And if he did, and proceeded inadvertently to display a knowledge of Rudi he couldn’t possibly have obtained ordinarily in the course of such a short acquaintance… ? How-son suddenly realized what it must be like for a mulatto “passing” in a place where such things counted, and the room grew cold.

He just hadn’t known this feeling before. He was an undersized cripple; all right, these people were defiantly taking so much for granted. But even here there might be those who would consider him alien. Maybe, when the time came for them to find out who he really was (and that time would inevitably come, whether he was still among them or not), they would shrug and maintain their open-mindedness. On the other hand, maybe they wouldn’t.

Perhaps, in sheer self-defence, he ought to find out their opinions before committing himself—? He could do it in a moment!

Then he realized he had failed to catch something that was said to him, and reflexively picked the words out of Rudi’s mind. He was half-way through his answer before he realized what he had done, and the room grew even colder. He was so used to being among people from whom his talent was no secret that he had acquired many automatic habits such as that. The shock made him stumble in his reply, but he recovered quickly enough to hide his alarm.

The one glimpse inside Rudi’s mind had made the idea of probing deeper still more tempting, but he told himself carefully : he’s not my patient, not a professional colleague. I may have gone too far already — no farther!

He forced himself to concentrate on the conversation. Brian, whom he didn’t like at all, was shaking off his harassed mood and returning to his old comfortable dogmas. “After all,” he was saying, “people like Dr. Howson here are bound to be exceptions wherever you try to fit them in. I mean, they’re like trying to predict the next atom due to disintegrate in a chunk of uranium. You know one of them is going to pop, but you can’t say which. Equally, you know that Dr. Howson has to fit in somewhere, but you couldn’t predict where without a lot of other data…”

He droned on, while Howson’s mind took hold of one short phrase and worried it over and over.

“Dr. Howson has to fit in somewhere!”

It was very much later when Clara sat down near him again. The room was far less crowded; some people had gone home, and others had apparently decided to camp out on the stairs.

“Oh, that Rudi!” she said in a tone Which mingled annoyance with tolerant long-suffering. “He’s out in the kitchen being miserable. You’d never think it to look at him, of course. He’s giving imitations of the stuffed shirts on the university staff, with props, and about half a dozen idiots are laughing at him.”

“If you wouldn’t think it to look at him, how would you know?” said Howson bluntly. Then a possibility occurred to him, and he caught himself. “I’m sorry. Presumably you know him very well.”

“If you think he’s my — well, shall we be polite and say ‘intimate friend’ ? — you’re wrong,” Clara countered in a cool, slightly reproachful voice. “As a matter of fact, I hardly knew him except by sight until this thing of his grant being stopped came up a short while ago.”

She paused, looking puzzled. “Come to think of it, I probably shouldn’t be so…”

Howson shared her puzzlement. He had jumped to the exact conclusion Clara had just disabused him of; even though it didn’t fit quite all the facts, it was the most obvious explanation. But if that wasn’t the truth, what the — ?

Several people came out of the kitchen, laughing heartily, surrounding Rudi and clapping him on the back. Howson scanned the dark, good-looking face. No, it betrayed no hint of the misery Clara claimed to detect.

While his companions took their leave, reducing the number of survivors to a mere dozen or so, Rudi helped himself from a handy bottle without seeming to care much what was in it, and went back into the kitchen. Howson assumed he had gone to rejoin somebody. He looked around the room, trying to ignore the girl and the man n in the red sweater, who had progressed far beyond conversation as a means of showing their interest in each other.

“You seem, as I said before,” Clara remarked as she came back to him after seeing off the departing guests, “to have — to be — a problem. Yes, I’ve made up my own mind on the point. What’s worse, I’ve had to discard all the nice simple reasons to account for it. After all, you can’t be too badly handicapped if you’re a doctor. Correct?”

Her green eyes were very penetrating. Howson felt a prickle on his nape, and it had nothing to do with her reference to his deformity. With an attempt at lightness he said, “Do you put all your guests through detailed interrogation ?”

“Only the uninvited ones who intrigue me,” she said, unperturbed. “Like you, for instance.”

Howson suspended his intention to answer for a few seconds. A possibility had struck him which seemed on the face of it so unlikely that he was literally afraid to formulate it even to himself. He was still debating it when—

The shock almost threw him forward to the floor. The intensity of it blinded him completely; it raged inside his skull like a fire. He knew what it was, of course. Even before he had fully regained his senses he found himself shouting. “In the kitchen! It’s Rudi!”

Everyone in the room looked around in blank astonishment. And Howson realized that there hadn’t been a sound.

Everyone in the room — except, it dawned on him, Clara. And Clara, white-faced, was already opening the kitchen door. She couldn’t have reached it so quickly in answer to his words of warning. She couldn’t have. And that meant—

Cursing his unresponsive body, Howson struggled to his feet. Already half a dozen astonished people were crowding with a babble of horrified cries through the kitchen door.

Their voices were incoherent, and their minds were clouded with shock. It didn’t matter. Howson knew perfectly well what had happened.

The voice of Brian, the would-be sociologist, rose authoritatively above the din. “Don’t touch him! Get the little guy in here — he’s a doctor. And someone phone for an ambulance. Clara, is there a phone ?”

“Down the basement,” the girl answered in a shaky but controlled voice.

Meantime, Howson was dragging himself through five seconds of time slowed to the duration of an hour. I’m a doctor, he was thinking. I know about lesions of the cerebellum. I know about maladjustment and psychosis from the inside. But what the hell good is that to a guy leaking his life away on a hard kitchen floor?

They stood aside to let him pass, and he looked down with physical sight for the first time at something already too familiar to him. Rudi had literally and precisely committed hara-kiri (why? A tantalizing hint of explanation hovered just beyond Howson’s mental reach) with a common carving knife from a nearby drawer.

Now he was unconscious the blinding pain-signal from his mind was easier to shut out. But the pain of his own helplessness remained. These people — these people! — were looking to him for advice and guidance…

He found his voice. “Anyone gone for an ambulance?”

A chorus assured him someone had.

“Good. Then get out of here and shut the door. Keep as quiet as you can. Better yet, get the hell out of the apartment — no, the police may want to — oh, Wast the police! Go home!”

Clara was moving to join the others, but he frowned and said nothing, and she heard him. Shyly she closed the door and came back to his side.

“Know anything about this sort of thing ?” he said grimly.

“N-no. But I’ll do anything you say. Is there anything we can do?”

“He’ll be dead in about five minutes unless we do something.” Howson laughed without humour. “And the joke is that I’m not a medical doctor. I’ve never so much as dressed a cut finger in my life — barring my own.”