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country. Then, by her reaction, I would have known whether half of all creation had blinked out of existence or whether I had merely imagined that effect. But I only sat there fighting off another partial lapse of consciousness. When I finally overcame the seizure and managed to look up again, the road was there, stretching normally into the distance, flanked by serene fields and rolling hills which stood out sharply in the moonlight.
    There it was again—the redeeming circumstance. The road had disappeared. But it couldn’t have, because there it was. Similarly, Lynch had vanished. But all evidence indicated he had never existed. There was no way I could prove I had seen a sketch of Achilles and the tortoise. But the compensating possibility was that it had never been drawn in the first place.
    It wasn’t until the following afternoon that Chuck Whitney came up with a sufficiently challenging simulectronic problem to rescue my thoughts from their treadmill of unreason.
    He entered my office through the private staff door, dropped into a chair, and swung his heels up on the desk. “Well, we finally got the look-see modulator back in operation.”
    I turned from the window, where I had been staring out at the reaction monitor pickets.
    “You don’t seem very happy about it.”
    “We lost two whole days.”
    “We’ll make it up.”
    “Of course we will.” He smiled wearily. “But that environmental breakdown scared hell out of our Contact Unit down there. For a while I thought P. Ashton would go irrational and have to be yanked.”
    I glanced uncomfortably at the floor. “Ashton is the only weak link in Fuller’s system. No analog mentality can stand up against the knowledge that he’s merely a complex of electrical charges in a simulated reality.”
    “I don’t like it either. But Fuller was right. We’ve got to have a dependable observer down there. So many things could start going wrong without our finding out about it for days.”
    It was a problem that had mired my thoughts for weeks, eventually driving me to take that month’s leave so I could come to grips with my dissatisfaction. Somehow I couldn’t shake off the conviction that permitting a Contact Unit to know he is nothing more than an electronically simulated entity was the height of ruthlessness.
    Suddenly decided, I said, “Chuck, we’re going to junk that system as soon as possible. Instead we’ll set up surveillance staff. We’ll do all our observing through the medium of direct projection into the simulator. No more P. Ashtons.”
    His expression shifted into a relieved grin. “I’ll start setting up the staff. Meanwhile, we have just one more problem. We’re going to lose Cau No.”
    “Who?”
    “Cau No. He’s the ‘average immigrant’ in our population. A Burmese. IDU-4313. Ashton reported half an hour ago that he attempted suicide.”
    “Why?”
    “As best I could get it, astrological considerations required as much. That upheaval in the environment convinced him doomsday was imminent.”
    “That’s easily taken care of. Remotivate him. If he’s developed a suicide urge, just program it out.”
    Chuck rose and went to the window. “It’s not that simple. Ranting and raving about the meteors and the storm and fires, he attracted quite a crowd. Sold them on the idea that all those freaks of nature couldn’t happen at the same time. Ashton says a whole slew of ID entities are wondering about the upheaval.”
    “Oh. That’s bad.”
    He shrugged. “By itself it would probably wash off. But if something else like that should happen, we may have a lot of irrational reaction units running around. Best thing to do is shut down Simulacron-3 for another couple of days and wipe off the storm and fires completely. Cau No is going to have to go too. His ‘obsession’ is too deep.”
    After he had gone, I settled down at the desk and, without realizing it, soon had my pen in hand. Absently, I tried to duplicate Fuller’s drawing