ten minutes!

Boredom was like a hungry beast that breathed in his ears with a roar of silence while he sat through several succeeding cycles.

Silence. It seemed to echo in his ears as he looked about the apartment. It seemed to whisper that he was losing the duel. The Martian's trap was working: he would sit and wait, and think, and think endlessly until they were wild thoughts and he was insane. And then, the Martian would have his revenge, for insanity was a form of walking death....

He made a decision. He had fought boredom legally and exhausted every method he could think of. If there were no more legal ways, then he would fight boredom illegally. The police couldn't reach him in ten minutes no matter what he did.

Dialing Mary Jeffers' phone number at the beginning of the next cycle, he laid the receiver on the desk, ran across the room and climbed through the window.

The stone ledge just beneath his window wasn't very wide, but by inching his way along it, he reached the open window of apartment 1403.

Climbing through the window, he saw that Mary Jeffers had picked up the telephone receiver with one hand and was trying to dry herself with a towel in the other.

"Hello," she said.

Her back was to him, but he noticed that she wasn't very efficient with the towel. Water dripped from her body and collected in a small pool around her feet.

He grinned and said, "Hello."

She whirled to face him and dropped the telephone receiver, her dark brown eyes widening.

"Harry Ogden," he said. "Remember?"

As soon as he asked the question, he knew it was a foolish one. The time trap was his trap alone and only he was conscious of all the repeated cycles. She was unaware of all their previous conversations and he was now a stranger to her.

She backed away and let out a scream.

It didn't bother him. It was music to his ears—a sound that broke the silence of his peculiar world—a weapon to combat boredom with, and he reflected that he would make many trips to apartment 1403....

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