"Oooooh!" he said. "My head!"

"Want a bromo?" a familiar voice asked sympathetically.

Bethelman forced his eyes open. The stocky, smiling face of Dr. Elijah Kamiroff floated above him.

Bethelman sat straight up in bed, his eyes wide. The effort made his head hurt worse. He looked around.

He was in the upstairs guest bedroom of Dr. Kamiroff's suburban home.

He turned to look at the biochemist, who was busily mixing a bromo.

"What date is this?" he asked.

Kamiroff looked at him with mild blue eyes. "It's the second," he said. "Why?"

Bethelman took the glass of fizzing liquid and downed it. The pattern was beginning to make sense. He had gone to sleep in Boston the night of the first and awakened in New York on the fifteenth. Then he had gone to sleep in New York on the twenty-ninth and awakened on the second.

It made a weird kind of sense.

He handed the empty glass back to the biochemist and said: "Dr. Kamiroff, sit down. I want to tell you something."

Half an hour later, Kamiroff was rubbing his chin with a forefinger, deep in concentration. "It sounds wild," he said at last, "but I've heard of wild things before."

"But what caused it?"

"Do you remember what you did last night? I mean the night of the first?"

"Not clearly; we got pretty crocked, I remember."

Kamiroff grinned. "I think you were a few up on me. Do you remember that bottle of white powder I had in the lab down in the basement?"

"No," Bethelman admitted.

"It was diazotimoline, one of the drugs we've been using in cancer research on white mice. That whole family of compounds has some pretty peculiar properties. This one happens to smell like vanilla; when I let you smell it, you stuck your finger in it and licked off some of the powder before I could stop you.

"It didn't bother me much; we've given it to mice without any ill effects, so I 

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