“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?”