Cunningham, himself, was not sober. I looked at Dr. Sue Calicoo. She hissed, "If you mention anything about the tunnel I'll brain you! Anything! Do you understand?" I chased after Cunningham, hauled back with one hand and clipped him carefully with the other. I slammed the door and told Sue, "Help me sober him up." She whistled softly. "He's not that drunk. Bring him to and you'll find out." I worked on his heavy neck for a moment until his eyes flickered. I was in no mood to make him comfortable, so I just propped his back against a packing-case and took off on him. "What kind of a travesty on the practice of medicine do you call this?" I began. Sue yawned and went to join the party. "Call me when the patty-cake is baked," she said as she closed the door. The glare of hostility gradually vanished from Cunningham's handsome face. Without it he looked better. He lit a cigarette, thought for a moment and smiled at me. "Have you been kissing my partner?" I blurbled in my throat. He went on, "You are acting as strangely as Sue did. I have often conjectured that if you could bottle Sue's kisses adrenalin would be obsolete." "You--kiss her--often?" I asked against my will. "Only twice. The day she came to work, and two weeks later when they took the stitches out of my head. The second one was just to show there were no hard feelings." "She loves you," I said with inane persistence. He shrugged, "Could be. But she means matrimony. I flunked that once. Won't take the test again. But now, Doctor, you didn't come here to make a match, surely. Sue reports that the M.P. board takes a dim view of my Symptometers. Have you filed a report yet?" he asked warily. "Not quite yet," I admitted. Blueboids. Sue Calicoo. Brooklyn in the Spring. "And when your respiration becomes normal again," Cunningham assured me, "I think you will realize that such a report will be difficult to file. Am I right?" He hoisted himself from the carpet. "You know," he went on, "this investigation was sure to come. I knew it. And I guess it threw me a little more than I thought it would. Now that it's here I'm relieved. I think they sent the right man, Doctor Klinghammer." * * * * * He fished a bottle from the debris on one of the benches and offered it to me. He did it in such a neighborly manner that in my preoccupation I accepted and tilted down at least a deciliter before coming to my senses. Then it was too late. A remarkable thing happened when that liquefied plutonium hit bottom. I twanged like a sixty-pound bow, and I began laughing. I felt sorry for this poor, misguided Romeo. The solution to his whole problem spread before me like an atlas. Slowly his smile vanished. "Before we discuss this further, I'd like to impress a point or two. Those coin machines are only a means to an end." He pulled heavily at the bottle, took me by the arm and led me over to the huge, half-created machine at the end of the lab.