"Please do," she said. "I'm sure it can't be any more impossible than my bones healing up and a bad cut on my cheek vanishing overnight without even leaving a scar." "You think not?" Lin said grimly. "Then listen to this. You remember when we were about to hit? A fraction of a second before the crash? At that precise instant when you were staring at me reproachfully I suddenly found myself in--I don't know where it was, but I know it wasn't on this earth. I followed a path up to a high tablerock overlooking an immense valley, and there on that high perch was a statue." "A statue?" Dorothy echoed. "Don't interrupt," Lin said. "You can't possibly understand. I don't myself. So just listen to what happened and what I think it means. It was a moving statue. Like a robot, in a way. But it was more than that. I'm sure of that now. It was, in some way, a god. The god of Fate. It was typing on a typewriter of some sort that had an automatic feed to supply a new sheet of paper every time the old one was yanked out. And beside the typewriter was a wastebasket sort of thing with a flame burning at the bottom. This statue would fill a sheet of paper with typing and then yank it out and drop it in the basket, and it would instantly burn. And I know now that the very process of burning that sheet of paper made reality out of whatever was written on it. And to cut a long story short, I yanked a sheet of paper out of the statue's fingers just as it was about to be dropped into the flame." "But--" Dorothy said weakly. "That piece of paper," Lin said firmly, "was our fate. Yours and mine. On it was written that we were to die in that accident. And until that paper is returned to that place and burned in the flame, _we cannot die_!" She was looking at him queerly now. "You think I'm crazy?" Lin said. "Hugo Fairchild came to get that paper didn't he? And I have it. Fairchild's waiting outside the hospital for me--or you--to come out with it, too. I saw him from my room." "How...." Dorothy said weakly. "How did you get over into that--that other world?" "I don't know," Lin said. "I just did, that's all." "Then ... then Hugo Fairchild is from this other world?" "It's obvious, isn't it?" Lin said. "But it's too late for it to do him any good now, isn't it?" she persisted. "The accident is over. We weren't killed." Lin shook his head slowly. "It isn't too late, or he wouldn't want it. Don't you see? We, you and I, can't die until he gets it. That's why he wants it. Since it's written on it that we died in that crash, the moment it burns we'll be back where we were when I snatched that paper from the flames, and we'll die in that accident. Then all this, our being in the hospital and all, will never have happened!" * * * * * It was the next day. Dorothy had come to Lin's room. She was peeking out the window at Fairchild down on the sidewalk.