by H. L. Gold
_now_or--while you were--disturbed?"
Clocker's impulse to blurt the whole story was stopped at the gate. Thedoctor was staring too studiously at him. He didn't have his story setyet; he needed time to think, and that meant getting out of thishospital and talking it over with himself.
"You kidding?" he asked, using the same grin that he met complainerswith when his turf predictions went sour. "While my head was out of thestirrups, of course."
The doctor, the nurse and the orderly relaxed.
* * * * *
"I ought to write a book," Clocker went on, being doggedly humorous."What screwball ideas I got! How'd I act?"
"Not bad," said the orderly. "When I found you yakking in your wife'sroom, I thought maybe it was catching and I'd better go find anotherjob. But Doc here told me I was too stable to go psychotic."
"I wasn't any trouble?"
"Nah. All you did was talk about how to handicap races. I got quite afew pointers. Hell, you went over them often enough for anybody to getthem straight!"
"I'm glad somebody made a profit," said Clocker. He asked the doctor,"When do I get out of here?"
"We'll have to give you a few tests first."
"Bring them on," Clocker said confidently.
They were clever tests, designed to trip him into revealing whether hestill believed in his delusions. But once he realized that, hemeticulously joked about them.
"Well?" he asked when the tests were finished.
"You're all right," said the doctor. "Just try not to worry about yourwife, avoid overworking, get plenty of rest--"
Before Clocker left, he went to see Zelda. She had evidently recordedthe time-step satisfactorily, because she was on a soft-shoe routinethat she must have known cold by the time she'd been ten.
He kissed her unresponsive mouth, knowing that she was far away in spaceand could not feel, see or hear him. But that didn't matter. He felt hisown good, honest, genuine longing for her, unchecked by the aliens'control of emotions.
"I'll spring you yet, baby," he said. "And what I told you about thatbig apartment on Riverside Drive still goes. We'll have a time togetherthat ought to be a footnote in history all by itself. I'll see you ...after I get the real job done."
He heard the soft-shoe rhythm all the way down the corridor, out of thehospital, and clear back to the city.
* * * * *
Clocker's bank balance was sick, the circulation of his tip sheet gone.But he didn't worry about it; there were bigger problems.
He studied the newspapers before even giving himself time to think. Thenews was as bad as usual. He could feel the heat of fission, close hiseyes and see all the cities and farms in the world going up in ablinding cloud. As far as he was concerned, Barnes and Harding and therest weren't working fast enough; he could see doom sprinting in half afield ahead of the completion of the record.
The first thing he should have done was recapture the circulation of thetip sheet. The first thing he actually did do was write the story of hisexperience just as it had happened, and send it to a magazine.
When he finally went to work on his sheet, it was to cut down the racingdata to a few columns and fill the rest of it with warnings.
"This is what you want?" the typesetter asked, staring at the copyClocker turned in. "You _sure_ this is what you want?"
"Sure I'm sure. Set it and let's get the edition out early. I'm doublingthe print order."
"Doubling?"
"You heard me."
When the issue was out, Clocker waited around the main newsstands onBroadway. He watched the customers buy, study unbelievingly, and wanderoff looking as if all the tracks in the country had burned downsimultaneously.
Doc Hawkins found him there.
"Clocker, my boy! You have no idea how anxious we were about you. Butyou're looking fit, I'm glad to say."
"Thanks," Clocker said abstractedly. "I wish I could say the same aboutyou and the rest of the world."
Doc laughed. "No need to worry about us. We'll muddle along somehow."
"You think so, huh?"
"Well, if the end is approaching, let us greet it at the Blue Ribbon. Ibelieve we can still find the lads there."
They were, and they greeted Clocker with gladness and drinks.Diplomatically, they made only the most delicate references to therevamping job Clocker had done on his tip sheet.
"It's just like opening night, that's all," comforted Arnold WilsonWyle. "You'll get back into your routine pretty soon."
"I don't want to," said Clocker pugnaciously. "Handicapping is only away to get people to read what I _really_ want to tell them."
"Took me many minutes to find horses," Oil Pocket put in. "See one Iwant to bet on, but rest of paper make me too worried to bother betting.Okay with Injun, though--horse lost. And soon you get happy again, stickto handicapping, let others worry about world."
Buttonhole tightened his grip on Clocker's lapel. "Sure, boy. As long asthe bobtails run, who cares what happens to anything else?"
"Maybe I went too easy," said Clocker tensely. "I didn't print the wholething, just a little part of it. Here's the rest."
* * * * *
They were silent while he talked, seeming stunned with the terriblesignificance of his story.
"Did you explain all this to the doctors?" Doc Hawkins asked.
"You think I'm crazy?" Clocker retorted. "They'd have kept me packedaway and I'd never get a crack at telling anybody."
"Don't let it trouble you," said Doc. "Some vestiges of delusion can beexpected to persist for a while, but you'll get rid of them. I havefaith in your ability to distinguish between the real and unreal."
"But it all _happened_! If you guys don't believe me, who will? Andyou've _got_ to so I can get Zelda back!"
"Of course, of course," said Doc hastily. "We'll discuss it further someother time. Right now I really must start putting my medical columntogether for the paper."
"What about you, Handy Sam?" Clocker challenged.
Handy Sam, with one foot up on the table and a pencil between his toes,was doodling self-consciously on a paper napkin. "We all get theseideas, Clocker. I used to dream about having arms and I'd wake up stillthinking so, till I didn't know if I did or didn't. But like Doc says,then you figure out what's real and it don't mix you up any more."
"All right," Clocker said belligerently to Oil Pocket. "You think mystory's batty, too?"
"Can savvy evil spirits, good spirits," Oil Pocket replied with stolidtact. "Injun spirits, though, not white ones."
"But I keep telling you they ain't spirits. They ain't even human.They're from some world way across the Universe--"
Oil Pocket shook his head. "Can savvy Injun spirits, Clocker. Nospirits, no savvy."
"Look, you see the mess we're all in, don't you?" Clocker appealed tothe whole group. "Do you mean to tell me you can't feel we're gettingset to blow the joint? Wouldn't you want to stop it?"
"If we could, my boy, gladly," Doc said. "However, there's not much thatany individual or group of individuals can do."
"But how in hell does anything get started? With one guy, twoguys--before you know it, you got a crowd, a political party, acountry--"
"What about the other countries, though?" asked Buttonhole. "So we'resold on your story in America, let's say. What do we do--let the rest ofthe world walk in and take us over?"
"We educate them," Clocker explained despairingly. "We start it here andit spreads to there. It doesn't have to be everybody. Mr. Calhoun said Ijust have to convince a few people and that'll show them it can be doneand then I get Zelda back."
Doc stood up and glanced around the table. "I believe I speak for all ofus, Clocker, when I state that we shall do all within our power to aidyou."
"Like telling other people?" Clocker asked eagerly.
"Well, that's going pretty--"
"Forget it, then. Go write your column. I'll see you chumpsaround--aro
und ten miles up, shaped like a mushroom."
He stamped out, so angry that he untypically let the others settle hisbill.
* * * * *
Clocker's experiment with the newspaper failed so badly that it was notworth the expense of putting it out; people refused to buy. Clocker hadthree-sheets printed and hired sandwich men to parade them