"Thank God!" he said.

James Carroll returned home in a dither. Regardless of the pain of—whatever it was—he was going to go through with this. Delusions and hallucinations of that vividness should not be. He must be in a severe mental state. He hadn't believed them when they told him that he had been a brilliant physicist. But this well-proven hallucination was final. And before he got worse....

James Carroll was in a state over his state by the time he opened his front door. He entered the room, looking idly about him, half in fear of what he might see next.

What he saw was the sheet of paper with the report on it.

Could you feel an hallucination? Could you read an hallucination? How could a man with five nominal senses, all run by one brain, reach any decision?

He pressed the button on his wall and the housekeeper entered.

"Mrs. Bagby, I am in a slight mental turmoil. Please trust me to the extent of asking no questions but I beg of you to tell me exactly what I will be doing for the next few minutes?"

"I'll try," she said, knowing from Dr. Pollard all about Mr. Carroll's state of mind. She was willing to help.

"You are sitting at your desk, reading a sheet of paper upon which are some handwritten notes and a sketch. Now you are rising. You have just torn off an inch from the bottom of the page—where there is no writing. You are lighting a match, touching it to the end of the paper. It burns.

"You are walking toward the fireplace—moving swiftly now because the paper is burning rapidly. You drop it on the hearth—and the already-laid fire is catching. The chimney is smoking a bit and you are poking the fresh blaze."

He turned and faced her.

"Thanks," he said. "That's what I thought I was doing. Now, to avoid a mental discussion of personal metaphysics, I must establish the validity of this sheet of paper!"

The housekeeper asked if there were anything more to do, and Carroll shook his head idly. She left, and James Carroll faced himself in the mirror.

"Whose hallucination?" he asked himself. "Mine—or Pollard's?"

He recalled a tale of a man so convinced of his hallucination of utter smallness that he prepared trick 

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