ff the problem. "The guys who run the shop take it all down
as a record for whoever wants to know about us a zillion years from now.
That's on account of us humans are about to close down the track and go
home."

The doctor bent close intently. "Is that what you believe _now_
or--while you were--disturbed?"

Clocker's impulse to blurt the whole story was stopped at the gate. The
doctor was staring too studiously at him. He didn't have his story set
yet; he needed time to think, and that meant getting out of this
hospital and talking it over with himself.

"You kidding?" he asked, using the same grin that he met complainers
with when his turf predictions went sour. "While my head was out of the
stirrups, of course."

The doctor, the nurse and the orderly relaxed.

* * * * *

"I ought to write a book," Clocker went on, being doggedly humorous.
"What screwball ideas I got! How'd I act?"

"Not bad," said the orderly. "When I found you yakking in your wife's
room, I thought maybe it was catching and I'd better go find another
job. But Doc here told me I was too stable to go psychotic."

"I wasn't any trouble?"

"Nah. All you did was talk about how to handicap races. I got quite a
few pointers. Hell, you went over them often enough for anybody to get
them straight!"

"I'm glad somebody made a profit," said Clocker. He asked the doctor,
"When do I get out of here?"

"We'll have to give you a few tests first."

"Bring them on," Clocker said confidently.

They were clever tests, designed to trip him into revealing whether he
still believed in his delusions. But once he realized that, he
meticulously joked about them.

"Well?" he asked when the tests were finished.

"You're all right," said the doctor. "Just try not to worry about your
wife, avoid overworking, get plenty of rest--"

Before Clocker left, he went to see Zelda. She had evidently recorded
the time-step satisfactorily, because she was on a soft-shoe routine
that she must have known cold by the time she'd been ten.

He kissed her unresponsive mouth, knowing that she was far away in space
and could not feel, see or hear him. But that didn't matter. He felt his
own good, honest, genuine longing for her, unchecked by the aliens'
control of emotions.

"I'll spring you yet, baby," he said. "And what I told you about that
big apartment on Riverside Drive still goes. We'll have a time together
that ought to be a footnote