«That's quite a story,» I said.

«Damn right,» snorted the alienist, eyes shut.

«And more than half of it true. Did you listen? What have you learned?»

«That more submarine captains should become psychiatrists.»

«So? I have often wondered: did Nemo really die when his submarine was destroyed? Or did he run off to become my great-grandfather and were his psychological bacteria passed along until I came into the world, thinking to command the ghostlike mechanisms that haunt the under tides, to wind up with the fifty-minute vaudeville routine in this sad, psychotic city?»

I got up and touched the fabulous brass symbol that hung like a scientific stalactite in mid-ceiling.

«May I look?»

«I wouldn't if I were you.» He only half heard me, lying in the midst of his depression as in a dark cloud.

«It's only a periscope-«

«But a good cigar is a smoke.»

I remembered Sigmund Freud's quote about cigars, laughed, and touched the periscope again.

«Don't!» he said.

«Well, you don't actually use this for anything, do you? It's just a remembrance of your past, from your last sub, yes?»

«You think that?» He sighed. «Look!»

I hesitated, then pasted one eye to the viewer, shut the other, and cried:

«Oh, Jesus!»

«I warned you!» said Von Seyfertitz.

For they were there.

Enough nightmares to paper a thousand cinema screens. Enough phantoms to haunt ten thousand castle walls. Enough panics to shake forty cities into ruin.

My God, I thought, he could sell the film rights to this worldwide!

The first psychological kaleidoscope in history.

And in the instant another thought came: how much of that stuff in there is me? Or Von Seyfertitz? Or both? Are these strange shapes my maundering daymares, sneezed out in the past weeks?