had passed over it that I brought with me a commitment form, made out
all but my signature, for you." He took it from his pocket and laid it
on the desk. "The modern equivalent of the _lettre-de-cachet_, I
suppose the author of a book on the French Revolution would call it. I
was all ready to certify you as mentally unsound, and commit you to
Northern State Mental Hospital."

Chalmers sat erect in his chair. He knew where that was; on the other
side of the mountains, in the one part of the state completely
untouched by the H-bombs of the Thirty Days' War. Why, the town
outside which the hospital stood had been a military headquarters
during the period immediately after the bombings, and the center from
which all the rescue work in the state had been directed.

"And you thought you could commit me to Northern State!" he demanded,
laughing scornfully, and this time he didn't try to make the laugh
sound natural and unaffected. "You--confine _me_, anywhere? Confine a
poor old history professor's body, yes, but that isn't me. I'm
universal; I exist in all space-time. When this old body I'm wearing
now was writing that book on the French Revolution, I was in Paris,
watching it happen, from the fall of the Bastile to the Ninth
Thermidor. I was in Basra, and saw that crazed tool of the Axis shoot
down Khalid ib'n Hussein--and the professor talked about it a month
before it happened. I have seen empires rise and stretch from star to
star across the Galaxy, and crumble and fall. I have seen...."

Doctor Hauserman had gotten his pen out of his pocket and was signing
the commitment form with one hand; with the other, he pressed a button
on the desk. A door at the rear opened, and a large young man in a
white jacket entered.