“Shay lis’en,” he broke in. “If you don’t tell where at, I can’t find you. Tell in code.”
“Ain’t I telling you just as fast as I can?” she retorted. “I’ve been talking just as fast as I could make my tongue go ever since you finally answered me, and you took an awful long time in answering, and I can’t tell you where I am at if you don’t let me talk, and I think you are a brute, and I believe you are still drunk, and here is the location in code: ‘693-1-41: 396-1-141: 356-1-22: 690-2-142: and be sure you put it down on paper right away so you don’t forget, and—”
But Algernon had “hung up.”
By now he was sober enough to realize that he was not sober enough for the task in hand, so he quickly snapped the bracelets of an “Electric Regenerator” around his wrists, set the regulator at “2 seconds,” lapsed into unconsciousness—and awoke at the end of that time an entirely different man, as the result of the equivalent of two nights’ natural sleep.
His first move on awakening was to reach for a button in the desk before him marked “Package Transporter”; but he paused with the movement half completed, as a look of pain distorted his face. For a moment he clasped both hands across his forehead, moaning, in helpless misery: “My God! What a headache!”
His helplessness, however, was only temporary. Turning to a silver urn behind him, which bore the golden-inlaid legend: “Pasteurized Water,” he pressed what appeared to be a part of a carved figure in the mahogany base and a secret drawer shot out revealing a number of coffee cups, spoons and a box of tablets labeled: “Equivalent—2 Spoons Sugar and 1 Jigger Cream.” Dropping one of these tablets and a spoon into a cup, he set it down on his desk. Next he took a diminutive collapsible microscope, with a lens of flexible glass, out of his pocket; and, with its aid, picked out an all-but-invisible needle-point concealed in the filigree ornamentation of the faucet of the urn. This he pressed with his finger nail. Then he pushed a button in the faucet labeled “Hot,” and filled the coffee cup as he mumbled jubilantly to himself: “Some trick this! You get your ‘pasteurized water’ according to government regulations all right, but—oh! You naughty little needle.” He eyed the dubious looking mixture that flowed into the cup for a suspicious moment, tasted it hopefully—and then, livid with rage, spat the stuff out and hurled the cup across the room.
Speechless for a moment, he controlled himself with an effort; and then, with desperate haste, unlocked a private drawer in his desk and opened it half-way to a visible line. Pulling a cord hanging over his head, which started an electric fan going—and which, in this precise connection, also caused a slight orifice in the panel of the drawer to unfold, revealing an assortment of crystalline-white and brownish-looking pills—he selected one of the white pills, placed it in his mouth and crunched it between his teeth to get quick action, in spite of his vigilant valet’s “Begging your pardon, sir,” protest.
“Can’t help it, John,” he said. “This is a real emergency and I simply have got to have something. On the face of things, it looks like the narcotics are the only genuine stuff left to us by the ‘Bootlegger-Smuggler-Prohibitionist Combine’.”
The look of pain that had distorted his features quickly disappeared, and in its place there came the comforting jubilance of an anticipated pleasure. Turning to a combination-lock to the cash drawer of his desk; he set the knob at “0,” turned it forward to “20,” back to “15,” forward again to “2,” back to “1,” again forward to “3,” back a full revolution again to “3” and lastly forward to the final “15.” Then he applied a firm, steady pressure to the knob, and a circular segment of the floor upon which the desk stood, and whose scarcely discernable outline blended so perfectly with the inlaid floral scroll design of the floor as to appear an integral part of it, revolved half-around, disclosing a considerable compartment filled with sealed tins of tobacco, and a varied assortment of pipes. Filling a “briar” from a half-empty tin, he adjusted the patent “Smoke Consumer,” pushed a button in the desk which caused the room to be sprayed with an atomized disinfectant which deodorized the fumes and prevented external detection of the felonious act, “lit up,” and took long, deep draughts at the pipe. The serene content of an anticipated joy realized, stole over his face; and, discreetly to himself, he murmured defiantly: “The skunks caught me napping with their ‘Anti-coffee’ law all right, but I was ‘Johnnie-on-the-spot’ when they prohibited tobacco, and I prepared myself for life.”