He had to know.
He spent the next two weeks running down his activities during the blank period, and the more he worked, the more baffled he became. He had never been a gambling man, but he seemed to have become one over those two weeks. And a damned lucky one at that.
Horse races, the numbers game, even the stock market, all seemed to break right for him. In the blank two weeks, Bethelman had made himself close to fifty thousand dollars! And every so often, he'd come across a little note from himself, telling him that he was doing fine. Once, a note he found in his bureau drawer, tucked among the socks, told him to invest every cent he had in a certain security and then sell the next day. He did it and made another nine thousand dollars.
It was exactly four weeks to the day after he had sat in the bar with Dr. Kamiroff that he found the last cryptic note to himself. It was in his unabridged dictionary, laying right on the page which contained the word he happened to be looking up.
Tomorrow morning, it said, you will see Dr. Kamiroff. But don't expect him to explain anything to you until you have explained everything to him.
So he would see Kamiroff in the morning, eh? He'd been trying to get hold of the biochemist every day for the past two weeks—and there had been no results.
That night, just before bed-time, Bethelman drank a glass of beer. One glass. No more.
And that's why he couldn't understand waking up the next morning with a king-size hangover. He rolled over in bed, moaning—half afraid to open his eyes.
"Oooooh!" he said. "My head!"