* * * * * Home. I lighted the living room from the door, looked around for intruders for the first time I could remember, and went inside. I threw myself on the couch and rubbed my stomach. I wasn't hurt badly. My middle was going to be sorer in the morning than it was now. Lighting up a cigarette, I watched the shapes of smoke and tried to think. I looked at it objectively, forward and back. The solution was obvious. First of all, I positively could _not_ have been an aviator in World War One. I was in my mid-twenties; anybody could tell that by looking at me. The time was the late 'Fifties; anybody could tell that from the blank-faced Motorola in the corner, the new Edsels on the street. Memories of air combat in Spads and Nieuports stirred in me by old magazines, Quentin Reynolds, and re-runs of _Dawn Patrol_ on television were mere hallucinations. Neither could I remember drinking bootleg hooch in speak-easies, hearing Floyd Gibbons announce the Dempsey-Tunney fight, or paying $3.80 to get into the first run of _Gone with the Wind_. Only ... I probably had seen GWTW. Hadn't I gone with my mother to a matinee? Didn't she pay 90¢ for me? So how could I remember taking a girl, brunette, red sweater, Cathy, and paying $3.80 each? I couldn't. Different runs. That was it. The thing had been around half a dozen times. But would it have been $3.80 no more than ten years ago? I struck up a new cigarette. The thing I must remember, I told myself, was that my recollections were false and unreliable. It would do me no good to keep following these false memories in a closed curve. I touched my navel area and flinched. The beating, I was confident, had been real. But it had been a nightmare. Those cops couldn't have been true. They were a small boy's bad dream about symbolized authority. They were keeping me from re-entering the past where I belonged, punishing me to make me stay in my trap of the present. Oh, God. I rolled over on my face and pushed it into the upholstery. That was the worst part of it. False memories, feelings of persecution, that was one thing. Believing that you are actively caught up in a mixture of the past with the present, a Daliesque viscosity of reality, was something else. I needed help. Or if there was no help for me, it was my duty to have myself placed where I couldn't harm other consumers. If there was one thing that working for an advertising agency had taught me, it was social responsibility. I took up the phone book and located several psychiatrists. I selected one at random, for no particular reason. Dr. Ernest G. Rickenbacker. I memorized the address and heaved myself to my feet. * * * * * The doctor's office was as green as the inside of a mentholated cigarette commercial. The cool, lovely receptionist told me to wait and I did, tasting mint inside my mouth. After several long, peaceful minutes the inner door opened.