e of the heavy fear. His
fingers found a cigarette and lighted it automatically. The first
familiar breath of smoke in his lungs helped. He drew in deeply again,
while the tiny sounds in the room became meaningful. There was the
insistent ticking of a clock and the soft shushing sound of a tape
recorder. He stared at the machine, running on fast rewind, and
reversed it to play. But the tape seemed to be blank, or erased.

He crushed the cigarette out on a table-top where other butts lay in
disorder. It looked wrong, and his mind leaped up in sudden frantic
fear, before he could calm it again. This time, reason echoed his
emotional unease.

Hawkes had never smoked before!

But his fingers were already lighting another by old habit. His
thoughts lurched, seeking for an answer. There was only a vague sense
of something missing--a period of time seemed to have passed. It felt
like a long period, but he had no memory of it. There had been the
final fight with Irma, when he'd gone stalking out of the house,
telling her to get a divorce any way she wanted. He'd opened the
mail-box and taken out a letter--a letter from a Professor....

His mind refused to go further. There was only a complete blank after
that. But it had been in midwinter, and now he could make out the
faint outlines of full-leafed trees against the sky through the
window! Months had gone by--and there was no faintest trace of them in
his mind.

_They'll get you! You can't escape! Hurry, go, GO!..._

The cigarette fell from his shaking hands, and he was half out of the
bed before the rational part of his mind could cut off the fear
thoughts. He flipped on the lights, afraid of the dimness. It didn't
help. The room was dusty, as if unused for months, and there was a
cobweb in one corner by the mirror.

His own face shocked him. It was the same lean, sharp-featured face as
ever, under the shock of nondescript, sandy hair. His ears still stuck
out too much, and his lips were a trifle too thin. It looked no more
than his thirty years; but it was a strained face, now--painted with
weeks of fatigue, and grayish with fear, sweat-streaked and with
nervous tension in every corded tendon of his throat. His somewhat
bony, average-height figure shook visibly as he climbed from the bed.

Hawkes stood fighting himself, trying to get back in the bed, but it
was a losing battle. Something seemed to swing up in the corner of the
room, as if a shadow moved. He jerked h