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.

"This is my life's work," he said solemnly. "Between my exwife and this mechanical monster, I ran through a rather substantial family fortune. I had to have funds. So I excised a few of the simple circuits from this contraption, threw on some window dressing and turned them loose in a few key locations where women congregate. Yesterday, after three weeks of operation, sixty of those gadgets coughed up $82,000. Unfortunately, I had to borrow almost a hundred thousand dollars to build them. In another week I'll show a profit."

"In another week," I told him, "you'll be held for malpractice and indicted for fraud—unless—"

"Unless I cut you in, I suppose," he sneered.

"Unless you give me another drink," I said after a suitable dramatic pause.

Cunningham pulled one eyebrow down, nonplussed, but he handed over the liquor. I choked on a swallow as Sue's voice cut over my shoulder, "I left you to play patty-cake, and now it's spin-the-bottle. Are you down to business, or shall I leave again?"

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