oon after we'd left the inn the
next morning--told him how he'd answered in his sleep.

And--what do you think of this?--he seemed to think I ought to have
guessed it! _Guessed_ a monstrous thing like that!

"You're less clever than I thought, with your books and that, if you
didn't," he grunted.

"But ... Good God, man!"

"Queer, isn't it? But you don't know the queerest ..."

He pondered for a moment, and then suddenly put his lips to my ear.

"I'll tell you," he whispered. "_It gets harder every time_!... At first,
he just slipped through: a bit of a catch at my heart, like when you nod
off to sleep in a chair and jerk up awake again; and away he went. But
now it's getting grinding, sluggish; and the pain.... You'd notice, that
night on the road, the little check it gave me; that's past long since;
and last night, when I'd just braced myself up stiff to meet it, and you
tapped me on the shoulder ..." He passed the back of his hand over his
brow.

"I tell you," he continued, "it's an agony each time. I could scream at
the thought of it. It's oftener, too, now, and he's getting stronger. The
end-osmosis is getting to be ex-osmosis--is that right? Just let me tell
you one more thing--"

But I'd had enough. I'd asked questions the night before, but now--well,
I knew quite as much as, and more than, I wanted.

"Stop, please," I said. "You're either off your head, or worse. Let's
call it the first. Don't tell me any more, please."

"Frightened, what? Well, I don't blame you. But what would _you_ do?"

"I should see a doctor; I'm only an engineer," I replied.

"Doctors?... Bah!" he said, and spat.

I hope you see how the matter stood with Rooum. What do you make of it?
Could you have believed it--_do_ you believe it?... He'd made a nearish
guess when he'd said that much of our knowledge is giving names to things
we know nothing about; only rule-of-thumb Physics thinks everything's
explained in the Manual; and you've always got to remember one thing:
You can call it Force or what you like, but it's a certainty that things,
solid things of wood and iron and stone, would explode, just go off in a
puff into space, if it wasn't for something just as inexplicable as that
that Rooum said he felt in his own person. And if you can swallow that,
it's a relatively small matter whether Rooum's light-footed Familiar
slipped through him unperceived, or had to struggle through obstinately.
You see now why I said that "a que