Slavko stopped pounding and said, “Huh?”
“Come, Slavko. But first say a polite good-by to Mr. Lamb. You may not be seeing him again.” Dr. Verner paused in the doorway and surveyed me with what seemed like genuine concern. “Dear boy,” he murmured, “you won’t forget that point about the reverse phonetics . . . ?”
He was gone and so (without more polite good-by than a grunt) was Slavko. I was alone with Carina, with the opportunity to disprove Dr. Verner’s fabulous narrative once and for all.
His story had made no pretense of explaining the presence of the vacuum cleaner.
And Inspector Abrahams’ theory had not even attempted to account for the still-revolving turntable.
I switched on the turntable of the Verner machine. Carefully I lowered the tonearm, let the oddly rounded needle settle into the first groove from the outer rim.
I heard that stunning final note in alt. So flawless was the Carina diction that I could hear, even in that range, the syllable to which it was sung: nem, the beginning of the reverse-Latin Amen.
Then I heard a distorted groan as the turntable abruptly slowed down from 78 to zero revolutions per minute. I looked at the switch, it was still on. I turned and saw Dr. Verner towering behind me, with a disconnected electric plug dangling from his hand.
“No,” he said softly—and there was a dignity and power in that softness that I had never heard in his most impressive bellows. “No, Mr. Lamb. You have a wife and two sons. I have no right to trifle with their lives merely to gratify an old man’s resentment of skepticism.”
Quietly he lifted the tone-arm, removed the record, restored it to its envelope, and refiled it. His deft, un-English hands were not at their steadiest.
“When Inspector Abrahams succeeds in tracing down Mr. Stambaugh,” he said firmly, “you shall hear this record in reverse. And not before then.”
And it just so happens they haven’t turned up Stambaugh yet.
The Ghost of Me
I gave my reflection hell. I was sleepy, of course. And I still didn’t know what noise had waked me; but I told it what I thought of mysterious figures that lurked across the room from you and eventually turned out to be your own image. I did a good job, too; I touched depths of my vocabulary that even the complications of the Votruba case hadn’t sounded.
Then I was wide awake and gasping. Throughout all my invective, the reflection had not once moved its lips. I groped behind me for the patient’s chair and sat down fast. The reflection remained standing.
Now, it was I. There was no doubt of that. Every feature was exactly similar, even down to the scar over my right eyebrow from the time a bunch of us painted Baltimore a mite too thoroughly. But this should have tipped me off from the start: the scar was on the right, not on the left where I’ve always seen it in a mirror’s reversal.
“Who are you?” I asked. It was not precisely a brilliant conversational opening, but it was the one thing I had to know or start baying the moon.
“Who are. you?” it asked right back.
Maybe you’ve come across those cockeyed mirrors which, by some trick arrangement of lenses, show you not the reversed mirror image but your actual appearance, as though you were outside and looking at yourself? Well, this was like that—exactly, detailedly me, but facing me rightway round and unreversed. And it stood when I sat down.
“Look,” I protested. “Isn’t it enough to be a madhouse mirror? Do you have to be an echo too?”
“Tell me who you are,” it insisted quietly. “I think I must be confused.”
I hadn’t quite plumbed my vocabulary before; I found a couple of fresh words now. “You think you’re confused? And what in the name of order and reason do you think I am?”
“That’s what I asked you,” it replied. “What are you? Because there must be a mistake somewhere.”
“All right,” I agreed. “If you want to play games. I’ll tell you what I am, if you’ll do the same. You chase me and I’ll chase you. I’m John Adams. I’m a doctor. I’ve got a Rockefeller grant to establish a clinic to study occupational disease among Pennsylvania cement workers—”
“—I’m working on a variation of the Zupperheim theory with excellent results, and I’m a registered Democrat but not quite a New Dealer,” it concluded, with the gloomiest frown I’ve ever noted outside a Russian novel.
My own forehead was not parchment-smooth. “That’s all true enough. But how do you know it? And now that I’ve told you I’m John Adams, will you kindly kick through with your half of the bargain?”
“That’s just the trouble,” it murmured reluctantly. “There must be a terrible mistake somewhere. I’ve heard of such things, of course, but I certainly never expected it to happen to me.”
I don’t have all the patience that a medical man really needs. This time when I said “Who are you?”it was a wild and ringing shout.
“Well, you see—” it said.
“I hardly know how to put this—” it began again.
“To be blunt about it,” it finally blurted out, “I’m the ghost of John Adams.”
I was glad I was sitting down. And I understood now why old Hasenfuss always recommended arms on the patient’s chair to give him something to grab when you deliver the verdict. I grabbed now, and grabbed plenty hard.
“You’re the—”
“I’m the ghost—”
“—the ghost of—”
“—of John Adams.”
“But”—I held onto the chair even tighter—“I am John Adams.”
“I know,” my ghost said. “That’s what’s so annoying.”
I said nothing. That was far too impressive an understatement to bear comment. I groped in the pocket of my dressing gown and found cigarettes. “Do you smoke?” I asked.
“Of course. If John Adams smokes, naturally I do.”
I extended
