“Yes.”
“Did you think to make them sign an admission of liability, or did you goof?”
“Well, sort of.” I felt in my pocket for the envelope; I’d forgotten about it. “I made Dr. Arnault write down what she was giving us.”
Pat reached for the envelope. “My apologies, maestro. With my brains and your luck we’ve got them where we want them.” He started to open the envelope. “I bet it was neopentothal-or one of the barbiturates.”
I snatched it back. “That’s mine.”
“Well, open it,” he answered, “and don’t obstruct traffic. I want to see what dream drug they gave us.”
We had come out into the pedestrian level and his advice did have merit. Before opening it I led us across the change strips onto the fast-west strip and stepped behind a windbreak. As I unfolded the paper Pat read over my shoulder:
“‘Long Range Fumbling, and so forth-injections given to subjects 7L435 & -6 T. P. Bartlett & P. H. Bartlett (iden-twins)-each one-tenth c.c. distilled water raised to normal salinity,’ signed ‘Doris Arnault, Sc.D., for the Foundation.’ Tom, we’ve been hoaxed!”
I stared at it, trying to fit what I had experienced with what the paper said. Pat added hopefully, “Or is this the hoax? Were we injected with something else and they didn’t want to admit it?”
“No,” I said slowly. I was sure Dr. Arnault wouldn’t write down “water” and actually give us one of the sleeping drugs-she wasn’t that sort of person. “Pat, we weren’t drugged…we were hypnotized.”
He shook his head. “Impossible. Granting that I could be hypnotized, you couldn’t be. Nothing there to hypnotize. And I wasn’t hypnotized, comrade. No spinning lights, no passes with the hands-why, my girl Mabel didn’t even stare in my eyes. She just gave me the shot and told me to take it easy and let it take effect.”
“Don’t be juvenile, Pat. Spinning lights and such is for suckers. I don’t care whether you call it hypnotism or salesmanship. They gave us hypos and suggested that we would be sleepy-so we fell asleep.”
“So I was sleepy! Anyhow that wasn’t quite what Mabel did. She told me not to go to sleep, or if I did, to wake up when she called me. Then when they brought you in, she-”
“Wait a minute. You mean when they moved you back into the room I was in-”
“No, I don’t mean anything of the sort. After they brought you in, Mabel gave me this list of numbers and I read them to you and-”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Pat, you’re mixed up. How could you read them in pitch darkness? She must have read them to you. I mean-” I stopped, for I was getting mixed up myself. Well, she could have read to him from another room. “Were you wearing headphones?”
“What’s that got to do with it? Anyhow, it wasn’t pitch dark, not after they brought you in. She held up the numbers on a board that was rigged with a light of its own, enough to let me see the numbers and her hands.”
“Pat, I wish you wouldn’t keep repeating nonsense. Hypnotized or not, I was never so dopey that I couldn’t notice anything that happened. I was never moved anywhere; they probably wheeled you in without disturbing you. And the room we were in was pitch dark, not a glimmer.”
Pat did not answer right away, which wasn’t like him. At last he said, “Tom, are you sure?”
“Sure I’m sure!”
He sighed. “I hate to say this, because I know what you will say. But what are you supposed to do when none of your theories fits?”
“Huh? Is this a quiz? You throw ‘em away and try a new one. Basic methodology, freshman year.”
“Okay, just slip this on for size, don’t mind the pattern: Tom, my boy, brace yourself-we’re mind readers.”
I tried it and did not like it. “Pat, just because you can’t explain everything is no reason to talk like the fat old women who go to fortune tellers. We’re muddled, I admit, whether it was drugs or hypnosis. But we couldn’t have been reading each other’s minds or we would have been doing it years ago. We would have noticed.”