"Want a bromo?" a familiar voice asked sympathetically.
Bethelman forced his eyes open. The stocky, smiling face of Dr. Elijah Kamiroff floated above him.
Bethelman sat straight up in bed, his eyes wide. The effort made his head hurt worse. He looked around.
He was in the upstairs guest bedroom of Dr. Kamiroff's suburban home.
He turned to look at the biochemist, who was busily mixing a bromo.
"What date is this?" he asked.
Kamiroff looked at him with mild blue eyes. "It's the second," he said. "Why?"
Bethelman took the glass of fizzing liquid and downed it. The pattern was beginning to make sense. He had gone to sleep in Boston the night of the first and awakened in New York on the fifteenth. Then he had gone to sleep in New York on the twenty-ninth and awakened on the second.
It made a weird kind of sense.
He handed the empty glass back to the biochemist and said: "Dr. Kamiroff, sit down. I want to tell you something."