old deedles ad stick theb id people that wadt theb.”
“Aw, Ellie—”
“I dod’t care, I dod’t like deedles!” she wailed, burying her face in his shirt.
He held her close, making comforting little noises. It was no use, he reflected sadly. Science just wasn’t Ellie’s long suit; she didn’t know a cold vaccine from a case of smallpox, and no appeal to logic or common sense could surmount her irrational fear of hypodermics. “All right, nobody’s going to make you do anything you don’t want to,” he said.
“Ad eddyway, thik of the poor tissue badufacturers,” she sniffled, wiping her nose with a pink facial tissue. “All their little childred starvig to death.”
“Say, you have got a cold,” said Phillip, sniffing. “You’ve got on enough perfume to fell an ox.” He wiped away tears and grinned at her. “Come on now, fix your face. Dinner at the Driftwood? I hear they have marvelous lamb chops.”
It was a mellow evening. The lamb chops were delectable—the tastiest lamb chops he had ever eaten, he thought, even being blessed with as good a cook as Ellie for a spouse. Ellie dripped and blew continuously, but refused to go home until they had taken in a movie, and stopped by to dance a while. “I hardly ever gedt to see you eddy bore,” she said. “All because of that dasty bedicide you’re givig people.”
It was true, of course. The work at the lab was endless. They danced, but came home early nevertheless. Phillip needed all the sleep he could get.
He awoke once during the night to a parade of sneezes from his wife, and rolled over, frowning sleepily to himself. It was ignominious, in a way—his own wife refusing the fruit of all those months of work.
And cold or no cold, she surely was using a whale of a lot of perfume.
He awoke, suddenly, began to stretch, and sat bolt upright in bed, staring wildly about the room. Pale morning sunlight drifted in the window. Downstairs he heard Ellie stirring in the kitchen.
For a moment he thought he was suffocating. He leaped out of bed, stared at the vanity table across the room. “Somebody’s spilled the whole damned bottle—”
The heavy sick-sweet miasma hung like a cloud around him, drenching the room. With every breath it grew thicker. He searched the table top frantically, but there were no empty bottles. His head began to spin from the sickening effluvium.
He blinked in confusion, his hand trembling as he lit a cigarette. No need to panic, he thought. She probably knocked a bottle over when she was dressing. He took a deep puff, and burst into a paroxysm of coughing as acrid fumes burned down his throat to his lungs.
“Ellie!” He rushed into the hall, still coughing. The match smell had given way to the harsh, caustic stench of burning weeds. He stared at his cigarette in horror and threw it into the sink. The smell grew worse. He threw open the hall closet, expecting smoke to come billowing out. “Ellie! Somebody’s burning down the house!”
“Whadtever are you talking about?” Ellie’s voice came from the stair well. “It’s just the toast I burned, silly.”
He rushed down the stairs two at a time—and nearly gagged as he reached the bottom. The smell of hot, rancid grease struck him like a solid wall. It was intermingled with an oily smell of boiled and parboiled coffee, overpowering in its intensity. By the time he reached the kitchen he was holding his nose, tears pouring from his eyes. “Ellie, what are you doing in here?”
She stared at him. “I’b baking breakfast.”
“But don’t you smell it?”
“Sbell whadt?” said Ellie.
On the stove the automatic percolator was making small, promising noises. In the frying pan four sunnyside eggs were sizzling; half a dozen strips of bacon drained on a paper towel on the sideboard. It couldn’t have looked more innocent.
Cautiously, Phillip released his nose, sniffed. The stench nearly choked him. “You mean you don’t smell anything strange?”
“I did’t sbell eddythig, period,” said Ellie defensively.
“The coffee, the bacon—come here a minute.”
She reeked—of bacon, of coffee, of burned toast, but mostly of perfume. “Did you put on any fresh perfume this morning?”
“Before breakfast? Dod’t be ridiculous.”
“Not even a drop?” Phillip was turning very white.
“Dot a drop.”
He shook his head. “Now, wait a minute. This must be all in my mind. I’m—just imagining things, that’s all. Working too hard, hysterical reaction. In a minute it’ll all go away.” He poured a cup of coffee, added cream and sugar.
But he couldn’t get it close enough to taste it. It smelled as if it had been boiling three weeks in a rancid pot. It was the smell of coffee, all right, but a smell that was fiendishly distorted, overpoweringly, nauseatingly magnified. It pervaded the room and burned his throat and brought tears gushing to his eyes.
Slowly, realization began to dawn. He spilled the coffee as he set the cup down. The perfume. The coffee. The cigarette….
“My hat,” he choked. “Get me my hat. I’ve got to get to the laboratory.”
It got worse all the way downtown. He fought down waves of nausea as the smell of damp, rotting earth rose from his front yard in a gray cloud. The neighbor’s dog dashed out to greet him, exuding the great-grandfather of all doggy odors. As Phillip waited for the bus, every passing car fouled the air with noxious fumes, gagging him, doubling him up with coughing as he dabbed at his streaming eyes.
Nobody else seemed to notice anything wrong at all.
The bus ride was a nightmare. It was a damp, rainy day; the inside of the bus smelled like the men’s locker room after a big game. A bleary-eyed man with three-days’ stubble on his chin flopped down in the seat next to him, and Phillip reeled back with a jolt to the job he had held in his student days, cleaning vats in the brewery.
“It’sh a great morning,” Bleary-eyes breathed at him, “huh, Doc?” Phillip blanched. To top it, the man had had a breakfast of salami. In the seat ahead, a fat man held a dead cigar clamped in his mouth like a rank growth. Phillip’s stomach began rolling; he sank his face into his hand, trying unobtrusively to clamp his nostrils. With a groan of deliverance he lurched off the bus at the laboratory gate.
He met Jake Miles coming up the steps. Jake looked pale, too pale.
“Morning,” Phillip said weakly. “Nice day. Looks like the sun might come through.”
“Yeah,” said Jake. “Nice day. You—uh—feel all right this morning?”
“Fine, fine.” Phillip tossed his hat in the closet, opened the incubator on his culture tubes, trying to look busy. He slammed the door after one whiff and gripped the edge of the work table with whitening knuckles. “Why?”
“Oh, nothing. Thought you looked a little peaked, was all.”
They stared at each other in silence. Then, as though by signal, their eyes turned to the office at the end of the lab.
“Coffin come in yet?”
Jake nodded. “He’s in there. He’s got the door locked.”
“I think he’s going to have to open it,” said Phillip.
A gray-faced Dr. Coffin unlocked the door, backed quickly toward the wall. The room reeked of kitchen deodorant. “Stay right where you are,” Coffin squeaked. “Don’t come a step closer. I can’t see you now. I’m—I’m busy, I’ve got work that has to be done—”
“You’re telling me,” growled Phillip. He motioned Jake into the office and locked the door carefully. Then he turned to Coffin. “When did it start for you?”
Coffin was trembling. “Right after supper last night. I thought I was going to suffocate. Got up and walked the streets all night. My God, what a stench!”
“Jake?”
Dr. Miles shook his head. “Sometime this morning, I don’t know when. I woke up with it.”
“That’s when it hit me,” said Phillip.
