Read Online If I Were You by L. Ron Hubbard - Free Book Online Page A

bottle because it made him think of how badly he himself wanted to go to Borneo.
    Mac, however, had not dismissed it. Surreptitiously Mac pulled the cork and sniffed. Then, with determination, he began to throw together random ingredients—whiskey, yolk of an egg, lemon and a pony of this syrup Euclid’s brother had sent.
    Mac shook it up.
    Mac drank it down.
    “Hey,” said Euclid belatedly. “Watcha doin’?”
    “Mmmmm,” said Mac, eyeing the three customers and Euclid, “that is what I call a real cocktail! Whiskey, egg yolk, lemon, one pony of syrup. Here”—he began to throw together another one—“try it!”
    “No!” chorused the customers.
    Mac looked hurt.
    “Gosh, you took an awful chance,” said Euclid. “I never know what Aristotle will dig up next. He said to go easy on that syrup because the natives said it did funny things. He says the native name, translated, means swello .”
    “It’s swell all right,” said Mac. Guckenheimer, one of the customers, looked at him glumly.
    “Well,” snapped Mac, “I ain’t dead yet.”
    Guckenheimer continued to look at him. Mac looked at the quartet.
    “Hell, even if I do die, I ain’t giving you the satisfaction of a free show.” And he grabbed his hat and walked out.
    Euclid looked after him. “I hope he don’t get sick.”
    Guckenheimer looked at the cocktail Mac had made and shook his head in distrust.
    Suddenly Guckenheimer gaped, gasped and then wildly gesticulated. “Look! Oh, my God, look!”
    A fly had lighted upon the rim of the glass and had imbibed. And now, before their eyes, the fly expanded, doubled in size, trebled, quadrupled . . .
    Euclid stared in horror at this monster, now the size of a small dog, which feebly fluttered and flopped about on shaking legs. It was getting bigger!
    Euclid threw a bung starter with sure aim. Guckenheimer and the other two customers beat it down with chairs. A few seconds later they began to breathe once more.
    Euclid started to drag the fly toward the garbage can and then stopped in horror. “M-Mac drank some of that stuff!”
    Guckenheimer sighed. “Probably dead by now then.”
    “But we can’t let him wander around like that! Swelling up all over town! Call the cops! Call somebody! Find him!”
    Guckenheimer went to the phone, and Euclid halted in rapid concentration before his tools of trade.
    “I gotta do something. I gotta do something,” he gibbered.
    Chivvis, a learned customer, said, “If that stuff made Mac swell up, it might make him shrink too. If he used lemon for his, he got an acid reaction. Maybe if you used limewater for yours, you would get an alkaline reaction.”
    Euclid’s paunch shook with his activity. Larkin, the third customer, caught a fly and applied it to the swello cocktail. The fly rapidly began to get very big. Euclid picked up the loathsome object and dunked its proboscis in some of his limewater cocktail. Like a plane fading into the distance, it grew small.
    “It works!” cried Euclid. “Any sign of Mac?”
    “Nobody has seen anything yet,” said Guckenheimer. “If anything does happen to him and he dies, the cops will probably want you for murder, Euclid.”
    “Murder? Me? Oh! I shoulda left this business years ago. I shoulda got out of New York while the going was good. I shoulda done what I always wanted and gone to Borneo! Guckenheimer, you don’t think they’ll pin it on me if anything happens to Mac?”
    Guckenheimer suddenly decided not to say anything. Chivvis and Larkin, likewise, stopped talking to each other. A man had entered the bar—a man who wore a Panama hat and a shoulder-padded suit of the latest Broadway design, a man who had a narrow, evil face.
    Frankie Guanella sat down at the bar and beckoned commandingly to Euclid.
    “Okay, O’Brien,” said Guanella, “this is the first of the month.”
    O’Brien had longed for Borneo for more reasons than one, but that one was big enough—Frankie Guanella, absolute monarch of the local