were the drinks, mixed. “Blow me down,” I said. And bent over to pick up my drink.

And there I was on the floor.

Charlie said, “Be careful, Hank. If you lean over forward, that’s the same as nodding. And don’t nod or lean just as you say something you don’t mean as an order.”

I sat up. “Fan me with a blowtorch,” I said.

But I didn’t nod. In fact, I didn’t move. When I realized what I’d said, I held my neck so rigid that it hurt, and didn’t quite breathe for fear I’d swing that pendulum.

Very gingerly, so as not to tilt it, I reached up and took off the headband and put it down on the floor.

Then I got up and felt myself all over. There were probably bruises, but no broken bones. I picked up the drink and drank it. It was a good drink, but I mixed the next one myself. With three-quarters gin.

With it in my hand, I circled around the headband, not coming within a yard of it, and sat down on the bed.

“Charlie,” I said, “you’ve got something there. I don’t know what it is, but what are we waiting for?”

“Meaning?” said Charlie.

“Meaning what any sensible man would mean. If that darned thing brings anything we ask for, well, let’s make it a party. Which would you rather have, Lili St. Cyr or Esther Williams? I’ll take the other.”

He shook his head sadly. “There are limitations, Hank. Maybe I’d better explain.”

“Personally,” I said, “I would prefer Lili to an explanation, but go ahead. Let’s start with Yehudi. The only two Yehudis I know are Yehudi Menuhin, the violinist, and Yehudi, the little man who wasn’t there. Somehow I don’t think Menuhin brought us that gin, so—”

“He didn’t. For that matter, neither did the little man who wasn’t there. I was kidding you, Hank. There isn’t any little man who wasn’t there.”

“Oh,” I said. I repeated it slowly, or started to. “There—isn’t any—little—man—who—wasn’t—” I gave up. “I think I begin to see,” I said. “What you mean is that there wasn’t any little man who isn’t here. But then, who’s Yehudi?”

“There isn’t any Yehudi, Hank. But the name, the idea, fitted so well that I called it that for short.”

“And what do you call it for long?”

“The automatic autosuggestive subvibratory super-accelerator.”

I drank the rest of my drink.

“Lovely,” I said. “I like the Yehudi principle better, though. But there’s just one thing. Who brought us that drink-stuff? The gin and the soda and the so forth?”

“I did. And you mixed our second-last, as well as our last drink. Now do you understand?”

“In a word,” I said, “not exactly.”

Charlie sighed. “A field is set up between the temple-plates which accelerates several thousand times, the molecular vibration and thereby the speed of organic matter—the brain, and thereby the body. The command given just before the switch is thrown acts as an autosuggestion and you carry out the order you’ve just given yourself. But so rapidly that no one can see you move; just a momentary blur as you move off and come back in practically the same instant. Is that clear?”

“Sure,” I told him. “Except for one thing. Who’s Yehudi?”

I went to the table and started mixing two more drinks. Seven-eighths gin.

Charlie said patiently, “The action is so rapid that it does not impress itself upon your memory. For some reason the memory is not affected by the acceleration. The effect—both to the user and to the observer—is of the spontaneous obedience of a command by…well, by the little man who wasn’t there.”

“Yehudi?”

“Why not?”

“Why not why not?” I asked. “Here, have another drink. It’s a bit weak, but so am I. So you got this gin, huh? Where?”

“Probably the nearest tavern. I don’t remember.”

“Pay for it?”

He pulled out his wallet and opened it. “I think there’s a fin missing. I probably left it in the register. My subconscious must be honest.”

“But what good is it?” I demanded. “I don’t mean your subconscious, Charlie, I mean the Yehudi principle. You could have just as easily bought that gin on the way here. I could just as easily have mixed a drink and known I was doing it. And if you’re sure it can’t go bring us Lili St. Cyr and Esther Williams—”

“It can’t. Look, it can’t do anything that you yourself can’t do. It isn’t an it. It’s you. Get that through your head, Hank, and you’ll understand.”