"No, you don't!" pants Jode, grabbing me. "We got to settle this! You got to do something about it! You come along!"
We register, getting rooms next to each other. Jode comes in my room, boiling, and sits down grim. The seat ain't comfortable. Then I blink. Jode is removing large, thick packages of banknotes—folding money—from the hip pockets of the sailor pants. They go on the table. They are impressive.
"Where'd that come from?" I ask, trying to postpone things.
"Mr. Vachti," says Jode, grim, "was all set to pay fifty grand just to see proof that the elixir of youth worked. He told the Prof that. He taunted him with it. He waved the cash in front of his face and repeated, sneering, that he was ready to pay it just to see proof. Well—I'm proof, of a sort. He saw me. So when I went in the house to put on these clothes I stopped by where he'd locked it up. I'm entitled to it. But—you Buck! How did this happen to me?"
I feel very much embarrassed but I have got it figured out more or less. I say, uncomfortable: "Well-l-l, Jode," I says, "I guess it was because there ain't any real mandrake in America. Ashes of mandrake was called for, and I couldn't get any, so I hunted up a weed that is right much like mandrake. May-apple is what they call it. I used that. It's a close cousin, but it musta lacked one of those catalysts or anticatalysts real mandrake woulda had—"
Jode grabs me and shakes hard. "What happened! And how is it gonna be fixed?"
Reluctant, I haul a notebook outa my pocket. I open up to where I copied old Hermes Trismigestus' formula for making the elixir of youth.
"Look," I say. "The formula is headed, To Make an Olde Manne a Youthe Againe. It gives the directions I tried to follow. I—uh—I guess the answer is in this here last paragraph I come close to not copying at all. Uh—it says at the end, To Make an Aged Crone into a Younge Damsel: the formula is ye same, excepte ye ashe of mandrake is to bee lefte oute."
Jode whacks me. Hard. Wow! To be fair, I guess, I'd ha' done the same. But—anyway, Jode and me have a right nice cottage, now, and I got a pretty good private experimental laboratory in it, and I'm working on the problem of adjusting matters in a more nearly normal way. Jode ain't been after me so much lately, though. It looks what you might call a sort of change of viewpoint is developing. Jode always did go in for fancy clothes, and the opportunity and cash for fancy clothes are on the job. Jode dresses magnificent, and is kind of looking the world over from a new viewpoint. The new viewpoint gets more tolerable as time goes on. I am treated with a certain amount of respect and—like I said—I got a swell laboratory. I pass for Jode's brother. Jode seems to treat me like a kid brother, too. She gets mad as hell when I tell her she uses too much make-up.