pill from his desk and swallowed it quickly before he went on. The hardest part was to come.

Cliff took himself seriously, far too seriously. With delicate verbal barbs, Hanson began to poke fun at some of the imbecilities of pedantic reasoning. Maculay offered resistance at first, but Hanson worked him over the ground carefully, pointing out that Maculay, the only man in the world capable of understanding the variable-matrix wave mechanics, was in no position to snort at his fellow man. After all, Gertrude Stein had once gained great popularity on the theory that no one could understand her and therefore she must be sheer genius. Eventually he had Cliff laughing over an old limerick:

Hanson worked over Maculay's Equations with a bit of acid humor. In third person, he had Maculay chuckling over the physicist who worked for years on some mathematics that did not come out even. Gradually, the doctor convinced his patient that he was not Clifford Maculay, the renowned abstract mathematician, but Maculay's nephew—the black sheep of the family—who viewed the brainy members with as much distaste as they viewed him. Young Cliff had often been mistaken for his brilliant uncle, and found this funny, since he felt himself smarter than his namesake; he, young Cliff, had fun whereas his uncle had only hard work to show for his life. Actually, any pondering of his uncle's work made young Cliff sick to his stomach, and he was glad to ignore such things; the whole theory was so much stupidity.

And for one year, Clifford Maculay, physicist, would be as different from his former self as was possible without breaking the law to bits.

"At the end of this year, you will return to your apartment in Washington, take a good night's sleep, and awaken as Doctor Clifford Maculay. Then, and only then will you remember; and you will realize furthermore that this job of relaxation has been forced upon you for your own good. You will then be able to solve the error in your calculations."

Hanson paused for a moment, pondering as to the advisability of giving the hypnotized physicist a key-word to bring him out of the post-hypnotic suggestion. But Doctor Hanson was seventy years old; he knew all too well that a year from this moment he might be dead and gone. He viewed it calmly, but not disinterestedly, and decided against a key-word; it only introduced a conflicting factor.

Let the man awaken of his own accord.

Then he awakened Maculay, who sat back in 

 Prev. P 6/45 next