y fear evaporated instantly--I'd escaped somehow!

But then a couple of realizations slapped me from each side. It was
day instead of night. I was out on the street and not in her
brownstone house.

Even the season had changed!

Dazed, I stared at the people passing by. They looked like characters
in a TV movie, the women wearing long dresses and flowerpot hats,
their faces made up with petulant rosebud mouths and bright blotches
of rouge; the men in hard straw hats, suits with narrow shoulders,
plain black or brown shoes--the same kind of clothes I was wearing.

The rumble of traffic in the street caught me next. Cars with square
bodies, tubular radiators....

For a moment, I let terror soak through me. Then I remembered the
mesh cage and the motors. May Roberts could have given me
electro-shock, kept me under long enough for the season to change, or
taken me South and left me on a street in daylight.

But this was a street in New York. I recognized it, though some of the
buildings seemed changed, the people dressed more shabbily.

Shrewd stagesetting? Hypnosis?

That was it, of course! She'd hypnotized me....

Except that a subject under hypnosis doesn't know he's been
hypnotized.

Completely confused, I took out the stack of envelopes I'd put in my
pocket. I was supposed to have both cash and a bank account, and I was
outside a bank. She obviously wanted me to go in, so I did. I handed
the top envelope to the teller.

He hauled $150 out of it and looked at me as if that was enough to buy
and sell the bank. He asked me if I had an account there. I didn't. He
took me over to an officer of the bank, a fellow with a Hoover collar
and a John Gilbert mustache, who signed me up more cordially than I'd
been treated in years.

I walked out to the street, gaping at the entry in the bankbook he'd
handed me. My pulse was jumping lumpily, my lungs refusing to work
right, my head doing a Hopi rain dance.

The date he'd stamped was May 15, 1931.

* * * * *

I didn't know which I was more afraid of--being stranded, middle-aged,
in the worst of the depression, or being yanked back to that
brownstone house. I had only an instant to realize that I was a kid in
high school uptown right at that moment. Then the whole scene vanished
as fast as blinking and I was outside another bank somewhere else in
the city.

The date on the envelope was May 29th and it was still 1931. I made a
$75 de