Fredric Brown - The Fredric Brown Megapack

“Shut up,” said Charlie. “I’m trying to think.”

I shut up and let him think.

And by the time I had the coffee made, I realized how silly I’d been talking.

I brought the coffee. By that time, Charlie had the lid off the pillbox affair and was examining its innards. I could see the little pendulum that worked the switch, and a lot of wires.

He said, “I don’t understand it. There’s nothing broken.”

“Maybe the battery,” I suggested.

I got out my flashlight and we used its bulb to test the little dry cell. The bulb burned brightly.

“I don’t understand it,” Charlie said.

Then I suggested, “Let’s start from the beginning, Charlie. It did work. It got us stuff for drinks. It mixed one pair of drinks. It— Say—”

“I was just thinking of that,” Charlie said. “When you said, ‘Blow me down,’ and bent over to pick up the drink, what happened?”

“A current of air. It blew me down, Charlie, literally. How could I have done that myself? And notice the difference in pronouns. I said, ‘Blow me down,’ then but later I said, ‘Shoot yourself.’ If I’d said, ‘Shoot me,’ why maybe—”

There was that prickle down my spine again.

Charlie looked dazed. He said, “But I worked it out on scientific principles, Hank. It wasn’t just an accident. I couldn’t be wrong. You mean you think that— It’s utterly silly!”

I’d been thinking just that, again. But differently. “Look,” I said, “let’s concede that your apparatus set up a field that had an effect upon the brain, but just for argument let’s assume you misunderstood the nature of the field. Suppose it enabled you to project a thought. And you were thinking about Yehudi; you must have been because you jokingly called it the Yehudi principle, and so Yehudi—”

“That’s silly,” said Charlie.

“Give me a better one.

He went over to the hot plate for another cup of coffee.

And I remembered something then, and went over to the typewriter table. I picked up the story, shuffling the pages as I picked them up so the first page would come out on top, and I started to read.

I heard Charlie’s voice say, “Is it a good story, Hank?” I said, “G-g-g-g-g-g—”

Charlie took a look at my face and sprinted across the room to read over my shoulder. I handed him the first page. The title on it was

THE YEHUDI PRINCIPLE.

The story started:

“I am going crazy.

“Charlie Swann is going crazy, too. Maybe more than I am, because it was his dingbat. I mean, he made it and he thought he knew what it was and how it worked.”

As I read page after page I handed them to Charlie and he read them too. Yes, it was this story. The story you’re reading right now, including this part of it that I’m telling right now. Written before the last part of it happened.

Charlie was sitting down when he finished, and so was I. He looked at me and I looked at him.

He opened his mouth a few times and closed it again twice before he could get anything out. Finally he said, “ T-time, Hank. It had something to do with time too. It wrote in advance just what—Hank, I’ll make it work again. I got to. It’s something big. It’s—”

“It’s colossal,” I said. “But it’ll never work again. Yehudi’s dead. He shot himself upon the stair.”

“You’re crazy,” said Charlie.

“Not yet,” I told him. I looked down at the manuscript he’d handed back to me and read:

“I am going crazy.”

I am going crazy.

He had known it, somehow, when he had awakened that morning. I too knew it more surely now, staring out of the editorial room window into the early afternoon sunlight slanting down among the buildings to cast a pattern of light and shadow. He knew that soon, perhaps even today, something important was going to happen. Whether good or bad he did not know, but he darkly suspected. And with reason; there are few good things that may unexpectedly happen to a man, things, that is, of lasting importance. Disaster can strike from innumerable directions, in amazingly diverse ways.

A voice said, “Hey, Mr. Vine,” and he turned away from the window, slowly. That in itself was strange for it was not his manner to move slowly; he was a small, volatile man, almost catlike in the quickness of his reactions and his movements.

But this time something made him turn slowly from the window, almost as though he never again expected to see that chiaroscuro of an early afternoon.

He said, “Hi, Red.”

The freckled copy boy said, “His Nibs wants to see ya.”

“Now?”

“Naw. Atcher convenience. Sometime next week, maybe. If yer busy, give him an apperntment.” He put his fist against Red’s chin and shoved, and the copy boy staggered back in assumed distress.

He got up out of his chair and went over to the water cooler. He pressed his thumb on the button and water gurgled into the paper cup.

Harry Wheeler sauntered over and said, “Hiya, Nappy. What’s up? Going on the carpet?”

He said, “Sure, for a raise.”

He drank and crumpled the cup, tossing it into the waste basket. He went over to the door marked “Private” and went through it.

Walter J. Candler, the managing editor, looked up from the work on his desk and said affably, “Sit down, Vine. Be with you in a moment,” and then looked down again.

He slid into the chair opposite Candler, worried a cigarette out of his shirt pocket and lighted it. He studied the back of the sheet of paper of which the managing editor was reading the front. There wasn’t anything on the back of it.

The M.E. put the paper down and looked at him. “Vine, I’ve got a screwy one. You’re good on screwy ones.”

He grinned slowly at the M.E. He said, “If that’s a compliment, thanks.”

“It’s a compliment, all right. You’ve done some pretty tough things for us. This one’s different. I’ve never yet asked a reporter to do anything I wouldn’t do myself. I wouldn’t do this, so I’m not asking you to.”

The M.E. picked up the paper he’d been reading and then put it down again without even looking at it. “Ever hear of Ellsworth Joyce Randolph?”

“Head of the asylum? Hell yes, I’ve met him. Casually.”

“How’d he impress you?”

He was aware that the managing editor was staring at him intently, that it wasn’t too casual a question. He parried. “What do you mean: In what way? You mean is he a good Joe, is he a good politician, has he got a good bedside manner for a psychiatrist, or what?”

“I mean, how sane do you think he is?”

He looked at Candler and Candler wasn’t kidding. Candler was strictly deadpan.

He began to laugh, and then he stopped laughing. He leaned forward across Candler’s desk. “Ellsworth Joyce Randolph,” he said. “You’re talking about Ellsworth Joyce Randolph?”

Candler nodded. “Dr. Randolph was in here this morning. He told a rather strange story. He didn’t want me to print it. He did want me to check on it, to send our best man to check on it. He said if we found it was true we could print it in hundred and twenty line type in red ink.” Candler grinned wryly. “We could, at that.”

He stumped out his cigarette and studied Candler’s face. “But the story itself is so screwy you’re not sure whether Dr. Randolph himself might be insane?”

“Exactly.”

“And what’s tough about the assignment?”

“The doc says a reporter could get the story only from the inside.”

“You mean, go in as a guard or something?”

Candler said, “Something.”