I woke confined about my arms, roughly lifted into the back of some crude internal combustion engine, and we rattled down rough roads. I only had the gouged wooden walls in the stinking and dark space in the back of something like a paddy wagon to give the space interest. There is only so many times you can visually trace out scrapings on wood before boredome sets in.



With a squealing of brakes which made me nervous, we stopped. I disembarked helped by two stout men in brown who were remarkably incurious. My attempts to start a conversation were futile. They dropped me off in a room with a linoleum tile floor, a metal radiator by the paned and institutional window. The window was high above the ground, several stories high, and subtly barred on the inside.



Gloom pervaded the room, and my soul. I took the time to examine my arm confinement, and found that it was a crude form of a strait jacket. To entertain myself, and to prove I was a responsible person, I shucked the suit. Then I sat at a desk, and studied the room. It was plain and well-put together and dismal in the extreme. I did nothing to suggest that I was an undesirable person. The only question in my mind was what type of gathering place had I fallen prey of?



Sanitorium, Asylum, Hospital, Gulag, Camp, and a half-dozen other words with their undesirable possibilities paraded through my mind.



Hours passed, and then the locked door opened to reveal a man in a white lab jacket with two goons, er, assistants behind him. His wingtip shoes, and smooth air let me know he was rich and pampered. I distrust those who get their positions of prominence and look pampered. It often means that they did not really earn it.



“Ah, Mr. Tadeusz, is that eastern European? Fascinating name.” He said as he waved my diary which chronicled the events since I and the madwoman William of Orange turned a star into a black hole to destroy an invasion force. I nodded in polite acauiescence.



With a disaproving frown, he took in the neatly folded strait jacket.



“There are rules in this institution, Mr. Tadeusz. We must insist that you follow them.”

“After an hour, the risk of developing cramps necessitated my removing it.” I replied as dryly as I could. The need to develop some status consumed me, because I was afraid of what happened to those without it.

“We are the doctors here, Tad. You are the patient. Remember that.” He bestowed a casual-to-him warning on me that chilled my blood because of its complete denigration of my views being important.

“And this institution is?”

“Sanger Home for the Mentally Unfit.” I gulped at his reply.

He walked about the room, occasionally peering at me.

“Obviously you are an educated man, Tad, but in ways that makes my job harder because you may feel it needful to resist the process of making you sane. This notebook is filled with the most arrant fantasy.

‘I am a worldwalker, cursed and gifted, to live in worlds until I die, and then continue in another material world, ad infinitum. I shall fight the good fight, and find my way home.’

You have issues with going home, we shall explore that.

‘The demon loomed over me, and with Merlin’s ring of might I called down lightning from the heavens to electrocute the evil monster.’

Violent, paranoid fantasies of this sort are hardly helpful. Also, this obsession with destroying evil seems rather simplistic. This ‘demon’, if he had been real, was likely sick, and he needed the practise of modern pschyiatry to help him.”



I ground my teeth together. The worst and most revealing of it was that the story of the demon was not mine. This ‘doctor’ had not caught on to the fact that I was recording an event told to me by Baron Coranado. And I highly doubted that ‘modern pschyiatry’ could do anything to help a demon of the Fifth Circle other than provide new targets for it to practise its sadism on.



“So what year is it?” I said as genially as I was capable of. It must not have been very successful because all three of them looked at me slantways in slight trepidation. Trying to smile only made it worse. So I waited until they regained their nerve.

“That is another thing, in this notebook, you claim to time travel.”

It was not really time travel. Such a trick is possible, but almost completely useless according to the Martian terraformer. It was travel between different worlds. And worlds had no temporal relation to each other.

“Something like that, yes.”



He must have understood my condescension, but the man was not really all that sharp. Maybe he could recite the textbook(or deftly cheat), but beyond that, hmmph.



“1947 Anno Domini which means …”

“I know what it means, In the Year of Our Lord.” I interupted peevishly, and he smiled in his first happy smile of the morning. For he had gotten me to diminish myself.



He moved toward the door.

“We will get you set up in a room soon enough.”

“What for?” I asked which was a stupid question. “I’m not insane.” I protested.

“According to this you are.” He tapped the notebook. “Fact is you have a large array of mental disturbances; even I think some brand-new ones.” He said the last with relish, and I groaned inside. I was his ticket to research fame and glory. If he believed in God, which the colorless rodent probably didn’t, he would be singing praises to Him for sending me to enhance the doctor’s career.



“Look, I can show you…”

“Tricks with quarters and finding them? Simple magicians stuff.” He dismissed the ability of a verser to find his stuff no matter where it went.

“Besides,” He added, “Your stuff got shipped off to storage.”

I checked and I could over the course of a few minutes feel it move its vector. He was right.

“Well then blood, my blood, I can track it down, and …”

“Stop, stop! You are not going to injure yourself. I shall have to add a diagnoses of incipient masochism to your problems.”

I gaped a bit, and the doctor and goons swept out of the room.



Tadeusz