"You are walking toward the fireplace--moving swiftly now because the paper is burning rapidly. You drop it on the hearth--and the already-laid fire is catching. The chimney is smoking a bit and you are poking the fresh blaze." He turned and faced her. "Thanks," he said. "That's what I thought I was doing. Now, to avoid a mental discussion of personal metaphysics, I must establish the validity of this sheet of paper!" The housekeeper asked if there were anything more to do, and Carroll shook his head idly. She left, and James Carroll faced himself in the mirror. "Whose hallucination?" he asked himself. "Mine--or Pollard's?" He recalled a tale of a man so convinced of his hallucination of utter smallness that he prepared trick pictures of himself, completely overwhelmed in size by the common water-hydra and its associated animalcules. Could he have prepared this report to support his own belief? He smiled. Tomorrow he would know for certain! If his sheet were valid, it would be missing from the files. If anybody had interfered with the official channels of the reports it had been someone other than James Forrest Carroll. Perhaps Dr. Pollard could identify the report. Then he'd know who was hallucinating! CHAPTER III _Kidnaped!_ Dr. Pollard finished telling his story to John Majors and said, "The whole thing jells, John. Everything fits perfectly." "I don't see it," objected Majors. "How can a man driven into a psychosis by overwork turn up concocting such a wild-eyed yarn as this hallucination?" "Easily. Supposing that Carroll had come upon something basically unsound. Suppose all the rest had done the same, the other three or four. The tinkering with the notes is a normal justification for him--if someone hadn't been tinkering with the notes, the problem might have been solved long ago. "Mrs. Bagby called me just before you came in, remember. I've taken time to inspect all the compiled notes prepared by the typing bureau from a couple of days before Carroll's illness to the present date. They're all present. I've also inspected the originals. There are none missing. Carroll's note must be a psychotic attempt to prove his sanity." "How could he prepare such?" wondered Majors. "Easily. It was done under a psychic block and the patient remembers only the true--_his_ true--facts of how he found it on the street." "Then you believe that Carroll was not on that corner on the day he first saw Sally get hauled into that black sedan?" "He may not have been there at all. We all knew Sally's habits and that corner very well. That Carroll returned on the following days is a part of his justification pattern. The whole thing is very logical. And it is too bad. I was hoping that Carroll's interest in Sally was a glimmer of returning interest in life and work." "The child is half his age," snorted Majors in derision.