I pulled up a seat and adjusted the lighting so only his face and mine seemed to float bodiless in a sea of night, two moons of flesh. "Paulson--or should I call you Pinkerton?--this will come as a shock, a shock I know only a fine analytical mind like yours could stand. You think your life as the great detective was only a Dream induced by some miraculous machine. But, sir, believe me: that life was _real_." Paulson's eyes rolled slightly back into his head and changed their luster. "Then _this_ is the Dream. I've thought--" "No!" I snapped. "This world is also real." I went through the same Fourth Dimension waltz as I had auditioned for Horbit. At the end of it, Paulson was nodding just as eagerly. "I could be destroyed for telling you this, but our leader is planning the most gigantic conquest known to any intelligent race in the Universe. He is going to conquer Earth in all its possible futures and all its possible pasts. After that, there are other planets." "He must be stopped!" Paulson shouted. I laid my palm on his arm. "Armies can't stop him, nor can fantastic secret weapons. Only one thing can stop him: the greatest detective who ever lived. Pinkerton!" "Yes," Paulson said. "I suppose I could." "He knows that. But he's a fiend. He wants a battle of wits with you, his only possible foe, for the satisfaction of making a fool of you." "Easier said than done, my friend," Paulson said crisply. "True," I agreed, "but he is devious, the devil! He plans to convince you that he also has been removed to this world from his own, even as you have. He will claim to be Abraham Lincoln." "No!" "Yes, and he will pretend to find you accidentally and get you to help him find a way back to his own world, glorying in making a fool of you. But you can use every moment to learn his every weakness." "But wait. I know President Lincoln well. I guarded him on his first inauguration trip. How could this leader of yours fool me? Does he look like the President?" "Not at all. But remember, the dimensional shift changes physical appearance. You've noticed that in yourself." "Yes, of course," Paulson muttered. "But he couldn't hoax me. My keen powers of deduction would have seen through him in an instant!" * * * * * I saw Horbit and Paulson happily off in each other's company. Paulson was no longer bored by a reality in which he was matching wits with the first master criminal of the paratime universe, and Horbit was no longer hopeless in his quest to gain another reality because he knew he was not merely insane now. It was a pair of fantastic stories that no man in his right mind would believe--but that didn't make them invalid to a brace of ex-Sleepers. They _wanted_ to believe them. The stories gave them what they were after--without me having to break the law and put them to sleep for crimes they hadn't committed.