the abysmal color of a
moonless night, pierced by the diamond points of a half-dozen
incredible stars.

He had only that single glimpse; then he found himself gazing across
at the pool under the far bank, whose waters reflected the tranquil
imagery of trees. He raised his casting rod, swung it back over his
shoulder, brought it forward again with a practiced flick of his
wrist, and watched the lure drop.

Within the range of his vision now, everything was entirely normal;
nevertheless, Herman wanted very much to stop fishing and look down to
see if that horrifying void was still there. He couldn't do it.

Doggedly, he tried again and again. The result was always the same. It
was exactly as if he were a man who had made up his mind to fling
himself over a cliff, or break a window and snatch a loaf of bread, or
say in a loud voice to an important person at a party, "I think you
stink." Determination was followed by effort, by ghastly, sweating,
heart-stopping fear, by relief as he gave up and did something else.

_All right_, he thought finally, _there's no point going on with it_.
_Data established: hallucination, compulsion, inhibition._ _Where do
we go from here?_

The obvious first hypothesis was that he was insane. Herman considered
that briefly, and left the question open. Three or four selected
psychoanalyst jokes paraded through his mind, led by the classic,
"You're fine, how am I?"

There was this much truth, he thought, in the popular belief that all
analysts were a little cracked themselves: a good proportion of the
people who get all the way through the man-killing course that makes
an orthodox analyst--a course in which an M.D. degree is only a
beginning--are impelled to do so in the first place by a consuming
interest in their own neuroses. Herman, for example, from the age of
fifteen up until the completion of his own analysis at twenty-six, had
been so claustrophobic that he couldn't force himself into a subway
car or an elevator.

But was he now insane?

Can a foot-rule measure itself?

Herman finished. At an appropriate hour he waded ashore, cleaned his
catch, cooked it and ate it. Where the ground had been bare around his
cooking spot, he saw empty darkness, star-studded, rimmed by a tangled
webwork of bare rootlets. He tried to go on looking at it when he had
finished eating the fish. He couldn't.

After the meal, he tried to take out his notebook and pen. He
couldn't.

In fact, it occu