Part 4

They started happily toward the door, too wrapped up in their gold-tinted dreams of the future to notice the fascinated, expectant gaze of their erstwhile adversaries. They were almost into the outer office when it happened. Unquestionably it was the shock of their lives.

They seemed to melt like popsicles in a furnace. They dwindled so swiftly there was the faint sound of disturbed atmosphere, a little rush of air. Suddenly their clothes were hanging loosely about them, the ends of their sleeves trailing on the floor. And they were still melting. Agatha screamed with terror; and even as she did her voice faded away into a thin, childish wail.

"Oh, heavens!" Toffee cried. "They took too much. They're disappearing entirely!" She buried her face against Marc's shoulder. "I can't look!"

Marc and Mr. Culpepper stared at the spectacle with open-mouthed amazement.

It was a long time before Toffee found the courage to turn away from Marc's shoulder. When she did, her eyes moved apprehensively toward the door, and then she made a little whimpering sound. Two forlorn little piles of clothing lay there, one on either side of the doorway.

"Ohhh, Lord," Toffee breathed. "They're gone ... completely gone. There's nothing left of them, not even a whisper."

"'Fraid you're right," Marc said. "Fixage fixed 'em."

Mr. Culpepper had been greatly sobered by the disappearance of the Harpers. "I had no idea," he muttered woodenly. "No idea at all."

"I feel sorry," Toffee said. "I can't help it. They were so proud and so elegant ... even if they were just a couple of rats."

"_Rats indeed!_"

Toffee started as though slapped in the nether regions with a cactus. The voice had been nothing more than a tiny whine, a mere vibration, but it had seemed to come from the heap of clothing that had been Agatha's. Toffee streaked across the room and knelt beside the crumpled garments. They seemed furiously agitated.

With deft fingers Toffee dug inside the clothing. First she uncovered a tiny, wrinkled hand, then an arm and finally an entire baby. The infant was very red of face and its small features were screwed up into an expression of extreme annoyance. Its button eyes blazed malevolently as it gazed at Toffee. It gritted its tiny teeth.

"Witch!" it hissed. "Oh, the things I would call you if I weren't a lady."

"Agatha!" Toffee cried. She lowered the infant back onto the pile of clothing and turned to the tangle of male garments on the other side of the door.

* * * * *

A brief search through a coat, a shirt and an undershirt uncovered Chadwick, also in an acute state of infancy. When he looked up and saw Toffee staring down at him he blushed furiously.

"Give me my trousers!" the baby demanded hotly. "Stop staring at me and give me my trousers!"

"Well, for heaven sake!" Toffee exclaimed.

She placed the depleted Harpers side by side on the lounge, and Marc and Mr. Culpepper moved to her side. As babies, the erstwhile thieves were markedly unbeautiful, and Toffee musingly remarked as much. At this the infant Agatha surprisingly forgot herself and poured out a string of oaths such as would have done credit to a stevedore on a hot day. Chadwick continued to blush.

"What are we going to do with them?" Toffee asked. "We can't turn them over to the police like this."

"Certainly not," Marc agreed. "And we can't keep them around. If my wife should suddenly come home and find me with a couple of babies...." He shuddered at the thought. "We'll have to restore them." He turned to Mr. Culpepper. "We can do that, can't we?"

"Yes!" Toffee cried. "We could bring them back to what they were before their faces were changed, couldn't we? That would solve everything."

This suggestion provoked a discordant howl from the infant Harpers.

"I don't know," the little scientist mused. "It could be done all right, but it would have to be done very carefully. We'd have to give them spirits in exact amounts. A little too much one way or another...." He stroked the tip of his nose with a slender finger. "Figuring on the basis of the amounts that you and Mr. Pillsworth consumed to restore yourselves, I could probably...." He retreated to the chair behind Marc's desk, tilted his head back and closed his eyes. "Yes, yes," he murmured dreamily.

"Will you just listen!" Agatha piped. "They're going to work us out a whiskey formula."

"I don't care what they work out," Chadwick replied, rolling unhappily over onto his fat little stomach. "I want some clothes. I'm cold and embarrassed."

"See if you can find something for them to wear," Marc said, turning to Toffee. "Try the model's dressing rooms in the photographer's studio; there may be something there." He glanced briefly at Toffee's faintly obscured figure. "And while you're about it," he added, "you might pick up something for yourself."

Toffee nodded and left the room. When she returned she was resplendent in a shimmering ice-blue evening gown that had a very conservative neckline ... provided a girl's neck, by some freak of nature, commenced somewhere in the region of her midriff. The glistening material clung tightly to her body, highlighting its more provocative features. When she walked she shimmered with a loveliness that seemed almost unreal.

In her hand she was carrying two brief lengths of black velvet. These she twined haphazardly around the rather brief figures of Agatha and Chadwick.

"How's that little wretch coming with our formula?" Agatha asked.

"Yes," Chadwick put in, "I could do with a spot or two very nicely just now."

Toffee glanced at Mr. Culpepper who, for all the world, seemed merely to be enjoying a sound sleep. His facial muscles twitched occasionally, though, giving testimony to the experimental processes that were being accomplished inside.

"Keep your diapers on," Toffee said. "He's doing what he can."

"Oh, well," Chadwick sighed. "I suppose there's really no hurry. They'll only turn us over to the police when we're restored."

"I don't care," Agatha said, eyeing Toffee's new loveliness with envy. "I'd rather rot in jail than be left to go on groveling around like this."

* * * * *

There was a sudden snort from Mr. Culpepper as his head snapped forward, and his eyes opened. "I have it," he announced composedly. "As I have it figured, ten jiggers of strong whiskey should restore them to what they were six months ago." He turned to Marc. "Do you have any liquor handy?"

Marc shook his head. "We'll have to go out for it."

"Very well," Mr. Culpepper said. "I'll go."

"No. We'll all have to go," Marc said. "We can't risk staying here. The cleaning ladies will be around this way soon. If they saw this ..." he indicated the babies and Toffee, "... there would be a scandal that would make Hollywood furious with envy."

Leaving the building, the Pillsworth party was one to startle and confound, a woman in a revealing evening gown carrying two velvet-swathed babies and accompanied by two extremely uneasy looking gentlemen, was a sight to give pause to even the most careless-minded citizen. Indeed, several citizens not only paused but stopped cold in their tracks as they saw the strange group moving toward them. With grave dignity, though, glancing neither to the right nor to the left, the ill-matched fivesome proceeded to the end of the block, waited in heavy silence for a change of traffic signals, crossed the street and disappeared through the doors of a retail liquor store. There they were greeted by a large, befuddled looking merchant.

The merchant surveyed his approaching customers with silent disbelief. Then he seemed to shake himself from an absorbing dream.

"This is a liquor store," he said dully.

"Yes, we know," Toffee said politely. "That's why we've come."

"I just thought I'd mention it," the merchant said unhappily, clearing his throat. He glanced out the window and closed his eyes a minute. Then he turned back to the group before the counter and seemed to be surprised all over again.

"Since you're really here," he said, "what can I do for you?"

"We'd like a bottle of strong whiskey," Toffee said. She turned questioningly to Mr. Culpepper who nodded back to her approvingly. "The strongest you have."

"Two bottles!" a tiny voice suddenly piped from the depths of one of the velvet bundles. Chadwick's small head bobbed into sight. "Make it two! And make it snappy!"

Agatha's head was only a moment behind Chadwick's in making its appearance, "Sot!" she accused. "Greedy little pig!"

"You be still," Chadwick rejoined. "What if I do get a little drunk tonight? Who ever had a better reason? Just being married to you would be enough, I should think! I've got it coming to me."

"You've got a lot coming to you," Agatha shrilled. "And someday you're going to get it. If it hadn't been for you starting that fight up there...."

"Please," the infant Chadwick said, looking pained. "Try to restrain your shrewish tendencies just this once, won't you?" He turned to the liquor merchant with a bland smile. "Two bottles, if you please, friend."

"Yes," Toffee put in quickly, by way of ending the discussion. "Two bottles, if you please."

"Perhaps it's just as well," Agatha drawled. "I wouldn't drink from the same bottle with that little lush, anyway."

* * * * *

The merchant made a brief, strangling noise as he tore his eyes away from Agatha and Chadwick and backed into a shelf, upsetting several bottles onto the floor. "I shouldn't of nipped the stock in the back room," he muttered to himself. "Me old lady warned me this would happen. She said it would start just this way." He turned his back on Toffee and the infants, grasped the edge of the shelf and rested his head on the backs of his hands. A deep shudder ran the full length of his body. It was some time before he began to recover even a little bit.

Finally, without turning around, he managed to say, "What kind of whiskey did you want, lady?"

Toffee looked at Agatha and Chadwick questioningly.

"What kind have you got?" Agatha called out.

The merchant shuddered again. "I don't know," he whimpered. "I don't know nuthin' right now. Maybe this is all Chanel number 5 up here on these shelves. It wouldn't surprise me none. Why don't you just look around and take what you want? I won't look. You just take it and go away. Just tip-toe out and don't slam the door. That's all I ask. The liquor is on the house."

After the selection of two large, rather vaporish-looking bottles, the little company returned to the sidewalk. The babies, however, were becoming increasingly troublesome in their eagerness to be at the liquor, which was in Marc's custody for the time being. Their ill-tempered cries, however, were almost entirely directed at Toffee. People began to stop in the streets to watch and to listen. If they could believe their ears, they were overhearing two new-born infants calling their mother names that even an adult hadn't any right to know. Shocking invective gushed from the sweet mouths of the babes in a fountainous stream. Toffee, probably for the first time in her life, was embarrassed.

"Can't we do something?" she asked her companion. "Can't we go somewhere? If this sort of thing goes on much longer I'll be picked up by a home for wayward mothers or something."

Marc glanced down the street. Then he pointed. "Over there," he said. His finger indicated a public library. "There should be quiet and privacy in there." He turned to the babies. "Now listen here, you two, either you be quiet and behave yourselves or you won't get a drop. Understand?"

Agatha and Chadwick were instantly subdued.

The library was a large, high-ceilinged place of passages and corridors. Just inside the main entrance was a large foyer-like room out of the center of which, like a giant mushroom, jutted a circular checking counter. Toffee moved quickly to the counter and rested the babies on it. An aged woman whose spinsterish face belied her gay dress turned and smiled, revealing a mouth full of charred fags.

"Yes?" she asked.

"Where are the books?" Toffee asked.

"What books?"

Toffee looked puzzled for a moment. "Big books," she said. "In stacks. I was told there were veritable walls of books in here."

"And there are," the woman said defensively. "Which books are you interested in?"

"How should I know?" Toffee asked helplessly. "I haven't read them yet."

The woman sighed. Then her eyes fell to Agatha and Chadwick lying on the counter and they lighted with the fanatical gleam of frustrated motherhood. She reached out and pulled back the velvet folds.

"My, what beaut...!" The lie died in her throat. To suggest that Agatha and Chadwick were anything but downright ugly was too great a falsehood for even this child-starved soul. "You must be ... uh ... proud," she said tonelessly. However, she was game; once she'd started she wasn't going to give up. She reached out a hand and waggled a finger over Agatha's protruding tummy.

"Kitchy-kitchy," she said unhappily.

Anger flashed in the infant's eyes. "Get your horny talons off me, you withered old wraith," she snapped. And having given warning, she parted her bubbling lips and bit the woman's finger.

* * * * *

The woman didn't cry out in surprise; she didn't make any sound at all. She simply stared hard at Toffee for a long moment, then silently pointed to a distant corridor.

"The books on abnormal child psychology are in there," she whispered. "And if I were you, honey, I'd hurry."

Toffee gathered up Agatha and Chadwick and joined Marc and Mr. Culpepper, who had been watching from a distance.

"That was fine," she scolded Agatha. "That was a splendid display."

"What did you expect?" Agatha replied haughtily. "The old hag was thumbing me like a ripe watermelon."

"I wish she'd throttled you," Toffee said annoyedly. "Lord knows you deserve it. Your mothers must have been women of great forbearance. How they kept their hands off your little throats is more than I can tell."

The little party made its way through the nearest passage and found itself in a forest of books. Shelves lined on either side stretched out toward them like great, reaching fingers. Here and there a solitary "browser" was picking his way painfully along the long rows, title by title, but on the whole the great, book-jammed room was reasonably deserted. Toffee moved along the ends of the rows, found a browserless section and disappeared inside. Marc and Mr. Culpepper followed. Together, they all retreated to the end of the section and formed a sort of huddle. Marc produced the bottles from beneath his coat.

"How are we going to measure it?" Toffee asked. "We have to give them ten jiggers exactly."

"Do I have to think of everything?" Agatha inquired scornfully. Her small hand emerged from her velvet wrappings, clutching a jigger glass. "It was lying around loose on the counter," she explained.

"As in womanhood," Toffee said philosophically, "so, too, in infancy is she a crook."

As though in solemn ritual, the bottles were silently opened and the initial portion poured.

Agatha stretched out her miniature hand. "Gimme," she said. "It's my glass. And, boy, do I need a slug!"

"Tell me, dear," Toffee said quietly, tilting the glass to Agatha's eager mouth, "whatever became of that lovely accent of yours?"

Agatha polished off the whiskey and burped. "None of your damned business," she said with truly childish simplicity.

By alternating between the two babes, a certain amount of decorum was maintained. Marc took charge of the stoking of Chadwick while Toffee continued in behalf of Agatha. Mr. Culpepper shoved a few volumes aside on one of the lower shelves and seated himself, watching with interest as the glass moved from hand to hand to bottle to baby. He looked like a spectator at a tennis game being played on a checker board. The glass shuttled from pouted lip to pouted lip until the inner infant, on both scores, had been fortified five times over. From this point on, as the whiskey poured down the tiny throats, a corresponding amount of exuberance arose via the same channel. Agatha, made congenial by the liquor, began to while away the time between drinks by lifting her childish voice in song.

"Becky lived in a Turkish harem," she chortled. "She had towels but she wouldn't wear 'em."

"Stop that caterwauling," Toffee commanded.

Agatha perversely increased her volume. "Becky looked like Theda Barer," she shrieked. "Theda was bare but Becky was barer!"

* * * * *

Suddenly a sharp, gasping sound echoed around the little group, seeming to come from no place in particular; the bookshelves themselves appeared to be making little twittering sounds of surprise. The Pillsworth party froze as it was. Eyes moved furtively in unturning heads. It was Toffee who discovered the cause of the interruption.

Several books had been removed from one of the upper shelves, leaving a sort of peep hole into the next section. In this opening had appeared the forbidding face of the spinsterish librarian. It bore the dismayed expression of a maiden lady who had inadvertently stumbled into a YMCA swimming pool.

"Heavens!" the woman gasped. "Giving liquor to _babies_! No wonder they're retarded!"

Toffee, recognizing the situation for what it was, displayed what she believed was great presence of mind in grabbing the tell-tale bottle from the shelf and lifting it to her own lips. She drank deeply of the contents, and just to lend conviction to her performance as a ravening drunkard, staggered against the bookshelves, rolling her eyes loosely in their sockets.

"Oh, dear," Mr. Culpepper put in from the perch on the shelf. "If I were you, I don't think I'd...."

A little moan issued from the colorless face in the bookshelf. "Oooo, what depravity!" it exclaimed. "And teaching the babies to drink, too!"

"Nonsense," Toffee said, addressing the face openly. "We're drinking this ourselves. We're just a bunch of roaring sots. We're too stingy to give any to the babies."

"I saw you," the face insisted. "You were forcing the filthy stuff on those infants. You ought to be reported."

Toffee turned to Marc. "We weren't either, were we?" she asked. "We never give these babies any liquor, do we?"

"Certainly not," Marc said indignantly. "We were only fighting them off, trying to keep them from taking it away from us. We love the stuff too much to waste it on them."

In demonstration, he grabbed the bottle that had been Chadwick's and pressed it eagerly to his mouth, a fanatical gleam in his eye.

"Oh, really," Mr. Culpepper cried. "I really don't think...."

"You see," Toffee said to the face. "Can't leave the stuff alone. Those babies haven't got a look-in as far as liquor is concerned. We wouldn't give them a drop if they were dying of thirst."

Doubt came into the face as Marc withdrew the bottle from his lips with a loud smacking noise and grandly wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. The librarian was beginning to look more or less convinced. Slowly, the face started to move away.

"Becky's boy friend came and found her," Agatha suddenly shrilled in a voice that was definitely dewy. "But her towels were not...."

The voice suddenly became softly muffled, as though by velvet.

The face darted back into the opening between the books. "What was that?" it asked.

"Me," Toffee said. "I like music with my liquor."

The face was some reassured. "Well, you'll have to stop it," it snapped. "You'll have to stop almost everything you're doing, in fact, if you expect to remain here. Drinking is not allowed...."

A loud, rumbling burp issued from the velvet bundle in Toffee's arms.

"Oh!" the face exclaimed, and suddenly disappeared. There was the sound of quick tapping footsteps on the other side of the shelf.

* * * * *

When the footsteps had died away Toffee and Marc, with renewed vigor, returned to their labors with the bottles and the babies.

"We'll have to hurry," Marc said. "That old hag had a look about her that definitely meant trouble if you ask me."

"I agree," Toffee said. She glanced down at Agatha. "And you didn't help matters any. You displayed your customary perverseness, I noticed."

The baby cocked an insolent eye at her. "You acted with rare intelligence, yourself," she said. "In my opinion you handled the situation like a jerk. I only shudder that all these strangers are laboring under the degrading notion that you are my mother."

The liquor flowed with increasing velocity. The eighth jigger had been administered when the footsteps sounded in the doorway beyond the book shelves. They entered the room and hurried forward as though they knew just where they were going.

"In there!" came the voice of the aging librarian. "They're in section five, throwing a regular wild party! They're drinking liquor and singing dirty songs and ... and ... contributing to the delinquency of babies! They're carrying on 'till you wouldn't believe it!"

"My!" a voice said, not untinged with pleased expectancy. "Sounds like the time we raided that house over on the other side...."

"Shut up," another voice said. "No matter what's goin' on behind them books, this is different. And don't you forget it!"

The footsteps drew closer and swiftly rounded the end of the section. The members of the Pillsworth party looked up in unison and saw two large, blue-clad policemen running toward them.

Toffee fairly threw Agatha into the arms of Mr. Culpepper. "Here!" she said. "I'll hold them off. You see that she gets the other two shots!" She sounded like the little Dutch boy about to cram his pinky into that dyke over in Holland. Agatha landed in Mr. Culpepper's lap with a thud and a burp.

Thus relieved of her besotted burden Toffee raced quickly to a movable ladder stretched up against the long shelves. Reaching it, she started upward, two rungs at a time.

The ladder was the sort that rested on rollers at either end and could easily be shuttled from one location to another with a good deal of facility. Once aloft Toffee lost no time in using the contrivance to its utmost capacity. Rollers whirred and Toffee and the ladder sped forward to the attack, toward a section that was notable for the number of truly weighty volumes it housed. Toffee seized up the first of these volumes and paused momentarily to read its title.

"War and Peace," she read. "That ought to put them to sleep."

Never was literature so forced upon anyone as it was on the hapless policemen in the awful moments that followed. "War and Peace," true to Toffee's expectations did indeed leave the first of the cops looking extremely drowsy as it clipped him on the chin and sent him staggering backwards against his companion. In a matter of seconds two of the city's finest were groveling pitifully on the floor, trying vainly to ward off a hail storm of books. Toffee, in selecting a lettered diet for these two besieged gentlemen showed a marked preference for the heavier works. Her victims were most impressed, in a very physical sort of way, with the works of the ancient Greeks.

The cops, apparently unwilling to perish under this literary avalanche, turned tail, and started crawling toward the outer protection of the shelves. Seeing that victory ... at least momentary victory ... was at hand, Toffee turned back to see what progress was being made with the howling Harpers. Everything at the end of the section was oddly serene.

* * * * *

Agatha had been set aside on one of the shelves and apparently the last of the ten libations was being given to Chadwick. While Toffee was watching this picture of rather distorted domestic contentment, one of the cops timidly extended his head around the lower corner of one of the shelves.