of heart failure first."

"Emerge?" asked Jerry, frowning. "I'd assumed you used a helmet, such as we do in Contact...."

Burgess sighed. "Unfortunately, I am paying the penalty of lone-wolf experimentation. I wish I'd had the sense to route the input to the brain through a helmet, but I didn't. Instead I installed the person in an observation room. The influencing factor was nutrition. Intravenous feedings wouldn't have served the purpose of the observer; sometimes the subject's choice of foodstuffs is significant. He had to be let move about, his mind in a make-believe world, but his body actually moving about a room we could see into. So—I had an atomic duplicator installed. The hospital got one last year for making radium, turning cancerous growths into normal flesh, regrowing bone and the like.

"Should the subject then grow hungry, the duplicator would be triggered by his conviction of eating. In his mind, he might be—hanging from a branch by his tail, for instance. The duplicator's production of bananas, coconuts or whatever would give us a further clue to his state of mind. You see?"

"So far, sound enough, Dr. Burgess," said Jerry. "So what went wrong? I assume something did, or I wouldn't be here."

"We made a terrible error. We tried observing a man named Anthony Mawson in our gadget. I'd diagnosed his case as simple inferiority complex. My fault. Wrong diagnosis. Mawson has megalomania, a gorgeous case of it ... of course, he's not the first such case to fool psychiatrists. You see, his outward shyness, soft-spoken voice and general gawkishness is due to feeling superior to others, not the reverse. He feels smarter, stronger, braver, etcetera, than everybody else in creation—but he also feels that nobody knows it but himself. Hence his indrawing, his brooding, taciturn gentility."

Jerry Norcriss prodded. "What happened with Mawson when you put him in your machine?"

"I don't know," said Burgess. "No one's been able to see into the machine since he entered it on Monday."

"He couldn't have escaped?"

"No! I wish he had. Anthony Mawson is still in that room, in his own private universe, and we can't get him out of it. We've tried cutting the power to the machine; the opacity inside the room remains. We sent two men in after him. They never came out."

"How could he possibly?" asked 

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