"C'mon," I said, "let's go to the room and we'll have some coffee. We can talk about it there."
"Sure," he said, and his voice was suddenly subdued. "Sure, why not?"
We went to the hotel room and I made some coffee, being careful to slip enough sleeping tablets in Johnny's cup. In a few minutes he was sprawled across the bed.
I went to the window and looked at the glowing beads of traffic below. I looked at the sky—at the stars. Spiders in the sky; what a story that would make. The editor'd slap me in the booby hatch if I ever handed in a who-what-when-where like that.
When I left for work the next morning, Johnny was still snoozing. Let him sleep it off. Do him good. He'd been working too hard at the lab, anyhow.
I couldn't get back to the hotel room that morning, though I wanted to see if Johnny was okay. I was pretty busy writing a human interest yarn kidding the pants off some astronomer's notion that light waves coming from certain portions of the sky were being deflected or refracted slightly for no discernible reason.
The amount of difference was microscopic, and I wrote it up to emphasize its ridiculous splitting of hairs and the fact that you can't take some of these crackpots seriously. Here the world is on the verge of coming apart at the seams, and they worry about wayward light rays.
During the afternoon, I managed to drop into the hotel to see if Johnny had slept off the liquor and the sleeping tablets. He had, and he was sitting on the edge of the bed, looking grim—and a little perplexed.
"How ya feeling, Johnny?" I said.
"Great," he said, though he didn't sound it. "Things seem a lot clearer this morning."