By Timmy's sixth birthday, only his parents' adamant attitude had saved him from becoming a side show. Once the initial household uproar had died down and some degree of general sanity been restored, Helen and Jerry had another bad fright. They had grudgingly allowed Clancey, the family sawbones, to call in a psychologist friend, Philip Warwick. The combined efforts of these two to find an explanation for Timmy resulted in complete chaos, with Timmy suffering violent and erratic lapses into complete idiocy for varying lengths of time. Standard tests meant nothing, unless mutually exclusive results could be accepted as meaningful in themselves. At length, Timmy suffered a relapse of such duration that the parents became panic-stricken and quietly rebelled. It was obvious that he needed an atmosphere of peace and quiet. Confusion, excitement, or the concentrated attention of several adults simply threw him into a relapse. The break came when Clancey called at the house and found it empty, deserted. He traced them to a new neighborhood where they had rented a house with a peaceful, walled garden. They were not pleased to see him, but Clancey was a psychologist of sorts himself and a working agreement was arrived at whereby he and Warwick could drop in frequently as friends and quietly observe Timmy, chatting with him when they could win his confidence and submitting him to whatever tests they could adequately disguise. But under pain of permanent excommunication from the Douglas menage they were not to discuss him with outsiders in such a way as to either identify him or draw attention to him. Timmy was to be allowed to set his own pace under their obliquely-watching eyes. He was not to become a subject for newspaper comment, for the speculation of strangers, or for the heated discussion of learned gentlemen calling each other liars in six syllables. For Timmy was something new under the sun. Two years of observation gave Clancey and Warwick an impressive file of notes on him, and they were prone to sit after office hours with it on the desk between them, giving it morose glances. They were not happy. Sometimes, as now, they concluded an evening visit by sitting in Clancey's or Warwick's car parked outside the Douglas fence, holding an impromptu post-mortem on an intellectual corpse that had come to life in complete defiance of all the rules. They didn't notice the stealthy movement of one of the fence-boards, nor the small form that snaked through the shadows of concealing shrubbery until it was near the open window of the car.