“Honestly, though, I feel sorry for my friend Fitch,” he added. “He’s going to be frightfully let down when some more of my alleged prophecies misfire on him. But I really haven’t been deliberately deceiving him.”
And Blanley College was at the center of one of the areas which would receive the worst of the thermonuclear hell to come. And it would be a little under a year. …
“And that’s all there is to it!” Hauserman exclaimed, annoyance in his voice. “I’m amazed that this man Whitburn allowed a thing like this to assume the proportions it did. I must say that I seem to have gotten the story about this business in a very garbled form indeed.” He laughed shortly. “I came here convinced that you were mentally unbalanced. I hope you won’t take that the wrong way, Professor,” he hastened to add. “In my profession, anything can be expected. A good psychiatrist can never afford to forget how sharp and fine is the knife-edge.”
“The knife-edge!” The words startled him. He had been thinking, at that moment, of the knife-edge, slicing moment after moment relentlessly away from the future, into the past, at each slice coming closer and closer to the moment when the missiles of the Eastern Axis would fall. “I didn’t know they still resorted to surgery, in mental cases,” he added, trying to cover his break.
“Oh, no; all that sort of thing is as irrevocably discarded as the whips and shackles of Bedlam. I meant another kind of knife-edge; the thin, almost invisible, line which separates sanity from non-sanity. From madness, to use a deplorable lay expression.” Hauserman lit another cigarette. “Most minds are a lot closer to it than their owners suspect, too. In fact, Professor, I was so convinced that yours had passed over it that I brought with me a commitment form, made out all but my signature, for you.” He took it from his pocket and laid it on the desk. “The modern equivalent of the lettre-de-cachet, I suppose the author of a book on the French Revolution would call it. I was all ready to certify you as mentally unsound, and commit you to Northern State Mental Hospital.”
Chalmers sat erect in his chair. He knew where that was; on the other side of the mountains, in the one part of the state completely untouched by the H-bombs of the Thirty Days’ War. Why, the town outside which the hospital stood had been a military headquarters during the period immediately after the bombings, and the center from which all the rescue work in the state had been directed.
“And you thought you could commit me to Northern State!” he demanded, laughing scornfully, and this time he didn’t try to make the laugh sound natural and unaffected. “You—confine me, anywhere? Confine a poor old history professor’s body, yes, but that isn’t me. I’m universal; I exist in all space-time. When this old body I’m wearing now was writing that book on the French Revolution, I was in Paris, watching it happen, from the fall of the Bastile to the Ninth Thermidor. I was in Basra, and saw that crazed tool of the Axis shoot down Khalid ib’n Hussein—and the professor talked about it a month before it happened. I have seen empires rise and stretch from star to star across the Galaxy, and crumble and fall. I have seen. …”
Doctor Hauserman had gotten his pen out of his pocket and was signing the commitment form with one hand; with the other, he pressed a button on the desk. A door at the rear opened, and a large young man in a white jacket entered.
“You’ll have to go away for a while, Professor,” Hauserman was telling him, much later, after he had allowed himself to become calm again. “For how long, I don’t know. Maybe a year or so.”
“You mean to Northern State Mental?”
“Well. … Yes, Professor. You’ve had a bad crack-up. I don’t suppose you realize how bad. You’ve been working too hard; harder than your nervous system could stand. It’s been too much for you.”
“You mean, I’m nuts?”
“Please, Professor. I deplore that sort of terminology. You’ve had a severe psychological breakdown. …”
“Will I be able to have books, and papers, and work a little? I couldn’t bear the prospect of complete idleness.”
“That would be all right, if you didn’t work too hard.”
“And could I say goodbye to some of my friends?”
Hauserman nodded and asked, “Who?”
“Well, Professor Pottgeiter. …”
“He’s outside now. He was inquiring about you.”
“And Stanly Weill, my attorney. Not business; just to say goodbye.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, Professor. He’s not in town, now. He left almost immediately after. … After. …”
“After he found out I was crazy for sure? Where’d he go?”
“To Reno; he took the plane at five o’clock.”
Weill wouldn’t have believed, anyhow; no use trying to blame himself for that. But he was as sure that he would never see Stanly Weill alive again as he was that the next morning the sun would rise. He nodded impassively.
“Sorry he couldn’t stay. Can I see Max Pottgeiter alone?”
“Yes, of course, Professor.”
Old Pottgeiter came in, his face anguished. “Ed! It isn’t true,” he stammered. “I won’t believe that it’s true.”
“What, Max?”
“That you’re crazy. Nobody can make me believe that.”
He put his hand on the old man’s shoulder. “Confidentially, Max, neither
