want to tell them."

"Took me many minutes to find horses," Oil Pocket put in. "See one I
want 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, stick
to handicapping, let others worry about world."

Buttonhole tightened his grip on Clocker's lapel. "Sure, boy. As long as
the bobtails run, who cares what happens to anything else?"

"Maybe I went too easy," said Clocker tensely. "I didn't print the whole
thing, just a little part of it. Here's the rest."

* * * * *

They were silent while he talked, seeming stunned with the terrible
significance 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 packed
away and I'd never get a crack at telling anybody."

"Don't let it trouble you," said Doc. "Some vestiges of delusion can be
expected to persist for a while, but you'll get rid of them. I have
faith in your ability to distinguish between the real and unreal."

"But it all _happened_! If you guys don't believe me, who will? And
you've _got_ to so I can get Zelda back!"

"Of course, of course," said Doc hastily. "We'll discuss it further some
other time. Right now I really must start putting my medical column
together 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 these
ideas, Clocker. I used to dream about having arms and I'd wake up still
thinking 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 my
story's batty, too?"

"Can savvy evil spirits, good spirits," Oil Pocket replied with stolid
tact. "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. No
spirits, no savvy."

"Look, you see the mess we're all in, don't you?" Clocker appealed to
the whole group. "Do you mean to tell me you can't feel we're getting
set to blow the joint? Wouldn't you want to stop it?"

"If we could, my boy, gladly," Doc said. "However, there's not much that
any i