“I don’t call that much,” he said. “Mercer looks you in the face and says he can’t do anything for you—is this the man you’d lay down your life for, you and the others? You’re ill.”

“In the society of the insane,” Joan said, “the sick are well.”

“What nonsense!” Mr. Lee said.

To Bogart Crofts Mr. Lee said, “It was interesting. She became a Mercerite directly in front of me. The latency transforming itself into actuality… it proved I was correct in what I previously read in her mind.”

“We’ll have Meritan picked up any time now,” Crofts said to his superior, Secretary Herrick. “He left the television studio in Los Angeles, where he got news of Mercer’s severe injury. After that, no one seems to know what he did. He did not return to his apartment. The local police picked up his empathy box, and he was beyond a doubt not on the premises.”

“Where is Joan Hiashi?” Crofts asked.

“Being held now in New York,” Mr. Lee said.

“On what charge?” Crofts asked Secretary Herrick.

“Political agitation inimical to the safety of the United States.”

Smiling, Mr. Lee said, “And arrested by a Communist official in Cuba. It is a Zen paradox which no doubt fails to delight Miss Hiashi.”

Meanwhile, Bogart Crofts reflected, empathy boxes were being collected in huge quantities. Soon their destruction would begin. Within forty-eight hours most of the empathy boxes in the United States would no longer exist, including the one here in his office.

It still rested on his desk, untouched. It was he who originally had asked that it be brought in, and in all this time he had kept his hands off it, had never yielded. Now he walked over to it.

“What would happen,” he asked Mr. Lee, “if I took hold of these two handles? There’s no television set here. I have no idea what Wilbur Mercer is doing right now; in fact for all that I know, now he’s finally dead.”