Scent Makes a Difference

By JAMES STAMERS
Illustrated by DICK FRANCIS
What I wanted was a good night's sleep. What I got was visitation rights with the most exasperating pack of sleepwalkers in history.
A fried egg came floating up through the stone steps of the Medical Center and broke on my shoe. According to my watch, it was time for the breakfast I didn't have that morning, so I waited a moment for the usual two rashers of bacon.
When they materialized, I hopped aside to avoid them and went back into the building, where the elevator took me straight up to the psychiatric floor, without asking.
Your blood pressure, salts, minerals, vitamins, basal metabolism, brain pattern, nervous reflexes and skin temperature control are within accepted tolerances, it droned, opening the doors to let me off. You have no clinical organic disorders; you weigh a hundred and fifty-two pounds, Earth, measure six feet one inch, and have a clear pallid complexion and an egg on your shoe.
I walked down the corridor to Dr. Doogle Spacio-Psycho Please Enter and went determinedly in.
Name, please, said the blonde receptionist, tapping her nail eroder.
Jones. Harry Jones.
Mr. Harry K. Jones, the physicist?
Yes.
Oh, no, she said, fiddling with the appointment list, Mr. Harry K. Jones has just had his morning appointment and left.