"I came to talk to you about that," I admitted.
I pulled up a seat and adjusted the lighting so only his face and mine
seemed to float bodiless in a sea of night, two moons of flesh.
"Paulson--or should I call you Pinkerton?--this will come as a shock, a
shock I know only a fine analytical mind like yours could stand. You
think your life as the great detective was only a Dream induced by some
miraculous machine. But, sir, believe me: that life was _real_."
Paulson's eyes rolled slightly back into his head and changed their
luster. "Then _this_ is the Dream. I've thought--"
"No!" I snapped. "This world is also real."
I went through the same Fourth Dimension waltz as I had auditioned for
Horbit. At the end of it, Paulson was nodding just as eagerly.
"I could be destroyed for telling you this, but our leader is planning
the most gigantic conquest known to any intelligent race in the
Universe. He is going to conquer Earth in all its possible futures and
all its possible pasts. After that, there are other planets."
"He must be stopped!" Paulson shouted.
I laid my palm on his arm. "Armies can't stop him, nor can fantastic
secret weapons. Only one thing can stop him: the greatest detective who
ever lived. Pinkerton!"
"Yes," Paulson said. "I suppose I could."
"He knows that. But he's a fiend. He wants a battle of wits with you,
his only possible foe, for the satisfaction of making a fool of you."
"Easier said than done, my friend," Paulson said crisply.
"True," I agreed, "but he is devious, the devil! He plans to convince
you that he also has been removed to this world from his own, even as
you have. He will claim to be Abraham Lincoln."
"No!"
"Yes, and he will pretend to find you accidentally and get you to help
him find a way back to his own world, glorying in making a fool of you.
But you can use every moment to learn his every weakness."
"But wait. I know President Lincoln well. I guarded him on his first
inauguration trip. How could this leader of yours fool me? Does he look
like the President?"
"Not at all. But remember, the dimensional shift changes physical
appearance. You've noticed that in yourself."
"Yes, of course," Paulson muttered. "But he couldn't hoax me. My keen
powers of deduction would have seen through him in an instant!"
* * * * *
I saw Horbit and Paulson happily off in each other's company. Paulson
was no longer bored by a reality in which he was matching wits with
the first master criminal of the paratime universe, and Horbit was no
longer hopeless in his quest to gain another reality because he knew
he was not merely insane now.
It was a pair of fantastic stories that no man in his right mind would
believe--but that didn't make them invalid to a brace of ex-Sleepers.
They _wanted_ to believe them. The stories gave them what they were
after--without me having to break the law and put them to sleep for
crimes they hadn't committed.
They would find out some day that I had lied to them, but maybe by that
time they would have realized this world wasn't so bad.
Fortunately, I was confident from their psych records that they were
both incapable of ending their little game by homicide, no matter how
justified they might think it was.
"Hey, Warden," Captain Keller bellowed as I approached my office
door, "when are you going to let me throw that stiff Coleman into the
sleepy-bye vaults? He's still sitting in there on your furniture as
smug as you please."
"You don't sound as if you like our distinguished visitor very well," I
remarked.
"It's not that. I just don't think he deserves any special privileges.
Besides, it was guys like him that took away our nightsticks. My boys
didn't like that. Look at me--I'm defenseless!"