“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.”