For a few days his pattern was like that of this first day. He read the back-number piles of news magazines, the books analyzing current politics and history; he ate at regular intervals, and twice he went swimming for short periods. On both occasions he wore the trunks, and the second swim was very short. He came out of the water feeling as if, as he said to himself, "there wasn't anything _to_ it." In his life, swimming alone had never seemed to happen. Don hardly noticed the pattern beginning to fray apart. On the fifth day he overslept, and did not get up until nearly eleven. That night he felt wakeful, and at midnight, he ate sardines and beans. He left the cans on the kitchen table, and did not drop them into the pit behind the house as he had been doing. The next morning he did not rise till noon. In fact, he did not even wind the alarm clock. It ran down the same day, and he tried to guess at the time when he set it. * * * * * There was a typewriter, and a stack of paper. Don began to set down his general view of the way that events would be happening in the outside world, trying to anticipate every possible question. He assumed, to begin with, that the questions would not be too obscure; but that left a large area of possibilities, anyway. Each day he wrote for several hours, and read for several more. Sometimes he would get too interested in some line of reading that would take him into areas which, he felt, would not be likely to enter the questions. At first he pulled himself out of those lines with an abrupt snapping shut of the offending book. But for three days he got farther and farther afield on a line that began with a book on a recent archaeological expedition and led him through a file of _National Geographics_, clear back to the article on Ancient Egypt in the encyclopedia. From that point he found it harder and harder to guess at the possible line that the questions might take, and he wrote on in any direction his fancy took. _If the questions dealt with the elections_, he wrote, _the first possible ones might be on the names of the candidates. Also, the platforms and general tendencies. Now, the possible Democratic party candidates are...._ And again, _There might be another change in Soviet politics, but in the articles in_ Time _and in_ The Reporter _the writers say that the present group is likely to continue in power for at least a while. However, if he should ask about something which sounds as if it went in that direction, I could assume that the present premier might die; he's old, and can't live much longer._ Don had always been a baseball fan, and his opinions in that area were firmly rooted in both his own past and in the thick file of sports pages of newspapers. _The Dodgers will probably win the pennant, and the Giants will probably sell their pitcher Joe Kenner. In boxing...._