ant to leave the parent branch.

The tree was there now. But it hadn't been when he first had
looked. Mr. Chambers was sure of that.

* * * * *

And now he saw the faint outlines of his neighbor's house ... but
those outlines were all wrong. They didn't jibe and fit together ...
they were out of plumb. As if some giant hand had grasped the house
and wrenched it out of true. Like the house he had seen across the
street the night before, the house that had painfully righted itself
when he thought of how it should look.

Perhaps if he thought of how his neighbor's house should look, it
too might right itself. But Mr. Chambers was very weary. Too
weary to think about the house.

He turned from the window and dressed slowly. In the living room
he slumped into his chair, put his feet on the old cracked
ottoman. For a long time he sat, trying to think.

And then, abruptly, something like an electric shock ran through
him. Rigid, he sat there, limp inside at the thought. Minutes
later he arose and almost ran across the room to the old mahogany
bookcase that stood against the wall.

There were many volumes in the case: his beloved classics on the
first shelf, his many scientific works on the lower shelves. The
second shelf contained but one book. And it was around this book
that Mr. Chambers' entire life was centered.

Twenty years ago he had written it and foolishly attempted to teach
its philosophy to a class of undergraduates. The newspapers, he
remembered, had made a great deal of it at the time. Tongues had
been set to wagging. Narrow-minded townsfolk, failing to understand
either his philosophy or his aim, but seeing in him another exponent
of some anti-rational cult, had forced his expulsion from the
school.

It was a simple book, really, dismissed by most authorities as
merely the vagaries of an over-zealous mind.

Mr. Chambers took it down now, opened its cover and began
thumbing slowly through the pages. For a moment the memory of
happier days swept over him.

Then his eyes focused on the paragraph, a paragraph written so
long ago the very words seemed strange and unreal:

_Man himself, by the power of mass suggestion, holds the physical
fate of this earth ... yes, even the universe. Billions of minds
seeing trees as trees, houses as houses, streets as streets ...
and not as something else. Minds that see things as they are and
have kept things as they were.... Destroy th