The Collection (68 page)

Maybe it's nine-five now. Hurry!

Door marked "Utility"-he jerked it open.

Shelves of linen. Mops and brooms. You can't kill yourself
with a mop or broom. You can smother yourself with linen, but not in less than
a minute and probably with doctors and interns coming.

Uniforms. Bucket. Kick the bucket, but
how?
Ah. There
on the upper shelf--

A cardboard carton, already opened, marked
^"
Lye."

Painful: Sure, but it wouldn
^'
t last long. Get it
over with. The box in his hand, the opened corner, and tilted the contents into
his mouth.

But it was not a white, searing powder. All that had come
out of the cardboard carton was a small copper coin. He took it out of his
mouth and held it, and looked at it with dazed eves.

It was five minutes after nine, then; out of the box of lye
had come a small foreign copper coin. No, it wasn't the Chinese haikwan tael
that had disappeared from the showcase in the museum, because that was silver
and had a hole in it. And the lettering on this wasn't Chinese. If he
remembered his coins, it looked Rumanian.

And then strong hands took hold of Charlie
^'
s arms
and led him back to his room and somebody talked to him quietly for a long
time.

And he slept.

He awoke Thursday morning from a dreamless sleep, and felt
strangely refreshed and, oddly, quite cheerful.

Probably because, in that awful thirty-five minutes of
waiting he
^'
d experienced the evening before, he
^'
d hit rock
bottom. And bounced.

A psychiatrist might have explained it by saying that he
had, under stress of great emotion, suffered a temporary lesion and gone into
a quasi-state of maniac-depressive insanity. Psychiatrists like to make simple
things complicated.

The fact was that the poor guy had gone off his rocker for a
few minutes.

And the absurd anticlimax of that small copper coin had been
the turning point. Look for something horrible, unnameable--and get a small
copper coin. Practically a prophylactic treatment, if you've got enough stuff
in you to laugh.

And Charlie had laughed last night. Probably that was why
his room this morning seemed to be a different room. The window was in a
different wall, and it had bars across it. Psychiatrists often misinterpret a
sense of humor.

But this morning he felt cheerful enough to overlook the
implications of the barred windows. Here it was a bright new day with the sun
streaming through the bars, and it was
another
day and he was still
alive and had another chance.

Best of all, he knew he wasn't insane.

Unless--

He looked and there were his clothes hanging over the hack
of a chair and he sat up and put his legs out of bed, and reached for his coat
pocket to see if the coin was still where he'd put it when they
^'
d grabbed
him.

It was.

Then--

He dressed slowly, thoughtfully.

Now, in the light of morning, it came to him that the thing
could he solved. Six-now there were six-screwy things, but they were definitely
connected. Periodicity proved it.

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.

Plenty of time to go a hundred miles.

If he just watched everything he did and said in the
meantime and made no move or remark which a psychiatrist could interpret--

He loafed and rested.

And at five o'clock Friday afternoon it was all right, and
he shook hands all the way round, and was a free man again. He'd promised to
report to Doc Palmer regularly for a few weeks.

But he was free.

Rain and darkness.

A cold, unpleasant drizzle that started to find its way through
his clothes and down the hack of his neck and into his shoes even as he stepped
off the train onto the small wooden platform.

But the station was there, and on the side of it was the
sign that told him the name of the town. Charlie looked at it and grinned, and
went into the station. There was a cheerful little coal stove in the middle of
the room. He had time to get warmed up before he started. He held out his hands
to the stove.

Over at one side of the room, a grizzled head regarded him
curiously through the ticket window. Charlie nodded at the head and the head
nodded back.

^"
Stavin' here a while, stranger?" the
head asked.

"Not exactly,
^"
said Charlie.
"Anyway, I hope not. I mean--
^"
Heck, after that whopper he'd
told the psychiatrists back at the hospital, he shouldn't have any trouble
lying to a ticket agent in a little country town. "I mean, I don't think
so:"

^"
Ain't no more trains out tonight, mister.
Got a place to stay? If not, my wife sometimes takes in boarders for short
spells."

^"
Thanks,
^"
said Charlie.
"I've made arrangements." He starred to add "I hope
^"
and then realized that it would lead him further into discussion.

He glanced at the clock and at his wrist watch and saw that
both agreed that it was a quarter to twelve.

"How big is this town?
^"
he asked.
"I don
^'
t mean population. I mean, how far out the turnpike is
it to the township line? The border of town.
^"