e automatic percolator was making small, promising
noises. In the frying pan four sunnyside eggs were sizzling; half a
dozen strips of bacon drained on a paper towel on the sideboard. It
couldn't have looked more innocent.

Cautiously, Phillip released his nose, sniffed. The stench nearly choked
him. "You mean you don't smell anything _strange_?"

"I did't sbell eddythig, period," said Ellie defensively.

"The coffee, the bacon--_come here a minute_."

She reeked--of bacon, of coffee, of burned toast, but mostly of perfume.
"Did you put on any fresh perfume this morning?"

"Before breakfast? Dod't be ridiculous."

"Not even a drop?" Phillip was turning very white.

"Dot a drop."

He shook his head. "Now, wait a minute. This must be all in my mind.
I'm--just imagining things, that's all. Working too hard, hysterical
reaction. In a minute it'll all go away." He poured a cup of coffee,
added cream and sugar.

But he couldn't get it close enough to taste it. It smelled as if it had
been boiling three weeks in a rancid pot. It was the smell of coffee,
all right, but a smell that was fiendishly distorted, overpoweringly,
nauseatingly magnified. It pervaded the room and burned his throat and
brought tears gushing to his eyes.

Slowly, realization began to dawn. He spilled the coffee as he set the
cup down. The perfume. The coffee. The cigarette....

"My hat," he choked. "Get me my hat. I've got to get to the laboratory."

* * * * *

It got worse all the way downtown. He fought down waves of nausea as the
smell of damp, rotting earth rose from his front yard in a gray cloud.
The neighbor's dog dashed out to greet him, exuding the
great-grandfather of all doggy odors. As Phillip waited for the bus,
every passing car fouled the air with noxious fumes, gagging him,
doubling him up with coughing as he dabbed at his streaming eyes.

Nobody else seemed to notice anything wrong at all.

The bus ride was a nightmare. It was a damp, rainy day; the inside of
the bus smelled like the men's locker room after a big game. A
bleary-eyed man with three-days' stubble on his chin flopped down in the
seat next to him, and Phillip reeled back with a jolt to the job he had
held in his student days, cleaning vats in the brewery.

"It'sh a great morning," Bleary-eyes breathed at him, "huh, Doc?"
Phillip blanched. To top it, the man had had a breakfast of salami. In
the seat ahead, a fat man held a dea