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dress or otherwise.”
    Fawcett eyed him with distaste. “I perceive you are a creature of dogmatic preconceptions.”
    “I’m a cop,” Wohl informed, blinking. “And I know when I’m being given the runaround.”
    “You must pardon our ignorance, doctor,” Graham chipped in smoothly. “Could you explain in less technical terms?”
    “Schizophrenics,” answered Fawcett, speaking as one speaks to a child, “are persons suffering from an especial type of mental disease which, a century ago, was known as dementia praecox. They have a split personality the dominant one of which lives in a world of fantasy that seems infinitely more real than the world of reality. While many forms of dementia are characterized by hallucinations which vary both in strength and detail, the fantastic world of the schizophrenic is vivid and unvarying. To put it in as elementary a manner as possible, he always has the same nightmare.”
    “I see,” commented Graham, doubtfully.
    Putting on his glasses with meticulous care, Fawcett stood up. “I will let you see one of the inmates in whom Webb was interested.”
    Showing them through the door, he conducted them along a series of passages to the asylum’s east wing. Here, he reached a group of cells, stopped outside one, gestured.
    They peered cautiously through a small, barred opening, saw a naked man. He was standing by his bed, his thin legs braced apart, his unnaturally distended abdomen thrust out. The sufferer’s ghastly eyes were fixed upon his own stomach with unwavering and hellish concentration.
    Fawcett whispered rapidly, “It is a peculiarity of schizophrenia that the victim often strikes a pose, sometimes obscene, which he can maintain without stirring for a period of time impossible to the normal human being. They have phases when they become living statues, often repulsively. This particular case is a typical poseur. His stricken mind has convinced itself that he has a live dog inside his abdomen, and he spends hours watching for a sign of movement.”
    “Good heavens!” exclaimed Graham, shocked.
    “A characteristic delusion, I assure you,” said Fawcett, professionally unmoved. He looked through the bars as if academically considering a pinned moth. “It was Webb’s irrational comments about this case that made me think him a little eccentric.”
    “What was Webb’s reaction?” Graham glanced again into the cell, turned his eyes thankfully away. The thought in his mind was the same as that in Wohl’s—but for the grace of fate, there go I!
    “He was fascinated by this patient, and he said to me, Fawcett, that poor devil has been prodded around by unseen medical students. He is mutilated trash tossed aside by super-vivisectionists.’” Fawcett stroked his beard, registered tolerant amusement. “Melodramatic but completely illogical.”
    A shudder ran through Graham’s muscular frame. Despite iron nerves, he felt sick. Wohl’s face, too, was pale, and both sensed the same inward relief when Fawcett led the way back to the office.
    “I asked Webb what the deuce he meant,” Doctor Fawcett continued, quite unperturbed, “but he only laughed a little unpleasantly and quoted that adage about when ignorance is bliss it is folly to be wise. A week later he phoned me in a state of considerable excitement and asked if I could get him data concerning the incidence of goitre in imbeciles.”
    “Did you get it?”
    “Yes.” Fawcett dived down behind his huge desk, slid open a drawer, came up with a paper. “I had it here ready for him. Since he’s dead, the information comes too late.” He flipped the paper across to Graham.
    “Why,” Graham exclaimed, looking it over, “this states that there is not one case of goitre among the two thousand inmates of this asylum. Reports from other asylums give it as unknown or exceedingly rare.”
    “Which doesn’t mean anything. It’s evidence only of the negative fact that imbeciles are not very susceptible to a