ack work.

"Well, to some extent I can work into the future. I can head up
and carry over. I can put in everything but the figures of the
field reports."

And he did so.

"It will be hard to bury me in work again. I could almost coast
for a day. I don't even know what day it is, but I must have
worked twenty hours straight through and nobody has arrived.
Perhaps nobody ever will arrive. If they are moving with the
speed of the people in the nightmare outside, it is no wonder
they have not arrived."

He put his head down on his arms on the desk. The last thing he
saw before he closed his eyes was the misshapen left thumb that
he had always tried to conceal a little by the way he handled his
hands.

"At least I know that I am still myself. I'd know myself anywhere
by that."

Then he went to sleep at his desk.

Jenny came in with a quick click-click-click of high heels, and
he wakened to the noise.

"What are you doing dozing at your desk, Mr. Vincent? Have you
been here all night?"

"I don't know, Jenny. Honestly I don't."

"I was only teasing. Sometimes when I get here a little early I
take a catnap myself."

The clock said six minutes till eight and the second hand was
sweeping normally. Time had returned to the world. Or to him. But
had all that early morning of his been a dream? Then it had been
a very efficient dream. He had accomplished work that he could
hardly have done in two days. And it was the same day that it was
supposed to be.

He went to the water fountain. The water now behaved normally. He
went to the window. The traffic was behaving as it should. Though
sometimes slow and sometimes snarled, yet it was in the pace of
the regular world.

The other workers arrived. They were not balls of fire, but
neither was it necessary to observe them for several minutes to
be sure they weren't dead.

"It did have its advantages," Charles Vincent said. "I would be
afraid to live with it permanently, but it would be handy to go
into for a few minutes a day and accomplish the business of
hours. I may be a case for the doctor. But just how would I go
about telling a doctor what was bothering me?"

Now it had surely been less than two hours from his first rising
till the time that he wakened to the noise of Jenny from his
second sleep. And how long that second sleep had been, or in
which time enclave, he had no idea. But how account for it all?
He had spent a long while in his own rooms, much long