help defend it."

"Ed, have you been talking about this to anybody else?" Weill asked.

"You're the first person I've mentioned it to. It's not the sort of
thing you'd bring up casually, in a conversation."

"Then how'd Whitburn get hold of it?"

"He didn't, not the way I've given it to you. But I made a couple of
slips, now and then. I made a bad one yesterday morning."

He told Weill about it, and about his session with the president of
the college that morning. The lawyer nodded.

"That was a bad one, but you handled Whitburn the right way," Weill
said. "What he's most afraid of is publicity, getting the college
mixed up in anything controversial, and above all, the reactions of
the trustees and people like that. If Dacre or anybody else makes any
trouble, he'll do his best to cover for you. Not willingly, of course,
but because he'll know that that's the only way he can cover for
himself. I don't think you'll have any more trouble with him. If you
can keep your own nose clean, that is. Can you do that?"

"I believe so. Yesterday I got careless. I'll not do that again."

"You'd better not." Weill hesitated for a moment. "I said I was a
lawyer, not a psychiatrist. I'm going to give you some psychiatrist's
advice, though. Forget this whole thing. You say you can bring these
impressions into your conscious mind by concentrating?" He waited
briefly; Chalmers nodded, and he continued: "Well, stop it. Stop
trying to harbor this stuff. It's dangerous, Ed. Stop playing around
with it."

"You think I'm crazy, too?"

Weill shook his head impatiently. "I didn't say that. But I'll say,
now, that you're losing your grip on reality. You are constructing a
system of fantasies, and the first thing you know, they will become
your reality, and the world around you will be unreal and illusory.
And that's a state of mental incompetence that I can recognize, as a
lawyer."

"How about the _Kilroy_?"

Weill looked at him intently. "Ed, are you sure you did have that
experience?" he asked. "I'm not trying to imply that you're
consciously lying to me about that. I am suggesting that you
manufactured a memory of that incident in your subconscious mind, and
are deluding yourself into thinking that you knew about it in advance.
False memory is a fairly common thing, in cases like this. Even the
little psychology I know, I've heard about that. There's been talk
about rockets to the Moon for years. You included something about tha