Then it stopped. I had not filled out these forms, and I knew it. I'd been in this room no more than three or four minutes at most, and I knew that, too. My eyes were narrowed, I stood staring out across the desk top thinking, then I saw the watercolor on the wall. The covered bridge was gone; now it was a pine-covered snow-capped mountain, and I laughed aloud, the fear instantly shrinking to nothing. The door opened, and Rube Prien walked in. "All finished? What's the matter?"

"Rube, what in the hell do you think you're doing?" I stood grinning at him as he walked toward the desk. "Why am I supposed to think I've been here twenty minutes?"

"But you have."

"And that the picture on the wall" — I nodded at it — "changed from a bridge to a mountain?"

"The picture?" Rube was standing before my desk, and he turned to look back at the watercolor, puzzled. "It's always been a mountain."

"And was the phone always green, Rube?"

He glanced at it. "Yeah, I guess so; far as I can remember."

I was slowly shaking my head, still smiling. "It's no use, Rube; I've been here five minutes at the most." I gestured at the papers on the desk top. "And I never filled those out, no matter how much it looks like my writing."

Through a moment or so Rube stood looking across the desk at me, his eyes concerned. Then he said, "Suppose I swear to you, Si, that you did? And that you've been here" — he looked at his watch — "just under twenty-five minutes?"

"You'd be lying."

"And suppose Rose swears it, too?"

I just shook my head. Suddenly I squatted down beside the little telephone table and looked underneath it. There hung the white phone, held in place and the receiver prevented from falling by a wide U-shaped copper band fastened between two sides of the underpart of the table; near it was fastened a small metal box from which a pair of thin wires ran down the inside of the table leg. I pressed the table top near the edge, and a panel within the intricate design revolved, the white phone rolling up into sight, the green phone sliding down onto the copper holding strip. When I looked up at him Rube was smiling, and he beckoned over his shoulder at the office doorway behind him.

A man in shirt-sleeves walked in. He was young, dark-haired, with a thin trimmed mustache, and he was looking at me in a pleased way. As he walked toward us Rube said, "Dr. Oscar Rossoff, Simon Morley." We each said how-do-you-do, and he reached across the desk top while my hand rose to shake his, but instead of taking my hand he took my wrist between thumb and fingers.

After a moment he said, "Pulse almost normal, and slowing rapidly. Good." He let go my wrist, stood smiling at me happily, and said, "How did you know? What tipped you off?" In the doorway Rose stood watching us, smiling.

"Nothing tipped me off except that it's impossible. I just knew I hadn't filled out those forms. That I hadn't been here twenty minutes." I had to smile again as I nodded toward the picture. "And that a few minutes ago that crazy mountain was a bridge."

"Inner-directed," Rossoff was murmuring before I finished. "This is fine," he said to Rube, "a very good reaction." He turned to me again. "To you it may seem unremarkable but I assure you many people act differently. One man jumped up and ran out through the door; we had to grab him in the hall and explain."

"Well, fine; glad I passed." I tried not to look it, but I felt pleased as a kid who'd just won the spelldown. "But what's the idea? And how'd you work it?"

Rube said, "We already knew the facts. It took an expert forger four hours to do those forms in a chemical ink. All but the first three blanks of the long form; those we left for you. There's a small infrared tube in the desk lamp; it makes the ink visible a few seconds after it's turned on. Rose watches through the mirror behind you; there's a corridor from her desk. As soon as you fill in the first three blanks, she phones you from an extension there and turns on the infrared tube. Time you're off the phone, and look back at the papers — hey, presto! — all the blanks are filled."

"And the picture?"

Rube shrugged. "A hole in the wall behind the glass and frame. While the candidate's writing, I just pull out the bridge and shove in the mountain."

"Well, it beats the Katzenjammer Kids, but what's the point?"

Rossoff said, "To see how you react when the impossible is happening: Some people can't take it. They rely on things being what they ought to be, and behaving as they always have. When suddenly they aren't, and don't, their senses actually surrender, can't cope. Right at that desk, they fail. Don, downstairs, was one; we had to give him a pill even after he knew what had happened. But you're guided from within, not from the outside. You know what you know. Come on into my office now, and have some coffee. A drink, if you want it; you've earned it."

Rossoff's office was down the corridor Rube and I had come along, around a corner, then in through a door labeled INFIRMARY. As Rossoff pushed it open for Rube and me, I was reminded of a hospital, and I realized that the door was wider than most. We walked on through a large room, unlighted except for a skylight. It contained a desk, a row of wicker chairs along a wall, a fluoroscope, an eye chart, and what I took to be a portable X-ray machine. Rube said, "No more tricks from now on, Si, I promise. That was the one and only."

"I didn't mind." Off to one side as we crossed the big room were the doorways of other, lighted rooms; from one I heard voices in casual conversation; in another I saw a man in a white hospital gown, his foot in a cast, sitting on an examining table reading a Reader's Digest.

We walked into a small reception room; a nurse in white uniform stood at a filing cabinet leafing through folders in the open top drawer. She was holding a pen in her teeth by the barrel, and she smiled as well as she could; Rube pretended he was going to swat her in the rear as we passed through, and she pretended to believe him, swinging out of the way. She was a big, good-looking, good-natured woman in her late thirties, with a lot of gray in her hair.

In his office Rossoff said, "Sugar? Cream?" walking toward a low magazine table and a glass jug of coffee on a hot plate. "I hope not, because we haven't got any."

"I believe I'll take mine black," Rube said, sitting down in an upholstered chair. "How about you, Si?"

"Black sounds good to me." I sat down in a green-leather chair, looking around me. It was a large rectangular room, windowless but filled with daylight from two immense skylights. I liked the room and felt comfortable in it. It was carpeted in gray and the walls were papered in a cheerful red-and-green pattern. At one end the doctor's desk was a mess, heaped with stacked books and papers. The other end was floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, and Rossoff, handing me a cup of coffee, saw me looking at them.

"Go take a look, if you like," he said, and I got up and walked over, tasting my coffee, which wasn't too good.

I'd expected the books to be medical texts, and a lot were. But six or eight feet of shelving was history: college textbooks, reference books, biographies, all kinds of books on every period, country and historical personage you could think of. And there must have been two hundred novels, many very old judging from the bindings, none of their titles familiar to me. On the way back to my chair, sipping the coffee, I took a quick look at the framed diplomas, New York State license, and photographs that nearly covered a wall above the back of a green-leather davenport. Rossoff, I saw, was an M.D. and a psychologist, from Johns Hopkins. He also had a cheerful-looking wife, two grade-school-age daughters, and a Basset hound. "All mine, the dog especially," he said, when he saw me glance at the pictures.