"I see your point, doctor," I told him. "I've asked my attorney and my private secretary to meet me here a little later today. I have some business I must clean up before I can settle down for treatment. I'll consult him about the kind of agreement to sign with the Sanctuary. So far as I'm concerned, I don't see the necessity for any agreement. I want to get a simple sanity test and see if you can recommend any course of treatment for dealing with a serious loss of memory." "I'm not sure that it is the management's policy to accept a patient under such unusual conditions," he said. "I'll have to consult my associates." "See here, doctor," I replied. "All I want now is to have one of the psychiatrists give me the works, tell me whether I'm sane or crazy, and then I'll pull out. I don't want to stay here under false pretenses and I don't intend to stay here a minute longer than I want to. I'll pay any fee you charge, within reason, but I'm damned if I'll sign my own freedom away, with Wall Street getting set to shoot the works." Dr. Folsom laughed. "I can't say that I blame you, Mr. Tompkins. And you don't sound unbalanced to me." "But I want a document signed to that effect," I declared. "You see, some of my business associates have been trying to have me adjudged incompetent so as to get control of my money. It's about three million dollars at present quotations. So I'm out to build up my defenses in advance of the show-down. _Now_ do you understand?" "Oh!" The Director of the Sanctuary was enormously relieved. "That's no trouble at all. I'll send up our business psychiatrist, Dr. Pendergast Potter--he studied under Jung in Vienna, you know--and he'll give you our standard businessman's sanity-test. We have quite a few cases like yours, you know. It's surprising how many business partners seize on insanity as a key to robbing their associates. It's done every day. And our fee for this service will be five thousand dollars." "Five thousand dollars it is!" I agreed. "Good!" Dr. Folsom beamed. "I'll send Potter over right away." CHAPTER 24 When Dr. Pendergast Potter arrived, he proved to be a short, square-built man, with a red spade beard and soft but shifty brown eyes--like an Airedale's. He had, he told me almost at once, studied with Jung in Vienna and I thought of that mischievous parody-- "Bliss was it in that Freud to be alive, But to be Jung was very Heaven!" "Dr. Folsom tells me, Mr. Tompkins," Potter continued in a sort of heel-clicking, stiff-bow-from-the-waist manner which was meant, I suppose, to reveal his Viennese training, "that you have reason to believe that your business partners are plotting against you, conspiring to throw you in the asylum? This sense of special persecution, sir, have you had it long? Perhaps when you were a child, you hated your father? It began then, not so? And, later at school, perhaps--" I got out of bed and advanced on the psychiatrist.