He could almost see her standing there in the hallway beyond the closed door. Desolated with remorse, she would be, undecided. A trickle of compassion gullied the surface of Marc's resentment. After all, she had really meant to hurt him. He would have called out to her, but the footsteps sounded anew and retreated down the hall. A moment later a door opened and closed. Marc sighed; tomorrow would be time enough to make it up to her. He closed his eyes as a slow drowsiness began to seep through his lean body--probably the sedatives going to work. His mind wandered aimlessly for a moment, then collided, quite forcibly, with a sudden realization; during the last hour--for the first time in weeks--his thoughts had turned away from the dismal state of the world and centered on himself. For a whole hour his interest had been entirely absorbed in a simple domestic crisis--a little thing like a fight over the radio! Marc's mind spun with the thought. In the last few months things--the matters of men's lives--had somehow gotten themselves all turned around backwards. People had ceased to concern themselves with the really important things--fighting over a radio, for instance--and had turned to the childish business of blowing up the world. Marc paused to sum up these thoughts. Somewhere they contained a very great and very simple truth, though they were all snarled up. Somehow his dislocated sacroiliac and the troubles of the world were subtly related.... The drowsiness washed over his mind again, and the thought was carried away on the crest. He reached after them, but couldn't quite make it. There was but one last glimmer: "What this world needs," Marc murmured, "is a good five ton kick in the...." His eyes closed, and instantly his chest began to rise and fall with the deep, regular breathing of complete sleep. * * * * * A warm breeze dusted the edge of the curtain and set it rippling. Somewhere in the night, in the distance across the city, a siren wailed with inconsolable melancholy. A cat stalked the intersection, as silent and intense as his leopard-long shadow. In his narcotic slumbers Marc rolled a bit to one side and made a small whimpering sound as the adhesive pulled at his back. He lay back and was still. But Marc had dismissed all conscious memory of his injury some time hence. In the same moment when he had fallen asleep he had left the room of the rippling curtain and unhappy echoes and had passed into the untroubled, all-black world of unconsciousness. Now, however, he stirred again, and with that almost indiscernible movement, leaped from the darkness into lighter regions; into the secret, all-things-are-possible world of his subconscious--into the world where dreams can become more real than reality itself. Marc paused on the brink of this world for one tremulous moment, then plunged forward....