en window bore with it a frightful stench of gasoline,
sagebrush, paint, and--from the distant commissary--ham sandwiches.

"Drunk," he thought frantically. "I'm drunk--or crazy!" He sprang up and
spun around wildly; then catching sight of a crack in the hardwood floor
he tried to walk along it. "Because if I can walk a straight line," he
thought, "I'm not drunk. I'm only crazy...." It was not a very
comforting thought.

He could walk it, all right. He could walk a far straighter line than
the crack, which he saw now was microscopically jagged. He had, in fact,
never felt such a sense of location and equilibrium in his life. His
experiment carried him across the room to a wall-mirror, and as he
straightened to look into it, suddenly all confusion settled and ceased.
The violent sensory perceptions leveled off and returned to normal.

Everything was quiet. Everything was all right.

Martin met his own eyes in the mirror.

Everything was _not_ all right.

He was stone cold sober. The Scotch he had drunk might as well have been
spring-water. He leaned closer to the mirror, trying to stare through
his own eyes into the depths of his brain. For something extremely odd
was happening in there. All over his brain, tiny shutters were beginning
to move, some sliding up till only a narrow crack remained, through
which the beady little eyes of neurons could be seen peeping, some
sliding down with faint crashes, revealing the agile, spidery forms of
still other neurons scuttling for cover.

Altered thresholds, changing the yes-and-no reaction time of the
memory-circuits, with their key emotional indices and associations ...
huh?

The robot!

Martin's head swung toward the closed office door. But he made no
further move. The look of blank panic on his face very slowly, quite
unconsciously, began to change. The robot ... could wait.

Automatically Martin raised his hand, as though to adjust an invisible
monocle. Behind him, the telephone began to ring. Martin glanced at it.

His lips curved into an insolent smile.

Flicking dust from his lapel with a suave gesture, Martin picked up the
telephone. He said nothing. There was a long silence. Then a hoarse
voice shouted, "Hello, hello, hello! Are you there? You, Martin!"

Martin said absolutely nothing at all.

"You keep me waiting," the voice bellowed. "Me, St. Cyr! Now jump! The
rushes are ... Martin, do you hear me?"

Martin gently laid down the receiver on the desk.