"I don't need to. You don't have to believe me. We'll just sit here and wait for the bomb drop, and then the point will prove itself. After that, of course, you'll be court-martialed for firing a wild shot without orders. But since you're prepared to wipe out your own family, you won't mind a little thing like twenty years in the guardhouse." Gascoigne looked at the silently rolling tape. "Sure," he said. "I've got the orders, anyhow. The same thing would happen if I didn't obey them. If nobody gets hurt, so much the better." A sudden spasm of emotion--I took it to be grief, but I could have been wrong--shook his whole frame for a moment. Again, he did not seem to notice it. I said: "That's right. Not even your family. Of course the whole world will know the station's a bluff, but if those are the orders--" "I don't know," Gascoigne said harshly. "I don't know whether I even got any orders. I don't remember where I put them. Maybe they're not real." He looked at me confusedly, and his expression was frighteningly like that of a small boy making a confession. "You know something?" he said. "I don't know what's real any more. I haven't been able to tell, ever since yesterday. I don't even know if you are real, or your ID card either. What do you think of that?" "Nothing," I said. "Nothing? Nothing! That's my trouble. Nothing! I can't tell what's nothing and what's something. You say the bombs are duds. All right. But what if _you're_ the dud, and the bombs are real? Answer me that!" His expression was almost triumphant now. "The bombs are duds," I said. "And you've gone and steamed up your glasses again. Why don't you turn down the humidity, so you can see for three minutes and running?" Gascoigne leaned far forward, so far that he was perilously close to toppling, and peered directly into my face. "Don't give me that," he said hoarsely. "Don't--give--me--that--stuff." I froze right where I was. Gascoigne watched my eyes for a while. Then, slowly, he put his hand on his forehead and began to wipe it downward. He smeared it over his face, in slow motion, all the way down to his chin. Then he took the hand away and looked at it, as though it had just strangled him and he couldn't understand why. And finally he spoke. "It--isn't true," he said dully. "I'm not wearing any glasses. Haven't worn glasses since I was ten. Not since I broke my last pair--playing King of the Hill." He sat down before the bombardier board and put his head in his hands. "You win," he said hoarsely. "I must be crazy as a loon. I don't know what I'm seeing and what I'm not. You better take this gun away. If I fired it I might even hit something." "You're all right," I said. And I meant it; but I didn't waste any time all the same. The automatic first; then the tape. In that order, the sequence couldn't be reversed afterwards. But the sound of the programmer's journal clicking to "Off" was as loud in that cabin as any gunshot.