Evri-Flave got on the market."

"We'll have to stop it; pull Evri-Flave off the market," Myers said. "We
can't be responsible for letting this go on."

"We can't stop, either. There's at least a two months' supply out in the
hands of jobbers and distributors over whom we have no control. And we
have all these contractual obligations, to buy the entire output of the
companies that make the syrup for us; if we stop buying, they can sell
it in competition with us, as long as they don't infringe our
trade-name. And we can't prevent pirating. You know how easily we were
able to duplicate that sample I brought back from Turkey. Why, our legal
department's kept busy all the time prosecuting unlicensed manufacturers
as it is."

"We've got to do something, Fred!" There was almost a whiff of hysteria
in Myers' voice.

"We will. We'll start, first thing tomorrow, on a series of tests--just
you and I, like the old times at Eisenhower High. First, we want to
be sure that Evri-Flave really is responsible. It'd be a hell of a
thing if we started a public panic against our own product for nothing.
And then...."

* * * * *

It took just two weeks, in a soundproofed and guarded laboratory on
Benson's Carondelet estate, to convict their delicious drink of
responsibility for that Munich State Opera House Horror and everything
else. Reports from confidential investigators in Munich confirmed this.
It had, of course, been impossible to interview the two thousand men
and women who had turned the Opera House into a pyre for their own
immolation, but none of the tiny minority who had kept their sanity and
saved their lives had tasted Evri-Flave.

* * * * *

It took another month to find out exactly how the stuff affected the
human nervous system, and they almost wrecked their own nervous systems
in the process. The real villain, they discovered, was the
incredible-looking long-chain compound alluded to in the original notes
as Ingredient Beta; its principal physiological effect was to greatly
increase the sensitivity of the aural nerves. Not only was the hearing
range widened--after consuming thirty CC of Beta, they could hear the
sound of an ultrasonic dog-whistle quite plainly--but the very quality
of all audible sounds was curiously enhanced and altered. Myers, the
psychologist, who was also well grounded in neurology, explained how the
chemical produced this effect; i