tightening ball of fear, exploded into realization.

That other Thorn had changed places with him. He was wearing that other Thorn's clothing—drab, servile, workaday. He was inhabiting that other Thorn's body—his own but strangely altered and ill-cared-for, aquiver with unfamiliar tensions and emotions.

He was in the world of his nightmares.

He stood stock-still, staring, the crowd flowing around him, jostling him wearily.

His first reaction, after a giant buffet of amazement and awe that left him intoxicatedly weak, was one of deep-seated moral satisfaction. The balance had at last been righted. Now that other Thorn could enjoy the good fortunes of utopia, while he endured that other Thorn's lot. There was no longer the stifling sense of being dominated by another personality, to whom misfortune and suffering had given the whiphand.

He was filled with an almost demoniac exhilaration—a desire to explore and familiarize himself with this world which he had long studied through the slits of nightmare, to drag from the drifting crowd around him an explanation as to its whys and wherefores.

But that would not be so easy.

An atmosphere of weary secrecy and suspicion pervaded the avenue. The voices of the people who jostled him dropped to mumbles as they went by. Heads were bowed or averted—but eyes glanced sharply.

He let himself move forward with the crowd, meanwhile studying it closely.

The misery and boredom and thwarted yearning for escape bluely shadowed in almost all the faces, was so much like that he remembered from his nightmares that he could easily pretend that he was dreaming—but only pretend.

There was a distorted familiarity about some of the faces that provided undiminishing twinges of horror. Those must be individuals whose duplicates in his own world he vaguely knew, or had glimpsed under different circumstances.

It was as if the people of his own world were engaged in acting out some strange pageant—perhaps a symbolic presentation dedicated to all the drab, monotonous, futile lives swallowed up in the muck of history.

They were dressed, both men and women, in tunic and trousers of some pale color that the blue light made it impossible to determine. There was no individuality—their 

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