cellar was a copper box. Even the cement-brick walls were
false fronts over a metal sheath!

* * * * *

Baffled, he attacked one of the foundation beams. That, at least, was
real wood. The glass in the cellar windows was real glass.

He sucked his bleeding thumb and tried the base of the cellar stairs.
Real wood. He chipped at the bricks under the oil burner. Real bricks.
The retaining walls, the floor--they were faked.

It was as though someone had shored up the house with a frame of metal
and then laboriously concealed the evidence.

The biggest surprise was the upside-down boat hull that blocked the
rear half of the cellar, relic of a brief home workshop period that
Burckhardt had gone through a couple of years before. From above, it
looked perfectly normal. Inside, though, where there should have been
thwarts and seats and lockers, there was a mere tangle of braces,
rough and unfinished.

"But I _built_ that!" Burckhardt exclaimed, forgetting his thumb. He
leaned against the hull dizzily, trying to think this thing through.
For reasons beyond his comprehension, someone had taken his boat and
his cellar away, maybe his whole house, and replaced them with a
clever mock-up of the real thing.

"That's crazy," he said to the empty cellar. He stared around in the
light of the flash. He whispered, "What in the name of Heaven would
anybody do that for?"

Reason refused an answer; there wasn't any reasonable answer. For long
minutes, Burckhardt contemplated the uncertain picture of his own
sanity.

He peered under the boat again, hoping to reassure himself that it was
a mistake, just his imagination. But the sloppy, unfinished bracing
was unchanged. He crawled under for a better look, feeling the rough
wood incredulously. Utterly impossible!

He switched off the flashlight and started to wriggle out. But he
didn't make it. In the moment between the command to his legs to move
and the crawling out, he felt a sudden draining weariness flooding
through him.

Consciousness went--not easily, but as though it were being taken
away, and Guy Burckhardt was asleep.

III

On the morning of June 16th, Guy Burckhardt woke up in a cramped
position huddled under the hull of the boat in his basement--and raced
upstairs to find it was June 15th.

The first thing he had done was to make a frantic, hasty inspection of
the boat hull, the faked cellar floor, the imitation stone. They were
al