Amazing Stories, August 1927 — page 57: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

ELECTRO-EPISODED IN A.D. 2025 adorned with the best that Wertheimer, the Paris arbiter of the world’s fashions, could devise in the way of a realization of his “picture-frame” sar- casm; and the row that resulted had, this time, been hectic on both sides—with her scoring the final “point” by throwing her engagement ring at his feet. Then, through the great ‘Electro-visional” dial attached to his general radio outfit, he had watched her “take off” from the roof in her runabout mono- plane, had noted the reckless speed with which she drove it through the air, had chuckled when an aerial speed-cop took her license number and “tagged” her by shooting the citation into the rear of her machine, had seen her land on her own roof and, a moment later, had watched her “take off” again in her large touring biplane and rapidly grow into a tiny speck in the western sky. Evidently his Esmeralda was a high-strung thoroughbred, who meant business when her dander was up! For a brief moment Algernon made a profound effort to solve the problem as to just how long he should keep her waiting before he answered her “call.” The nice adjustment of time to the particu- lar individuality of the person concerned under the correlated circumstances enumerated, was a matter of supreme importance! Then, suddenly, the idea occurred that she might have met with an accident. Instantly he acted! Touching a spring on the golden radio-receptacle on his vest pocket, he caught the released frame- work in his hand, slipped the catch that allowed it to snap into shape, and quickly adjusted it to his face. Then, choosing his words carefully and spar- ingly, he spoke into the pendant microphone with an attempted precision to conceal his thick tongue, asking: “This you, Esm’alda?” “Yes, this is me!” she snapped back promptly. “Who did you suppose it was? Have you been giving away any more of these ‘special’ radio sets to any other female? If I catch you playing any tricks on me with any other huzzy, I’ll make you wish that you had never been born! If—”’ Patiently, and speaking more clearly than before, Algernon stopped the flow of words by interjecting another query. “Want an’thin’ p’ticular?” he asked. “Yes! I want help quick—right this minute,” she answered. ‘My leg is broken and I can’t move, and there ig a nasty big tiger on the ledge right over my head just ready to spring on me and eat me up! I was flying west in my big ’plane, and I was out of our district where everybody knows me and papa has them all ‘fixed,’ and I was away out here where nobody knows me, and one of those beastly ‘Purity Teague’ sleuths caught me powdering my nose, and he chased me, and I ‘stepped on the gas’ and hit the two-hundred-miles-an-hour clip, and I thought of that new ‘Blectric Spark-screen Broadcaster’ you had attached to the ’plane, and I turned that loose, and then I circled behind the screen, and that brute must haVe chased me into the ocean, for I ran straight into this mountain before I could see where I was going, and I fell a thousand feet or more, and I broke my leg so I can’t move, and that horrid Bowe era ba apg! 1 “— >. _tiger—” Wieas oa aC eee 471 Algernon’s stoppage of the verbal torrent was de- cidedly impatient this time. “Shay lis’en,’ he broke in. “If you don’t tell where at, I can’t find you. Tell in code.” “Ain’t I telling you just as fast as I can?” she retorted. “T’ve been talking just as fast as I could make my tongue go ever since you finally answered me, and you took an awful long time in answering, and I can’t tell you where I am at if you don’t let me talk, and I think you are a brute, and I be- lieve you: are still drunk, and here is the location in code: ‘6981-41: 396-41-141: 356-1-22: 690-2-142: and be sure you put it down on paper right away so you don’t forget, and—” But Algernon had “hung up.” By now he was sober enough to realize that he was not sober enough for the task in hand, so he quickly snapped the bracelets of an “Electric Re- generator around his wrists, set the regulator at “2 seconds,” lapsed into unconsciousness—and awoke at the end of that time an entirely different man, as the result of the equivalent of two nights’ natural sleep. H‘* first move on awakening, was to reach for a button in the desk before him marked “Pack- age Transporter”; but he paused with the move- ment half completed, as a look of pain distorted his face. For a moment he clasped both hands across his forehead, moaning, in helpless misery: “My God! What a headache!” His helplessness, however, was only temporary. Turning to a silver urn behind him, which bore the golden-inlaid legend: ‘“Pasteurized Water,” he pressed what appeared to be a part of a carved figure in the mahogany base and a secret drawer shot out revealing a number of coffee cups, spoons and a box of tablets labeled: “Equivalent—2 Spoons Sugar and 1 Jigger Cream.” Dropping one of these tablets and a spoon into a oup, he set it down on his desk. Next he took a diminutive collapsible microscope, with a lens of flexible glass, out of his pocket; and, with its aid, picked out an all-but- invisible needle-point concealed in the filigree orna- mentation of the faucet of the urn. This he pressed with his finger nail. Then he pushed a button in the faucet labeled “Hot,” and filled the coffee cup as he mumbled jubilantly to himself: “Some trick this! You get your ‘pasteurized water’ according to government regulations all right, but—oh! You naughty little needle.”” He eyed the dubious looking mixture that flowed into the cup for a suspicious moment, tasted it hopefully—and then, livid with rage, spat the stuff out and hurled the cup across the room. Speechless for a moment, he controlled himself with an effort; and then, with desperate haste, un- locked a private drawer in his desk and opened it half-way to a visible line. Pulling a cord hanging over his head, which started an electric fan going— and which, in this precise connection, also caused a slight orifice in the panel of the drawer to unfold, revealing an assortment of crystalline-white and brownish-looking pills—he selected one of the white pills, placed it in his mouth and crunched it be- tween his teeth to get quick action, in spite of his vigilant valet’s gz yc 2 Soks:comy