"Tell you what I'll do," said Pollard. "Since you think this affair is what you claim, I'm going to give you a chance to prove it. I'm going to advance Sally into the mailing department and let you take over the job of delivering those reports yourself. You feel that they might not be able to pull the wool over your eyes?" "You know what I think?" said Carroll sharply. "I think that the days that I joined Sally for her sandwich I took a ride with her in that car, instead!" "How do you come to that conclusion?" asked the psychologist, scribbling on his scratchpad. "Because every day that I watched I saw her enter the car. Every day I was with her we saw no car. Could it be mass-hypnosis?" "It might--but why weren't you hypnotized?" "I don't know. Why have I got this amnesia?" "It isn't amnesia anymore," said the psychologist ruefully. "It is now a definite psychic block against your former line of work, coupled with self-justified hallucination." "I hate to puncture that bubble," said Pollard. "But I must. Take that job and find out for yourself!" "I will," said James Carroll flatly. "You watch!" "Good!" "And I will not be stopping for sandwiches, either!" snapped Carroll. "Or, I might add, anything else!" * * * * * James Carroll tucked the box underneath his arm and set out along the street. He walked warily, keeping a sharp lookout for the black sedan. A few hundred feet ahead of him he saw Sally turn into the drug store for her habitual snack but he suppressed very quickly the impulse to follow her and talk to her about the job. He stood on the corner of the square, waiting for traffic. It was a reasonably long-time light for the crosstown road, and Carroll reached for a cigarette. His pack was empty, so he crumpled it and tossed it in the nearby waste-chute and looked about him questingly. The corner upon which he stood held a cigar store and James Carroll entered the shop to buy cigarettes. The store was rather full and he was forced to wait. And it came to him, then. During that wait it came to his feebly-groping mind that this was the same sort of pattern that he had seen before. Was this truth--or reality? He smiled, and as the storekeeper came towards him, he looked the man in the eye and said: "When did you split me off?" There was a look of amazement on the proprietor's face--wonder, puzzlement and a scowl of slight anger. "You heard me," said Carroll flatly. "What are you doing to my reports?" "You're nuts," said the storekeeper. "Am I?" replied Carroll lightly. "Then I'll tell you why. The Lawson Radiation comes from a system of interstellar travel, used by some race out in the Boötes region of the sky. The insoluble dilemma is how to go out to learn the secret of interstellar travel when I need interstellar travel to go out and ask the questions--" The man's face faded, distorted like a cheap oil-clay image under too warm a light.