prophecies misfire on him. But I really haven't been deliberately
deceiving him."

And Blanley College was at the center of one of the areas which would
receive the worst of the thermonuclear hell to come. And it would be a
little under a year....

"And that's all there is to it!" Hauserman exclaimed, annoyance in his
voice. "I'm amazed that this man Whitburn allowed a thing like this to
assume the proportions it did. I must say that I seem to have gotten
the story about this business in a very garbled form indeed." He
laughed shortly. "I came here convinced that you were mentally
unbalanced. I hope you won't take that the wrong way, Professor," he
hastened to add. "In my profession, anything can be expected. A good
psychiatrist can never afford to forget how sharp and fine is the
knife-edge."

"The knife-edge!" The words startled him. He had been thinking, at
that moment, of the knife-edge, slicing moment after moment
relentlessly away from the future, into the past, at each slice coming
closer and closer to the moment when the missiles of the Eastern Axis
would fall. "I didn't know they still resorted to surgery, in mental
cases," he added, trying to cover his break.

"Oh, no; all that sort of thing is as irrevocably discarded as the
whips and shackles of Bedlam. I meant another kind of knife-edge; the
thin, almost invisible, line which separates sanity from non-sanity.
From madness, to use a deplorable lay expression." Hauserman lit
another cigarette. "Most minds are a lot closer to it than their
owners suspect, too. In fact, Professor, I was so convinced that yours