All our fears about you are confirmed; you are deranged—your presence here proves it. Or does it? Stockstill thought, No, it doesn’t, and perhaps I should disqualify myself; perhaps it is unethical for me to try to deal with you. Considering the way I feel… I can’t take a detached, disinterested position regarding you; I can’t be genuinely scientific, and hence my analysis, my diagnosis, may well prove faulty.

“Why are you looking at me like this?” Mr. Tree was saying.

“Beg pardon?” Stockstill murmured.

“Are you repelled by my disfigurations?” Mr. Tree said.

“No-no,” Stockstill said. “It isn’t that.”

“My thoughts, then? You were reading them and their disgusting character causes you to wish I had not consulted you?” Rising to his feet, Mr. Tree moved abruptly toward the office door. “Good day.”

“Wait.” Stockstill came after him. “Let’s get the biographical material concluded, at least; we’ve barely begun.”

Mr. Tree, eying him, said presently, “I have confidence in Bonny Keller; I know her political opinions… she is not a part of the international Communist conspiracy seeking to kill me at any opportunity.” He reseated himself, more composed, now. But his posture was one of wariness; he would not permit himself to relax a moment in Stockstill’s presence, the psychiatrist knew. He would not open up, reveal himself candidly. He would continue to be suspicious—and perhaps rightly, Stockstill thought.

As he parked his car Jim Fergesson, the owner of Modern TV, saw his salesman Stuart McConchie leaning on his broom before the shop, not sweeping but merely daydreaming or whatever it was he did. Following McConchie’s gaze he saw that the salesman was enjoying not the sight of some girl passing by or some unusual car—Stu liked girls and cars, and that was normal—but was instead looking in the direction of patients entering the office of the doctor across the street. That wasn’t normal. And what business of McConchie’s was it anyhow?