"Of what?"

"I don't know. Just him, maybe. I'm not sure."

"He carrying the same line?"

"Yeah. But worse this time, more intense somehow...."

Ritchie tried to keep the smile. He remembered, all right. Much too well. The whole story was crazy, normally enough to get the kid off with a life sentence in the criminally insane ward. But it was a little too crazy, so the psychiatrists wouldn't buy.

"Can't get his words out of my mind," Kaplan was saying. His eyes were closed. "'Mister, tell them, tell them. If you kill me, then you'll all die. This whole world of yours will die....'"

Because, Ritchie remembered, you don't exist, any of you, except in my mind. Don't you see? I'm asleep and dreaming all this. You, your wives, your children, it's all part of my dream—and when you kill me then I'll wake up and that will be the end of you....

"Well," Ritchie said, "it's original."

Kaplan shook his head.

"Come on, Max, snap out of it. You act like you never listened to a lunatic before. People have been predicting the end of the world ever since Year 1."

"Sure, I know. You don't have to patronize me. It's just that—well, who is this particular lunatic anyway? We don't know any more about him than the day he was caught. Even the name we had to make up. Who is he, where'd he come from, what's his home?"

My home ... a world of eternities, an eternity of worlds.... I must destroy, hurt, kill before I wake always ... and then once more I must sleep ... always, always....

"Look, there's a hundred vagrants in every city. Just like our boy: no name, no friends, no relatives."

"Then he doesn't seem in the least odd to you, is that it? Is that what you're telling me?"

"So he's odd! I never met a murderer that wasn't!" Ritchie recalled the lean hairless face, the expressionless eyes, the slender youthful body that moved in strange hesitant jerks, the halting voice.

The clock bonged the quarter hour. Fifteen to twelve. Max Kaplan wiped the perspiration from his forehead.

"And 

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