The note was unsigned, but Bethelman didn't need a signature.
The handwriting was his own.
He looked at himself in the mirror behind the bar. He was clean shaven—which he hadn't been when he was drinking with Dr. Kamiroff in Boston. Also, he was wearing his tweed topcoat, which he had left in New York. A search of his pockets revealed the usual keys and change. In his billfold was three hundred dollars in cash—more than he'd ever carried around in his life—and a receipt for a new twenty-dollar hat. The receipt was dated the tenth.
He took off his hat and looked at it. Brand new, with his initials on the sweatband.
Evidently, he'd been doing something the past two weeks—but what?
He remembered talking to Kamiroff about the variability of time—something about a man named Dunne. And he remembered the biochemist saying that time travel was physically impossible. For a second or two, Bethelman wondered whether he'd been projected into the future somehow. But if he had, he reasoned, he'd still be wearing the same clothes he'd had on in Boston.
No, he decided, it's something else. I've gone off my rocker. I'm daffy as a dung beetle. What I need is a good psychiatrist.
But that didn't explain the note.
He took it out and looked at it again. It still said the same thing. He decided that before he went to a psychiatrist, he'd do what the note said. He'd go to Marco's.