"True," I agreed, "but he is devious, the devil! He plans to convince you that he also has been removed to this world from his own, even as you have. He will claim to be Abraham Lincoln."

"No!"

"Yes, and he will pretend to find you accidentally and get you to help him find a way back to his own world, glorying in making a fool of you. But you can use every moment to learn his every weakness."

"But wait. I know President Lincoln well. I guarded him on his first inauguration trip. How could this leader of yours fool me? Does he look like the President?"

"Not at all. But remember, the dimensional shift changes physical appearance. You've noticed that in yourself."

"Yes, of course," Paulson muttered. "But he couldn't hoax me. My keen powers of deduction would have seen through him in an instant!"

I saw Horbit and Paulson happily off in each other's company. Paulson was no longer bored by a reality in which he was matching wits with the first master criminal of the paratime universe, and Horbit was no longer hopeless in his quest to gain another reality because he knew he was not merely insane now.

It was a pair of fantastic stories that no man in his right mind would believe—but that didn't make them invalid to a brace of ex-Sleepers. They wanted to believe them. The stories gave them what they were after—without me having to break the law and put them to sleep for crimes they hadn't committed.

They would find out some day that I had lied to them, but maybe by that time they would have realized this world wasn't so bad.

Fortunately, I was confident from their psych records that they were both incapable of ending their little game by homicide, no matter how justified they might think it was.

"Hey, Warden," Captain Keller bellowed as I approached my office door, "when are you going to let me throw that stiff Coleman into the sleepy-bye vaults? He's still sitting in there on your furniture as smug as you please."

"You don't sound as if you like our distinguished visitor very well," I remarked.

"It's not that. I just don't think he deserves any special privileges. Besides, it was guys like him that took away our nightsticks. My boys didn't like that. Look at me—I'm defenseless!"

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