ike the gambler
that I am. But I had a plan: One which necessity had never forced me to
use until now. Several years before I had read an article about the
medicine men of a certain tribe of aborigines living in the jungles at
the source of the Amazon River. They had discovered a process in which
the juice of a certain bush--known only to them--could be used to poison
a man. Anyone subjected to this poison died, but for a few minutes after
the life left his body the medicine men could still converse with him.
The subject, though ostensibly and actually dead, answered the medicine
men's every question. This was their primitive, though reportedly
effective method of catching glimpses of what lay in the world of death.

[Illustration]

I had conceived my idea at the time I read the article, but I had never
had the need to use it--until the doctors gave me a month to live. Then
I spent my sixty thousand dollars, and three weeks later I held in my
hands a small bottle of the witch doctors' fluid.

The next step was to secure my victim--my collaborator, I preferred to
call him.

The man I chose was a nobody. A homeless, friendless non-entity, picked
up off the street. He had once been an educated man. But now he was only
a bum, and when he died he'd never be missed. A perfect man for my
experiment.

I'm a rich man because I have a system. The system is simple: I never
make a move until I know exactly where that move will lead me. My field
of operations is the stock market. I spend money unstintingly to secure
the information I need before I take each step. I hire the best
investigators, bribe employees and persons in position to give me the
information I want, and only when I am as certain as humanly possible
that I cannot be wrong do I move. And the system never fails. Seven
million dollars in the bank is proof of that.

Now, knowing that I could not live, I intended to make the system work
for me one last time before I died. I'm a firm believer in the adage
that any situation can be whipped, given prior knowledge of its
coming--and, of course, its attendant circumstances.

* * * * *

For a moment he did not answer and I began to fear that my experiment
had failed. "Where are you?" I repeated, louder and sharper this time.

The small muscles about his eyes puckered with an unnormal tension
while the rest of his face held its death frost. Slowly, slowly,
unnaturally--as though energiz