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unremarkable but I assure you many people act differently. One man jumped up and ran out through the door; we had to grab him in the hall and explain."
    "Well, fine; glad I passed." I tried not to look it, but I felt pleased as a kid who'd just won the spelldown. "But what's the idea? And how'd you work it?"
    Rube said, "We already knew the facts. It took an expert forger four hours to do those forms in a chemical ink. All but the first three blanks of the long form; those we left for you. There's a small infrared tube in the desk lamp; it makes the ink visible a few seconds after it's turned on. Rose watches through the mirror behind you; there's a corridor from her desk. As soon as you fill in the first three blanks, she phones you from an extension there and turns on the infrared tube. Time you're off the phone, and look back at the papers — hey, presto! — all the blanks are filled."
    "And the picture?"
    Rube shrugged. "A hole in the wall behind the glass and frame. While the candidate's writing, I just pull out the bridge and shove in the mountain."
    "Well, it beats the Katzenjammer Kids, but what's the point?"
    Rossoff said, "To see how you react when the impossible is happening: Some people can't take it. They rely on things being what they ought to be, and behaving as they always have. When suddenly they aren't, and don't, their senses actually surrender, can't cope. Right at that desk, they fail. Don, downstairs, was one; we had to give him a pill even after he knew what had happened. But you're guided from within, not from the outside. You know what you know. Come on into my office now, and have some coffee. A drink, if you want it; you've earned it."
    Rossoff's office was down the corridor Rube and I had come along, around a corner, then in through a door labeled INFIRMARY. As Rossoff pushed it open for Rube and me, I was reminded of a hospital, and I realized that the door was wider than most. We walked on through a large room, unlighted except for a skylight. It contained a desk, a row of wicker chairs along a wall, a fluoroscope, an eye chart, and what I took to be a portable X-ray machine. Rube said, "No more tricks from now on, Si, I promise. That was the one and only."
    "I didn't mind." Off to one side as we crossed the big room were the doorways of other, lighted rooms; from one I heard voices in casual conversation; in another I saw a man in a white hospital gown, his foot in a cast, sitting on an examining table reading a Reader's Digest.
    We walked into a small reception room; a nurse in white uniform stood at a filing cabinet leafing through folders in the open top drawer. She was holding a pen in her teeth by the barrel, and she smiled as well as she could; Rube pretended he was going to swat her in the rear as we passed through, and she pretended to believe him, swinging out of the way. She was a big, good-looking, good-natured woman in her late thirties, with a lot of gray in her hair.
    In his office Rossoff said, "Sugar? Cream?" walking toward a low magazine table and a glass jug of coffee on a hot plate. "I hope not, because we haven't got any."
    "I believe I'll take mine black," Rube said, sitting down in an upholstered chair. "How about you, Si?"
    "Black sounds good to me." I sat down in a green-leather chair, looking around me. It was a large rectangular room, windowless but filled with daylight from two immense skylights. I liked the room and felt comfortable in it. It was carpeted in gray and the walls were papered in a cheerful red-and-green pattern. At one end the doctor's desk was a mess, heaped with stacked books and papers. The other end was floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, and Rossoff, handing me a cup of coffee, saw me looking at them.
    "Go take a look, if you like," he said, and I got up and walked over, tasting my coffee, which wasn't too good.
    I'd expected the books to be medical texts, and a lot were. But six or eight feet of shelving was history: college textbooks, reference books,