Journalists -- Fiction; Short stories; Time travel -- Fiction
_There should be close to ten thousand dollars in the package_, the
note said. _You promised Marco a grand of it if number 367 won--which,
of course, it did. He got hold of the runner for you._
Again, the note was in his own handwriting.
He gave Marco the thousand and left. There were some things he'd have
to find out. He went to his apartment on 86th Street and put in a long
distance call to Dr. Elijah Kamiroff in Boston. After an hour, he was
informed that Dr. Kamiroff was out of town and was not expected back
for two weeks. Where had he gone? That was confidential; Dr. Kamiroff
had some work to do and did not wish to be disturbed.
Bethelman cursed the biochemist roundly and then went to his private
files, where he kept clippings of his own stories. Sure enough, there
were coverages of several things over the past two weeks, all properly
bylined.
Two weeks before, he had written the little article on research being
done on cancer at Boston University School of Medicine, most of which
he'd gotten from Dr. Kamiroff. No clues there; he'd evidently been
behaving naturally for the past two weeks. But why couldn't he remember
it? Why was his memory completely blanked out?
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!"
"Want a bromo?" a familiar voice asked sympathetically.
Bethelman forced his eyes open. The stocky, smiling face of Dr. Elijah
Kamiroff floated above him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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