“Yes, sir.”

“Total recall, Rick. Well. I imagine that’s all. Unless of course, you have any queries?”

“Yes, sir—Wilf. How long do you estimate? Time is—”

“Precious. Not mine, it isn’t. However, in your case I suppose— Well. It might be a week or two or a month—or two. Not longer. What difference can it make to you? You have no settled employment, ex-professor.”

“And you did say, Wilf, you mentioned reservations.”

“Ah yes. They only refer to the biography, you know. Nothing to worry about.”

He looked at me, miserably and warily.

“I’d like to know, Wilf, if it’s all the same to you.”

“That’s reasonable, Rick, and I thought that perhaps you would want to know them before you committed yourself. I’ll mention the principal one so that you can think it over. I shall give you a full and free account of my life without concealment and you can write what you like about that. But you will also give a clear account of the time you offered me Mary Lou and of the time you offered Halliday Mary Lou and had the offer accepted. In fact the biography will be a duet, Rick. We’ll show the world what we are—paper men, you can call us. How about that for a title? Think Rick—all the people who get lice like you in their hair, all the people spied on, followed, lied about, all the people offered up to the great public—we’ll be revenged, Rick, I’ll be revenged on the whole lot of them, ha et cetera. In this very room, my son—Mary Lou and me and you off to sleep, seduce the old sod, ‘Rick Tucker, who I am sure will entertain you’, did you forge that too, from the old poet whose boots you probably licked just to say you knew him? It’s a trade, my son. Me for you. My life for yours. Don’t say you won’t do it. You have to do it there’s nothing else you can do you have to lick the platter clean like the saucer down there the flying saucer Christ you can’t even throw straight. Now you know. Sod off and come when I call you. I’ll whistle.”

So we were silent again. I had time to reflect that a really manly man of Rick’s size would pick me up and chuck me over the balcony down to smash. But Rick was a paper man. There was no strength in him. I was safe, had been deceived. He wasn’t strong or hot or warm. He wasn’t a murderer. He was a suicide if anything but I doubted even that. Suicide is a sickness in health and Rick was wholly sane. It was his one—no, he had a crack. Marrakesh.

But the man was standing up. He was inflating I saw. Was he going to be what Johnny would call “cruel” and do me a mischief? I found to my surprise that I did not care. I watched him, eye to eye, perhaps for the last time I thought. I held him with the power of the human eye over a beast. So at last he looked down and turned to the door. Then when he had reached it instead of going straight out as I had thought he would, he turned suddenly, swelled. He clenched his fists and yelled at me.